Red Hat, Red Herring

A few days ago, David Pakman posted a Thread that felt like a trigger pulled by a trembling hand. It wasn’t particularly shocking or unique. In fact, it was boilerplate liberal Twitter dopamine: “67% of Americans — including HALF of Republicans — think Trump is covering up Epstein evidence. He’s losing his base fast.” The likes poured in. Replies followed the script — “the cult is finally cracking,” “they’re waking up,” “dumpster fire,” “even the base sees the truth now.” There was a palpable air of catharsis in the comments, a communal exhale among people who’ve spent years waiting for the moral arc of the universe to do the one thing it never seems to: bend on schedule. But as I read through it, something clarified. Not in anger or even amusement, but with a kind of exhausted certainty. This wasn’t a moment of collapse. It was a moment of projection. And not from Trump’s supporters — but from the people who have never understood what the red hat meant in the first place.

The people nodding along with Pakman’s tweet have been trying to engineer Trump’s fall since the escalator ride. They’ve thrown indictments, Access Hollywood, impeachment, Ukraine, classified documents, and Jan 6 at him. They’ve thrown books and podcasts and Pulitzer-winning editorials. And each time it didn’t stick, they told themselves the base was brainwashed. That one more revelation, one more poll, one more “gotcha” would finally shatter the illusion. But the illusion isn’t Trump’s. The illusion is theirs. They keep mistaking moral clarity for strategic leverage. They keep thinking that if enough people agree that something is wrong, the system will correct itself. But that only works when people still trust the system doing the correcting. And the red hat — whatever else it may symbolize — is first and foremost a symbol of withdrawal from that trust.

Trump’s base isn’t an amorphous blob of cultish loyalty. It’s a layered coalition that coheres not around his personality, but around what his presence represents: defiance, vengeance, and symbolic inversion of a cultural order they believe has humiliated them. For some, it's economic abandonment. For others, it’s religious displacement, cultural dislocation, or years of being told that their gender, skin color, profession, accent, or dietary habits mark them as morally inferior. Trump was — and still is — a middle finger wrapped in a flag, dipped in gold plating, and shouted through a bullhorn. His vulgarity wasn’t a bug. It was a feature. It meant he wasn’t one of “them.” His sins were pedestrian and televised. Theirs — the elite’s — were whispered, obfuscated, and ritualized.

This is why the Epstein card doesn’t land. This is why “Trump’s base thinks he’s hiding the files!” is such a hollow declaration. The entire populist-right cosmology already assumes everyone in power is complicit in child trafficking, satanic ritual, and globalist blackmail networks. They don’t need proof. They operate on archetype. And within that cosmology, Trump has never been cast as the predator. He’s cast as the outsider — the one who wasn’t invited to the real party, the one who wasn’t initiated. He may be crude. He may be greedy. He may even be pervy. But in their eyes, he’s not the kind of man who sits in a pentagram while sipping adrenochrome with Klaus Schwab. He’s the guy who was rich enough to get close to the temple, but dumb enough to speak about it too loudly, too publicly, and with too much Queens bravado to ever be trusted by the real devils in the room. That’s why the QAnon types, for all their contradictions, never placed Trump on the inside of the pedo cult — only ever as the would-be exposer of it.

It’s also worth remembering that Trump is not a true believer. He is an operator. He is transactional. He wrote Art of the Deal, not Mein Kampf. He is Bubba with a red tie, a barker who negotiates through contradiction and momentum, not through doctrine. The real danger to Trump has never come from the left. It comes from his own right flank — the ones who have radicalized themselves into purity spiral suicide vests. The Bannonists. The Flynnists. The ones who scream betrayal if Trump doesn't press the nuke on the deep state every time he opens his mouth. This is what I’ve started calling Woke MAGA — not because they share ideology with the left, but because they’ve adopted the same absolutist logic, the same refusal to horse trade, the same posture of moral purity wrapped in revolutionary urgency. They’re the ones calling Trump a coward now, not the liberals.

So no, Trump isn’t losing his base. He’s shedding the performative fringes. He’s burning off the radicalized fat. The core remains — the ones who voted for deportation, jobs, national pride, a nation that isn’t ashamed to still have borders or a flag. The rest — the influencers, the content spinners, the NeverTrump grifters, the Epstein-watching purity cultists — are just white noise. Or worse, useful idiots chasing shadows.

What Pakman’s tweet represents is something much older than this moment. It’s the perennial liberal fantasy that the system will self-correct once the facts are clear enough. It’s the fantasy that a majority poll means a majority shift in power. It’s the fantasy that everyone still lives in a shared moral reality where shame is effective, where scandal breaks loyalty, and where the right truth at the right time makes the empire blink. That world no longer exists. Maybe it never did. But it certainly doesn’t now.

What we’re watching isn’t the red hat unraveling. We’re watching people chase a red herring — again. They’ve mistaken performative disapproval for actual erosion. They’ve confused a flash of discontent in a poll with a sea change in allegiance. And they’ll do it again next week when some new headline, some new gaffe, some new out-of-context quote confirms their hope that this time it’s different.

But it isn’t. And until they understand that — until they understand what the red hat was and is — they’ll keep missing the mark. They’ll keep pulling the trigger on kill shots that land like Nerf darts in a storm.

And Trump, grotesque and golden, will keep walking.

tl;dr

The provided text, "Red Hat, Red Herring," argues that liberal commentators consistently misinterpret public sentiment regarding Donald Trump. It asserts that perceived scandals and negative polls do not erode his base because his supporters are motivated by a rejection of the established cultural order, rather than a belief in his moral purity. The author contends that Trump's actions are often seen as defiance against an elite they distrust, and that his base is not easily swayed by conventional political attacks like the Epstein allegations. The piece suggests that liberals mistakenly believe facts and moral clarity will cause a systemic correction, failing to grasp that Trump's appeal lies in his symbolic opposition to the very systems attempting to hold him accountable. Ultimately, the author concludes that ongoing attempts to trigger Trump's downfall through scandal are "red herrings," as they fundamentally misunderstand the nature and resilience of his support.