The best political analysis of the week didn’t come from a pollster or a pundit. It came from an Epstein survivor I sat down with last night in Dallas.
As the sun was setting here in Texas, I huddled with a group of Epstein survivors. More than a dozen of them are in Dallas this week (at the same time as the president is hosting his GOP “midterm convention”) to call out the Trump administration’s coverup of the most sprawling sex crimes investigation in American history, in which the president’s name appears literally thousands of times. I asked one woman whether she was worried about coming to deep-red Texas, during a week when MAGA is supposed to take over the city.
“No,” she said flatly. “There are more of us than them.”
She meant it figuratively. But given what it looks like here in town, she might as well have meant it literally.
Rather than fleeing the area this week, the political opposition seems drawn to it. As I wrote in the UK’s i Paper this week, the president’s showpiece convention has become a magnet for the very people he spent years trying to intimidate: Democratic candidates, pro-democracy organizers, former officials who walked away from him, and the survivors now standing beside 3.5 million printed pages of the Epstein files and refusing to let the issue go away (thanks in part to DEFIANCE.org Members who are making it possible to keep shining a light).
Meanwhile, the people who the convention was actually built for are staying home. Politico surveyed more than seventy Republican candidates and members of Congress; forty-five said they weren’t coming to Texas or still needed to “check their schedules.” Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, defending a district Trump carried, explained his absence by saying “our bosses are back home.” Even Melania Trump isn’t on the speaker list.
At the same time, Trump’s own supporters are being begged to attend to fill the seats. When the event was first announced, access carried a high price tag. Organizers were charging $250,000 for a roundtable with Trump, $88,600 for a commemorative photo with the president, and a $25,000 minimum for the Republican candidates to attend an event supposedly held in their honor. By last week, the party was blasting out text messages promising free tickets to anyone who’d take them, so much so that locals thought it was a scam.
Trump posted that the arena is “totally sold out!” As always, you can tell how well it’s going by how loudly he insists it’s going well.
His panic is on full display. You could see it rising in the White House over the weekend, when the president unleashed an hours-long, thirty-seven-post spree of AI-generated fantasies, including his own face on Hulk Hogan’s body, Trump on horseback beside George Washington, Trump commanding a robot army, and Trump laying claim to the moon. He’s hardly projecting strength. He’s a man mentally unraveling in plain view and retreating into a digital fantasy world where apparently the crowds are infinite and the founding fathers gaze up at him admiringly.
The real world looks far grimmer for him. The president’s approval rating is the lowest of his political career. The mere fact that this convention is being held in Texas — Texas! — is itself a defensive concession, a decision to spend the week shoring up ground in a place that Republicans never needed to worry about. A Texas pollster I know, a woman who has spent years rolling her eyes at Democratic promises to turn this state blue, told me something yesterday I didn’t expect to hear: “This is the year.”
The enthusiasm gap is almost as palpable as the scorching heat here in town.
Nearly three-quarters of Democrats say this is the most important midterm of their lifetimes (22 points higher than their Republican neighbors). GOP enthusiasm has fallen off a cliff, and honestly, what did Trump expect? He’s spent years assuring his base he’d rig the system so Republicans would never lose again, and he’s spent this year trying to prove it, from redrawing election maps mid-cycle to attempting a federal takeover of mail-in voting. He stood in front of Mount Rushmore this July and promised that because of his efforts, Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.” If Big Brother has it handled, why stand in line to vote? Autocratic promises, so it seems, are a turnout killer.
There’s a deeper truth behind the Dallas flop this week. And it’s that Donald Trump’s autocratic experiment is entering more than just the “fail phase.” It’s backfiring spectacularly. This is the story of every would-be dictator. They sow the seeds of their own demise by manufacturing enemies at wide scale, until — one day — the enemies actually start outnumbering the loyalists. The intimidation that once cleared rooms for the strongman starts filling those same rooms with his opponents.
You’re seeing it here on the ground in Dallas. You’re seeing it at the Trump-Epstein Memorial Reading Room we’ve helped set up. If you tune into the GOP convention this week (and I wouldn’t recommend it), you’ll see it too, especially when you watch the seat-fillers sit there clapping half-heartedly. Something in the air has changed.
The survivor was right. There are more of us than them.
Your friend, in defiance,
DEFIANCE DAILY
In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tonight at 5 pm ET! We’ll be giving you a virtual tour of the Trump-Epstein Memorial Reading Room & Bookmobile you helped build, which will be hosting U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico tomorrow for a LIVE press conference.
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