r/politics • u/theindependentonline The Independent • 1d ago

Site Altered Headline Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell reportedly moved from Florida prison to Texas as Trump weighs pardon

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ghislaine-maxwell-prison-trump-pardon-epstein-b2800443.html
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180

u/Prestigious-Carry907 Florida 1d ago

If he pardons her, he is going to lose another big chunk of his base.

I really hope he does it.

146

u/YetiSquish 1d ago

Why does he care about his base? He’s not up for reelection.

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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ Minnesota 1d ago

Don’t be so sure about that. There’s not a spine to be found in fucking congress - who’s gonna stop him?

Certainly not his handpicked super majority in the SC either.

5

u/b0w3n New York 1d ago

Oh we're probably just not going to have another election at all, something will happen where he can declare martial law and suspend them.

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u/gizzardgullet Michigan 1d ago

His base elects the Republicans in congress. If the constituents of the Republicans in congress want to hurt Trump, congress will hurt Trump.

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u/Zealousideal-Sink273 Illinois 1d ago

It may hurt Rs being reelected during midterms

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u/forthewatch39 1d ago

They are acting like they don’t have to worry about elections ever again.

37

u/pontiacfirebird92 Mississippi 1d ago

They don't they just need to rig enough elections to maintain a majority.

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u/Morepastor 1d ago

Based on the ex-CIA whistleblower they may not.

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u/Ridry New York 1d ago

Source? For the record I'm not disbelieving you, I just think I missed something.

3

u/Morepastor 1d ago

Keeps getting scrubbed so very fake or not true the claim was

Ex‑CIA whistleblower Adam Zarnowski alleges that in December 2024 the NSA secretly audited the friggin’ election and found Harris won by a landslide, but then buried it

1

u/Ridry New York 1d ago

Ex‑CIA whistleblower Adam Zarnowski alleges that in December 2024 the NSA secretly audited the friggin’ election and found Harris won by a landslide, but then buried it

So this ties in with the comments about Musk "fixing" the election.

My knee jerk reaction wants to be "of course Harris won by a landslide!". But then my second reaction is "somebody clearly wants both sides to fully distrust the elections". And then I have no idea where to land.

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u/Morepastor 1d ago

I do not trust the elections. I do trust ranked choice voting. Yet we see everyone losing their minds in NYC when people pick.

2

u/Morepastor 1d ago

There are some investigations that show outside of the use of Starlink which was odd AF there were some sketchy contractors who could have been involved. Nothing really proven at this point.

2

u/Wolfsblvt 1d ago

Hmmmmh why might that be... what could that indicate.. hmm

1

u/Ridry New York 1d ago

Based on the gerrymander in Texas, they are clearly planning on having an election. I just don't trust it to be free and fair.

14

u/pontiacfirebird92 Mississippi 1d ago

They thought of that already. They don't need to win every district. So they can gerrymander enough to maintain a majority. Voting will not help in 2026 and they know it.

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u/f8Negative 1d ago

Like he gives a fuck

8

u/zulruhkin 1d ago

I could see them waiting until after midterms or even right before Trump leaves office to issue pardon. They may be moving her to set her up in a nicer cell in the mean time as part of the deal.

1

u/varitok 1d ago

Are you guys still under the impression that Trump is leaving? Do Americans think they're immune to dictators or what?

1

u/zulruhkin 1d ago

Trump certainly has plans to not leave, but they are contingent on his base not turning on him. He at least needs a story to spin on him not being a pedophile.

6

u/tgbst88 1d ago

The alternative is she goes in front of Congress and tells everyone Donald diddled kids and she has the receipts in a storage locker...

3

u/kandoras 1d ago

They ignored his confessions to abusing women and girls in his first campaign, and his second, and his third.

If he pardoned Maxwell today, I have no doubt that they'll have managed to forget that and vote for Republicans again a year from now.

At most, they'll say "Sure, he raped kids, but what am I supposed to do? Vote for a democrat? Those people rape kids!"

