Last weekend, Donald Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Ghislaine Maxwell in a federal prison. This is significant because Maxwell is now the central figure in the entire Jeffrey Epstein saga. Her lawyer says she answered “every single question” over two days of interviews and never invoked privilege. And now, in a dramatic escalation, she has offered to testify before Congress — but only if granted immunity and other major conditions, according to a list of demands sent to the House Oversight Committee yesterday.

The response from Trump’s coalition to Maxwell’s efforts to secure her freedom reveals something fascinating about its fault lines. Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk told his audience on Real America’s Voice that Maxwell was a “mixed bag” but believed she’d be motivated to tell the truth in exchange for immunity or protection. Her former lawyer Alan Dershowitz called her the “Rosetta Stone” of the case on Fox News, hoping she’d be offered freedom in exchange for testimony. Newsmax host Greg Kelly dismissed her conviction as a “rush to judgement”, and suggested “she just might be a victim.” Meanwhile, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson posted an Instagram video celebrating the Maxwell meetings, declaring that “this is what transparency looks like.”

These prominent media allies are laying the groundwork for something that would have been unthinkable just months ago. Trump himself seemed to be getting ahead of the story this week, claiming Epstein had “poached” young women from his Mar-a-Lago spas, including Virginia Giuffre, which he said was why he banned Epstein from the property.

Not everyone’s buying it, though. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been openly suspicious about whether Maxwell’s cooperation might be motivated by a pardon. House Speaker Mike Johnson said that she should have “a life sentence at least” and that he would have “great pause” regarding any pardon. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec said the administration should only cooperate if Maxwell revealed “absolutely everything”, including “receipts and names”.

What makes this so dangerous for Trump is that it hits at the core contradiction of his movement. Pardoning Maxwell will look exactly like the kind of backroom deal they claim to despise. For years, his supporters have painted themselves as outsiders fighting a cabal of wealthy predators who protect each other through money, blackmail, and political favours. The Epstein case became their proof, an actual conspiracy of the rich and powerful abusing children. And now their champion might let the co-conspirator walk free? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

The polling reveals just how devastating this could be. A Quinnipiac survey earlier this month found that 63% of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files; more troubling for the President is that Republicans split nearly evenly on the matter, 40% approving versus 36% disapproving. That’s virtually unheard of for Trump, who typically commands overwhelming GOP support. A Fox News poll found only 13% of voters believe the administration has been transparent about Epstein, with 60% of Republicans saying the same. Meanwhile, 89% of Americans want all the files released. It’s rare to see such bipartisan support for any issue these days.

MAGA’s fault lines run deeper than just polling. The QAnon Shaman himself, Jacob Chansley, who was pardoned by Trump just months ago, turned on the President by calling him a “fraud” and suggesting that he was compromised by Epstein. The very supporters who cheered “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton would watch Trump release someone who actually went to trial.

The betrayal narrative writes itself, and the enthusiasm gap is already showing. While 72% of Democratic voters say they’re “extremely” motivated to vote in 2026, only 50% of Republicans feel the same — a 22-point chasm that’s among the biggest on record. Of course, the numbers show he won’t lose everybody with a Maxwell pardon, and Epstein’s partner-in-crime certainly has everything to gain. On top of that, Trump has proven that much of his base will forgive almost anything as long as the MAGA master floods the zone with other controversies, such as investigating Barack Obama for Russiagate, while he muddles through it.

But he might lose enough influential voices, with podcasters such as Joe Rogan condemning the “gaslighting”, to fracture his coalition. In a movement built on the promise of exposing elite corruption, pardoning Epstein’s co-conspirator could be a betrayal too far.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

MoustacheClubUS

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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