Trump’s base may finally be seeing what’s always been obvious — and it’s not just the emperor who’s exposed, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
THE CLASSIC FABLE The Emperor’s New Clothes helps to explain why President Donald Trump, a man who for the past decade has seemed like Teflon because nothing sticks, might be facing a reckoning amongst his base when it comes to his denials and the related cover-up of his obvious links to Jeffrey Epstein.
Yet, it’s important to know that Trump’s supporters are not offended by the crudeness of his nakedness, but rather are motivated by the expression of Trump’s power. That is why this fairy tale has to be adapted to untangle the complexity of Trump’s potential reckoning over Epstein.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, a foolish and vain emperor is tricked by two con artist tailors into believing they have made him a special suit of clothes which is only visible to people who are not idiots. The emperor cannot actually see the clothes, but he does not want to appear to be an idiot and therefore he pretends – he lies – that he can see them.
All the people around the emperor, including his servants and his subjects who see him parade past them wearing nothing but his birthday suit, are embarrassed to admit that they too cannot see any clothes, so they join in the emperor’s delusion that he is adorned in a fancy outfit.
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The tale finishes with a child, who is too young to feel the shame of not fitting in, declaring that the “emperor is not wearing any clothes”. This admission breaks the curse of everyone else’s delusion, allowing them to also see that they’ve all been conned. The moral of the story is that, like the child, people should speak truth to power, even when it is unpopular, because truth is important.
And also, no one wants to see the emperor naked.
There are many neat analogies to be gleaned from this story to help make sense of the Trump mess. First, imagine that in the Trump version, the con-artist tailors are the billionaire establishment. They use Trump as their useful idiot to deliver themselves tax cuts and to destroy government policies that inhibit their unrestrained greed.
Also imagine that in the Trump story, the emperor is not just vain like he is in the original, but also his nudity is a metaphor for all of Trump’s awful traits that make him entirely unsuitable for the Presidency and a danger to American democracy: dishonest, authoritarian, incompetent, racist, misogynistic, manipulative and easy to manipulate, cruel, foolish, narcissistic.
On top of all these negative traits – and more – Trump also had a very public, close personal friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a powerful billionaire who ran a paedophile ring for his rich friends, meaning more than likely Trump is, like Epstein… you finish the sentence.
Progressives would like the rest of the Trump version of this tale to play out the same way the original did. We would like to believe that if we just point enough times to evidence of Trump’s nakedness, playing the part of the truth-telling honest child, everyone around Trump will wake up out of their delusion and say, “Oh, I see now, I’ve been tricked into thinking this guy is wearing magnificent clothes when he’s naked! Silly me, I won’t vote for him again”.
But, we’ve learned the hard way over the past decade that this is not how the Trump story ends. Because the fact is, it doesn’t matter how many times progressives point to Trump’s nudity, his MAGA supporters and even those not rusted on who helped elect him President a second time, just shrug and say, “Yeah, we know Trump is naked, and we don’t care”.
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Not only do Trump voters not care that Trump is naked, but for many of them, his nudity is the point. This is partly because progressives are so offended by it. The more progressives point to Trump’s nudity, the more his supporters enjoy their distress, the more they enjoy his nudity — you can see how this loop continues.
To add more complexity, the nudity is not just the point, but being powerful enough to be a nude president who can strut around naked, who can troll, abuse, deceive and distress progressives on every issue imaginable, is a raw expression of power.
This truth helps us to get a little closer to understanding why Trump is finally facing some political pressure, seemingly for the first time ever, from his supporters – elite and grassroots – over the Epstein scandal.
The fact is, Trump’s supporters only support the clearly naked Trump because he delivers what they want: power. Not only does he have the power to walk around the world stage in all his grotesque nakedness, but he also delivers his supporters the power to maintain their White, male privilege.
This power includes the ability to troll progressives as revenge for threatening their White, male privilege. It includes the power to carry out the White nationalist agenda by deporting immigrants, the power to shut down government institutions, the power to destroy policies like access to abortion, diversity initiatives, science funding and climate action, the list goes on and on.
By understanding Trump’s nakedness in relation to his power and the power he bestows on his followers, who are desperate for revenge against those whom they see as threatening their power, you begin to get to the heart of why the Epstein scandal is different.
I don’t actually believe that Trump’s supporters care that Trump was an associate of Epstein. It has been widely acknowledged for a long time that Trump had a personal friendship with Epstein; Trump and Epstein were part of the same social circles in Palm Beach and New York; Trump said he and Epstein shared a love for young women; Trump’s name is in (and is circled) in Epstein’s little black book; there are numerous photos floating around the internet showing Trump and Epstein socialising together including one showing Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding.
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Recent reporting by the Washington Post revealed an extremely creepy letter from Trump to Epstein on his 50th birthday expressing a shared secret, which just further cements what everyone already knew — there was a close connection between the two men.
Yet, despite all the public evidence, MAGA supporters have never cared about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, just as they have never cared about all the other elements of his nakedness, including his conflicts of interest and open corruption in government, the personal wealth he accumulates from this corruption, his nepotism, his lies, his crashing of the economy, his policies enriching his billionaire mates and so on. As long as Trump is using his power to help them as well, they are satisfied.
They even perhaps thought that Trump, being in the inner circle of the billionaire establishment – being in the swamp – would put him in a powerful position to “drain the swamp” as he constantly promised them he would do.
Yet, as Dan Pfeiffer and Tim Dunlop in their own way point out, the Epstein situation is different because this time, Trump is inconsistent – is lying – to his base, rather than just lying to progressives. Trump’s supporters, particularly the rusted-on MAGA-Qanon-conspiracy sect, are watching how Trump is not fighting against the paedophile ring as he said he would and as they wanted him to, but is covering it up.
For some of his formally fervent supporters, this cover-up is akin to a realisation that Trump’s nakedness might not be proof that he will use his power to serve them, but is actually only being used to save his own skin.
The only point of Trump to MAGA is to serve their interests. MAGA does not care if Trump is naked, as long as he is naked for them. To torture this analogy a little more, if MAGA think Trump is covering something up that is important to them, they trust him less than when he is naked. Because, paradoxically, in covering up, he is admitting there is something about him that he does not want them to see.
This also means that these Trump supporters might have to flirt with the possibility that progressives were right about Trump’s nakedness being offensive. The idea that Trump might be forcing MAGAs to agree with progressives is possibly the thing that upsets them the most about Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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