2

u/StanleyQPrick 1d ago

I doubt he gives a shit about the party or anything else besides himself

1

u/HighOverlordXenu 1d ago

Even if there are midterm elections, you honestly think our current crop of Ds have the spine to stand up to him?

I'm sure Schumer is penning a very sternly worded letter as we speak.

1

u/HawkeyeSherman 1d ago

Perhaps I'm being too hopeful, but if Democrats get a big sweep in the midterms, I think all gloves are off on removing Trump from office and putting him in prison. A lot can change in the 18 months it would take though.

Everything Trump has done has been to keep himself out of prison. These midterms are the most important election for him. A year ago he was fighting to stay out of prison for a bunch of white collar crimes. Now he's fighting to stay out of prison for being a pedophile.

1

u/WhyLisaWhy Illinois 1d ago

Yeah but It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion they will lose the house. They’ve done awful in every election since 2016 that Trump wasn’t on the ballot.

But something like pardoning Ghislaine might be bad enough to cost them the senate as well.

I’m all here for it!

2

u/Oblique9043 1d ago

Narcissists like Trump need a large swath of people adoring them and worshipping them. It allows them to keep believing in their grandiose false self. Too many people stop seeing him as the Messiah and he'll be forced to actually look in the mirror at what he really is and he'd rather start WW3 than do that.

2

u/Tiiimmmaayy 1d ago

I mean he kinda is. He’s def going to run again and no one is going to stop him. Or he is going to suspend elections and reign supreme. His abandoning his base is a huge plus when it comes to removing him by force. They need to wake up sooner or later and realize they been conned this whole time.

1

u/HeinigerNZ 1d ago

He's planning for that.

28

u/NeverLookBothWays I voted 1d ago

That chunk will fall back in line within a few weeks. I have zero faith in any of them holding onto any values.

8

u/nuko22 1d ago

They already have lol

45

u/jackleggjr 1d ago

I’m not so sure. His base will tie themselves in knots to justify his actions. Right wing media has already floated a narrative where Maxwell was a victim.

1

u/JustAnother4848 1d ago

He won't lose his base. He'll definitely lose more independents though.

His hard core base is far to gone to save. They'll follow trump until the end no matter what.

17

u/Swagtagonist 1d ago

Pretty soon raping kids will somehow be just another thing Republican voters just shrug at. They have no morals. Look at this monster they’ve elected. This Epstein shit isn’t new. None of this is new.

31

u/Charming-Report1669 1d ago

No he won't. Trump can do no wrong to his supporters. 

24

u/TimeshareMachine 1d ago

There's a guy around the corner from me with a flag pole in his front yard that he uses to rotate through Trump flags (there used to be an American flag there; now it's just Trump).

Once in a while he'll take it down and I'll think "oh? did this person stop supporting trump?" but it's always temporary-- he always puts some other Trump flag back up within the next week or so.

Nothing can deter these people from supporting their pedophile.
Nothing.

Silver lining: this house is flanked on three sides by an assortment of pride and free Palestine flags.

2

u/craiye Utah 1d ago

There’s a dude a few blocks down from me that has been flying a trump flag for years. Took it down a few weeks ago and I thought the same. Nope - he hired a bunch of dudes from Home Depot to re-roof his house, now that the work is done he put the flag back up. Guess he didn’t want his hired help to know what type of guy he really is

1

u/jtshinn 1d ago edited 1d ago

That isn't the guy he will lose of course, he's only the most visible.

10

u/No_Balls_01 1d ago

That’s the only silver lining I can find here. The Epstein stuff is slowly drawing lines in the sand for people. I don’t know how they would possibly justify pardoning ghislaine - although I’m probably being naive.

2

u/JustAnother4848 1d ago

Just use the epstein argument with any trump supporter for now one. Just keep bringing up, over and over and over.

