Since 2018, Trisha Hope has crisscrossed the country to attend 42 of President Trump’s rallies as a “Front Row Joe,” a group of some of Trump’s most committed fans. But she recently told Politico that if Republicans lose the midterms and Democrats impeach Trump next year, “I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment.”

Her interview landed like a bombshell less than a month before the midterm elections, where the Republican Party is expected to lose control of one, if not both, houses of Congress. If some of the Front Row Joes have abandoned Trump, who was left? Yet Hope’s defection wasn’t new. She has been publicly regretting her support for Trump for more than a year. In April, she even called for the 25^th Amendment to be invoked to remove him from office. “He’s insane,” she wrote on X.

There are plenty of obvious reasons for her to be unhappy with the president in his second term: the Iran war, gas prices, inflation, the wildly rampant corruption that has enriched Trump and his family by billions of dollars in less than two years. But Hope dumped Trump for another reason entirely: Jeffrey Epstein.

During a July 2025 cabinet meeting, Trump interrupted a reporter who’d asked Attorney General Pam Bondi about the government’s huge trove of thus undisclosed documents related to the two prosecutions of the late sexual predator. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump fumed. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”

Hope was shocked. “President Trump’s lack of concern for the Epstein victims and his callous response to the reporter’s question,” she posted on X, “ends my relationship with him.”

In the face of near-daily Trump administration scandals, much of the country, and the mainstream media, has moved on from the Epstein files. But for a key segment of Trump’s most committed base, they remain front and center, and Trump’s having obstructed their release has been a key factor in some MAGA defections. “I think it was a real turning point on Trump,” says Carrie Dann, managing editor of the Cook Political Report.

Much of Trump’s improbable rise to power was driven by his ability to engage with a bloc of disaffected conservatives on the fringes who had never voted before. Unlike virtually any candidate before him, he successfully brought them into his coalition by tapping their belief in widespread conspiracy theories. Chief among those was Pizzagate, the notion that a global cabal of elite pedophiles headed by Hillary Clinton and her close advisers was running a Satanic pedophile ring out of the basement of DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria.

Pizzagate went viral during the 2016 presidential campaign, helped along by people now close to the Trump administration. One of its best-known promoters was Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer currently in the Pentagon’s official press corps. The former Navy intelligence officer even livestreamed the results of his amateur “investigation” into the pedophile ring from outside the family-friendly pizzeria in leafy northwest DC. About a month later, a North Carolina man toting an assault rifle showed up at Comet on a mission to rescue the children. He fired a couple of rounds into the restaurant. Fortunately, no one was injured.

The fact that the shooter found no captive children, much less a basement, did not put a damper on the conspiracy theory. A poll conducted after the shooting found that nearly half of Trump’s voters continued to believe it was real. Even six years after the shooting, Katie Zacharia, who was briefly Trump’s press secretary this month, was amplifying the theory on social media.

Pizzagate didn’t go away, but it did morph into QAnon, a cult-like movement whose believers took their cues from a mysterious internet poster known as Q. Influential Trump supporters, including Trump’s first short-lived national security advisor Michael Flynn, became proponents.

In 2018, Trump started signaling to QAnon believers that he was with them. Brandon Straka, one of the first people arrested for participating in the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, even invoked the QAnon motto from the stage at a 2019 Trump rally, crying at the end of his speech, “Where we go one, we go all!”

Q hasn’t posted anything in about four years, but his wild visions of child predators among the global elite have escaped the fever swamp of the internet and gone mainstream, thanks in part to Trump. By the end of 2024, nearly 20 percent of voters polled by PRRI, and 32 percent of Trump supporters, reported believing the conspiracy theory’s core tenets. So, when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for a second time in 2019, and later died in prison, allegedly by suicide, the wealthy and stunningly well-connected sexual predator became proof that the conspiracy theory was not entirely a hoax.

Trump himself rarely invoked Epstein in his public statements, but during his years out of office, his surrogates repeatedly called for the government to release the files, including their holy grail: the alleged client list. “Been calling for ALL of it to be released so the public can have accountability,” now-FBI Director Kash Patel posted on social media in December 2023. “We must find out who pedo’d around with Epstein.”

 “Show us all the Epstein client list now!!!” Don Trump Jr. demanded on social media that same year. “Why would anyone protect those scum bags?”

 “Part of why Kamala is getting so much support is that, if Trump wins,” Elon Musk opined, “that Epstein client list is going to become public.”

