In the shadow of Epstein, Uygur breaks out a cigar

He prematurely celebrates being vindicated — but was never close to being correct

Cenk Uygur, circa 2011. (Image credit: Associated Press / Current TV)

In the wake of the uproar over the attempted cover-up of the Epstein files by the Trump administration — of which most of the ruckus has come from MAGA itself — a particular voice has come through to call attention to himself so as to settle some scores.

Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks and self-described populist, points to this hubbub by MAGA to claim victory in some squabbles between himself and others on the political left. However, his underlying claim that MAGA is something other than what it is — a cult — leaves him in the same company as other doubters such as Rick Alan Ross, who similarly misdiagnosed this movement.

2021: MAGA rebuffs Trump

You may recall that I referenced Ross, a former cult deprogrammer, in a previous essay where I rebutted his assertion that Donald Trump wasn’t a cult leader. Both Ross and Uygur (pronounced YOU-gur) are similar in that they believe that, when MAGA bucks Trump, it indicates something other than what it actually does.

In at least two appearances before crowds in 2021, Trump somewhat offhandedly suggested to his supporters that they might want to get the COVID-19 shot, as he had done. Uncharacteristic pushback met this advice, in the form of boos. Ross diagnosed MAGA’s disapproval as proof that Trump isn’t really a cult leader, when in fact MAGA was livid that Trump went off-script.

By 2021, Covid denial had become an article of faith among MAGA. When Trump touted “the jab” and mentioned that he himself had gotten it, this threatened to crush a belief that otherwise had become incorporated into dogma. (It’s worth noting that once Trump got booed a couple of times, he stopped urging folks to get vaccinated. Message received!)

Ross interpreted this reaction as evidence that the crowd did not see Trump as a pinnacle leader. He could not see that MAGA was demanding that Trump return to doctrine. As I remarked in the previous essay:

[T]hey booed him because he was departing from his own orthodoxy. They wanted Trump to go back to fundamentals, to be purer in his precepts. They may have (accurately) perceived that Trump in this instance was “selling out” for the mainstream audience at home, which in any other case may not have roused his followers’ ire. But the topic of Covid — the need to oppose it — was too sacrosanct to the movement.

Mischaracterizations→misunderstandings

In somewhat different fashion, Cenk Uygur has over the last handful of months asserted that MAGA followers, as political actors, can be reasoned with on certain issues. He has maintained that they would break with Trump if he were to renege on these policies. MAGA, Uygur contends, is populist first and foremost, and by focusing on populist issues we might peel off some of these voters.

Already wrong

To be frank, the main issue Uygur specifically had named was MAGA supposedly being anti-war. He claimed, without evidence, that MAGA would rebuke Trump if he were to get the US involved in foreign wars.

That did not turn out to be true. When Israel launched attacks on Iran, after a couple of weeks it looked that the US would be obliged to assist in Israel’s assault. In the week leading up to the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, MAGA influencers warned that getting involved would cause some MAGA folks to bolt, because the principle was “America First.”

Then Trump went ahead and bombed those sites, and the influencers fell in line.

So while there was chatter that a split might occur, when push came to shove, those might-take-flight followers for the most part stayed put. Uygur was wrong on the main issue to which he had pointed with any specificity.

A more minor issue Uygur had suggested was that of corruption. MAGA is a populist movement, he proclaimss, and as such it would be against corruption in either of the Republican or Democratic parties. (This formulation paints MAGA as being far more independent than the group has ever shown itself to be.)

However, it does not take much searching to find instances of major corruption in the second Trump administration, not least regarding his cryptocurrency scheme. Some observers believe Trump to be possibly the most corrupt American presidency in history, far surpassing candidates such as Warren Harding and Richard Nixon. Yet MAGA, up to this point, has continued to stick with Trump. Here, too, Uygur’s instinct on MAGA’s nature proves incorrect.

Uygur appropriates Epstein in a most cynical manner

Now that MAGA is launching into Trump for his broken promise to release the Epstein files and to bring perpetrators to justice, Uygur is taking this as vindication that he has been right about MAGA all along.

Twitter / X post by Cenk Uygur, July 12, 2025.

As far as the Epstein reaction among MAGA is concerned, this does not prove Uygur right about anything that he claimed. No one, even those who study MAGA as a political movement or as a cult, foresaw such a chasm breaking open with regards to Trump’s announcement (partly because no one could predict that Trump would proclaim that he’d close the investigation without further charges — it was rather unimaginable). As the consequences were not foreseen, Uygur cannot take a victory lap on that outcome, since he was just as blind as the rest of us.