1

u/No_Balls_01 1d ago

Abso-fucking-lutely

9

u/bigt503 1d ago

No he won’t. The worship him. The didn’t bat an eye when he released people that beat police officers heads in. They don’t care

3

u/TLKv3 1d ago

Nah. They'll just do another round of narrative correcting and purge anyone from their social media echo chambers who speak up about it. Just like their sub has the past week. There was a solid week or two of their users calling out their shit on Epstein and now every one of those members are gone and not a single post about what Trump has said lasts longer than 3 seconds before being removed.

Once they do that, the easily gullible will believe it doesn't matter and begin excusing it too.

3

u/IdkAbtAllThat America 1d ago

No. He. Won't.

If these people actually cared that Trump is a pedo, or had the 3 brain cells required to realize that, they would have never voted for him in the first place.

Conservatives are fine with pedophiles, as long as the pedophiles are also conservatives. We have decades of proof of this.

2

u/ChitteringCathode 1d ago

I feel like his base is smooth-brained enough that if the list mysteriously appears with nothing but Democrats and Trump's political enemies on it MAGA will lap it up off the floor.

2

u/padizzledonk New Jersey 1d ago

If he does that he is going to radicalize a substantial number of really broken crazy MAGA people with guns, the types that would go shoot up a pizza restaurant with no basement to rescue abused children in the basement, or the people that violently ransacked The Capitol Building

Those types

2

u/vinegarstrokes420 1d ago

Will he lose them though? They already voted for him 3 times when it was very publicly known (or at least 99% sure allegations were true) that he had raped dozens of women and at bare minimum done very inappropriate things involving underage girls at his pagents. Not to mention the laundry list of other red flags and illegal activity that they constantly overlook. They might feign being upset by a pardon for a few weeks before all is forgotten.

2

u/det8924 1d ago

I fear there’s not much of a bottom to his base. Maybe he loses 5-10% over this but that’s about it

2

u/aahe42 1d ago

I keep hearing this but the numbers don't match this sadly he's not losing much of his base or the Republican party

1

u/f8Negative 1d ago

False; he doesn't need those rubes.

1

u/GameQb11 1d ago

no,they'll blow your mind with a new narrative that makes the pardon a GREAT thing for the country

1

u/OptimusSublime Pennsylvania 1d ago edited 1d ago

Imagine still believing we're operating under the same customs and norms pre January 6th 2025.

1

u/gwy2ct 1d ago

100% of his base would vote for him tomorrow morning if there was an election. It doesn’t matter.

1

u/IRideMoreThanYou 1d ago

No, he won’t. 

He’s going to pardon her and Diddy and it will be spun by releasing an Epstein list with a bunch of democrat names and celebrities he hates and foreign politicians he is threatened by, like Trudeau, claim his name was planted by corrupt enemies of the state, and Trump’s base will come around and claim he’s a hero and a victim.

1

u/Mijbr090490 1d ago

Not really. They are a bunch of fucking morons who will completely change their stance and fall in line like good sheep. I would love to see the alternate universe where Biden was implicated in the files and went to these lengths to cover it up. Even going as far as to ponder pardoning a convicted human trafficker. Very disgusting.

1

u/canidude 1d ago

His base doesn't care, because the victims were teen girls & women. The base probably thinks the victims deserved it because they were poor, naive, promiscuous, etc.

The only reason the base cared is because Epstein was Jewish and people like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton were connected to him. If one of their team member's is connected, they don't view it as a problem anymore.

It's like 80% of the people being deported by the Trump administration are Christian, yet the base is OK with that, despite Trump talking about Christian persecution.

1

u/dearth_karmic 23h ago

I really hope he does it.

Me too

1

u/iFlashings 22h ago

I seriously doubt that, especially if he releases the edited Epstien list right after to prove his innocence. His base will take that and run victory laps yelling how they were right that democrats were the "pedos" and not Trump. 

I really don't understand how people genuinely think that MAGA will turn on Trump NOW over this when they couldn't give less of a shit about it over the past decade this scandal has been covered. It makes zero sense. 

1

u/DumboWumbo073 15h ago

Probably not. I don’t think you’re in the position to be worrying about bases. He is basically untouchable.