All of this helps explain why Trump’s failure to open all of the Epstein files once he took office had such an impact on his supporters in ways that many other issues have not. “All these influencers had convinced them that Trump was on a mission from God to get into the White House” and save the children, says Mike Rothschild, the author of The Storm is Upon Us about QAnon. But once he took office again, the president “just waved the middle finger at them” when they demanded he release the files. “It was the first real betrayal. You could watch in real time as the fan bases recognized that they had been lied to.”

Trisha Hope, a Texas real estate agent, is a good example. As a Front Row Joe, she’d traveled the country in an RV to be front and center for all of Trump’s rallies after self-publishing Just the Tweets, a book of his social media posts in 2018. As a Trump delegate to the 2024 Republican convention, she sported a “J6 Prisoners of War” jacket and lobbied for blanket pardons for convicted Capitol rioters. (She was not one of them.)  

But Trump’s cavalier dismissal of the Epstein files in July 2025 changed everything. “It was like a dagger in my heart,” she told Politico. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.” (She declined to comment for this story.)

It’s probably no surprise that one of the first QAnon believers elected to Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), has also been among the only Republican members to turn on Trump. Along with three other Republican women, she helped Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) push through a discharge petition that forced the Justice Department to release more of the Epstein files after Trump obstructed their disclosure. Trump pilloried her for her perfidy, and she ended up resigning her seat. But today, she’s got a lot of company.

Derrick Evans, who livestreamed himself yelling “Derrick Evans is in the Capitol” on January 6, pleaded guilty in 2022 to a felony count of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder, and was sentenced to three months in prison. Trump pardoned him in January 2025 along with most of the other rioters, which should have ensured deep and enduring loyalty.

But like Hope, Evans quickly became disillusioned with Trump after, yes, the same July 2025 press conference. “Are you happy with the way this Epstein situation is being handled?” he asked his 870,000 followers on X a week after the press conference. “I am NOT happy, but maybe I’m in the minority.” He included a poll, in which 88 percent of the nearly 13,000 respondents said they too were unhappy about Trump’s Epstein response.

“We didn’t vote for the Epstein List to be covered up. We voted for Trump to arrest them,” he wrote on X last month. “If Republicans lose the midterms it will not be the fault of conservative voters who are tired of being lied to. The only person to blame for this is Donald Trump.”

Trump has even lost the self-anointed “Secretary of Retribution” Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and lawyer. He had been a foot soldier in the “stop the steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and had published a “Deep State target list” of alleged traitors he wanted prosecuted for treason after the 2024 election. He is now a relentless Trump critic over, among many other things, the Epstein files.

On October 5, Raiklin wrote a long X post slugged “Trump’s Protection of the Epstein Class: a Timeline.” It details instances when Trump had retaliated against his own supporters over for their work to release the Epstein files, including Taylor Greene, Massie, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo). “Marjorie Taylor Greene says that when she spoke with Donald Trump,” Raiklin told me in an interview, “he said that ‘releasing the Epstein files would hurt my friends,’ My next question is, well, what are the names of your friends? Is it Jared Kushner? Is it Howard Lutnick?”

The Epstein files have not appeared as questions in many polls this year, but in those where they have, voters report very negative feelings about Trump’s handling of them. An April poll from the Cook Political Report found that when asked about Trump’s performance on a host of different issues, more people—63 percent—disapproved of his handling of the Epstein files than almost any other issue, including the Iran war. Only his handling of the cost of living fared worse, and even then, by only two points.

Then there was this September poll, to be taken with a grain of salt since it was commissioned by the Courier Newsroom, an outlet that publishes content to support Democratic candidates. It found that three out of four people who voted for Trump in 2024 said that justice for Epstein’s victims would be a top issue in deciding how to vote in the midterms. The group also looked at campaign messaging and found that language addressing justice for Epstein’s victims resonated with voters by 17 points more than the Iran War and 15 points over trans girls in sports.

Those numbers, if anywhere close to accurate, may be one reason why so many Democratic candidates have been invoking Epstein in their campaigns this year. Ads for Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, for instance, have linked his GOP opponent, incumbent Sen. Jon Husted, to Epstein by invoking the donations he received from billionaire Les Wexner, Epstein’s longtime benefactor. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico met with some of Epstein’s victims in September while bashing his opponent, former state attorney general Ken Paxton, for ignoring them.

But while many of the MAGA faithful may have abandoned Trump, that doesn’t mean they will be part of a blue wave this year. “Not a chance,” Raiklin told me. “I say that unequivocally. I can’t say that more forcefully.” Despite Trump’s betrayals, which he calls “absolutely appalling and disgusting,” he thinks the country would have been much worse off if Kamala Harris had been elected.  

“I have Trump disappointment syndrome,” says Raiklin, “but I’m not going to commit suicide because I’m disappointed with him” and vote for a Democrat.

This post was shared from Mother Jones.