Furthermore, the dissension itself does not indicate what Uygur claims it does. It pays to remember that, when Uygur asserted over and over that MAGA was reasonable, he did so on the explicit condition that it was not a cult — at least no more so than the Democrats could be said to be.

This contention is evident in his remarks during his debates with Mark Lamont Hill, Francesca Fiorentini, and Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball, among others: Uygur pooh-poohs the idea of MAGA as a cult and repeatedly indicts Democrats as being possessed of the same type of zealotry.

This false equivalence is precisely what was dispelled by MAGA’s outcry over the Epstein determination. Just as with Covid denial, the prospect of the Epstein list being revealed had become an article of faith among MAGA folks. (Indeed, the belief of there being a worldwide child sex ring operated and frequented by “global elites” predates Covid denial by at least three years. It’s foundational to the tenets of QAnon, the conspiratorial, Trump-revering group that’s long been adjacent to MAGA.)

This idea of the existence of a global child sex ring pervades MAGA. Thus, when Trump tried to close the books on the Epstein investigation without any results or revelations, his base revolted. This was not what they were promised! They had invested so much into this belief — something had to pan out.

It is this organic, volcanic response by MAGA that is the clearest indication that Epstein forms a core belief, one that provides a sense of shared identity. In other words, MAGA is a cult.

In fact, Uygur should be able to admit that the reaction by MAGA is not rational. The idea that the Epstein list would deliver cosmic justice upon wrongdoers is an emotional belief, not a political one. This is why it’s not negotiable. Thus, the claim that Uygur makes is dashed. MAGA cannot be approached as a rational actor, because it is gripped by emotional issues such as this.

What MAGA is, and what MAGA can never be

Because MAGA is a cult but Uygur refuses to believe this, he cannot ever actually understand why Trump followers take the actions that they do. He might try to puzzle their behavior, substituting what he himself might do or what he’s seen other groups do. But cults operate on their own logic. Without acknowledging their different motivations and views, an outside observer cannot discern their true rationale or intent.

Uygur is lost when it comes to being able to figure out MAGA. He thinks that the best strategy to peel off some MAGA voters is to not challenge them on certain traits such as racial or gender intolerance but instead attempt to bond over policy alignments. Other prominent influencers and personalities on the left side of the political spectrum have taken Uygur to task for this abdication of basic progressive standards (i.e., don’t coddle racism and sexism), but Uygur is convinced that his strategy is best.

He is taking MAGA’s balking at the bungled closure of the Epstein files as vindication of his approach. He tongue-lashes his critics, pointing to the fact that MAGA is indeed bucking Dear Leader.

Twitter / X post by Cenk Uygur, July 12, 2025.

But here Uygur employs what’s known as a motte-and-bailey argument or fallacy. No one on the left argued that MAGA would never go against Trump. In fact, as I pointed out at the very beginning of this piece, we have on record a specific instance of when MAGA members let Trump know that they were unhappy with him: they weren’t going to stand for Trump rewriting the article of faith about COVID-19 and “the jab.” They needed him to stay true to the party line.

Uygur uses the current outrage about Epstein to say, “Eh? Now you see that they will rebuke Trump, which proves me right.” But it does no such thing. That was never the argument! Cenk claimed that MAGA could be reasoned with, not that they would never insist on demands from Trump. This episode with MAGA beside itself as a result of Trump breaking his promise indeed shows MAGA’s irrationality, utterly vitiating Cenk’s original claim.

So we see that Cenk Uygur, more concerned with being right instead of understanding the world as it actually is, has now substituted a different predicate into the debate so as to appear to triumph over his critics. (Meanwhile, MAGA continues to demand that Trump be consistent regarding the lore about child sex rings that the movement has built up for nearly a decade, that he not deviate from that storyline but bring it to a satisfying conclusion.)

Uygur is wrong about MAGA’s nature; thus, he will never understand it. He won’t be able to anticipate it, and certainly he won’t be able to entice any of those members to leave.

It’s incumbent upon us, however, to see the movement for what it is — a group experience built on identity fusion with its leader, permitting members illusory moments of power while projecting their flaws onto scapegoats, who then must be punished. This is the cult experience, but it’s also the fascist experience. The two share a lot in common. Fascism is a fulcrum for displacing psychological faults. We must understand this if we are to comprehend why MAGA as a group behaves the way it does.