Bongino in a Bind

Earlier this week, Dan Bongino, the former Fox News host turned FBI deputy director, sat down on the plush "Fox & Friends" couch to perform his latest role: teary martyr. “I gave up everything for this,” he whined, recounting his long nights at the bureau, the lonely grind of law enforcement, and, bizarrely, how his boss Kash Patel’s faucet interrupts the solitude of the four walls he stares at each day.

It was a strange, self-pitying monologue from a man who spent years feeding the very flames that now threaten to consume him.

Bongino is under fire from the MAGA base, not because he’s made any meaningful policy decision, but because he dared to say out loud this week what they refuse to believe: that billionaire sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. For a movement built on conspiracy and grievance, this was heresy. Never mind that Bongino spent the better part of the Trump years helping mainstream the idea that Epstein’s death was part of a vast, sinister cover-up. Now that he’s wearing a badge and unable to actually deliver the goods, he’s trying to extinguish the blaze he poured gasoline on.

To prove his newfound seriousness, Bongino and Patel announced on Fox News that the FBI will release surveillance footage showing no one entered Epstein’s jail cell, all but declaring it as proof he wasn't murdered. “You are going to see there is no one there but him,” Bongino said of Epstein. "There is video clear as day. He’s the only person in there and the only person coming out."

But the announcement was a clear attempt at damage control to reclaim credibility with a base that has grown restless after months of waiting for long-promised “deep state” bombshells to drop. But the problem isn’t the tape—it’s the narrative.

For years, figures like Bongino, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and dozens of other right-wing influencers turned Epstein into a totem of deep state paranoia. The idea that a high-profile sex trafficker with powerful connections could mysteriously die in prison became a gateway drug for deeper conspiracies: about the Clintons, about the FBI, about the very fabric of American governance.

Now that Bongino has moved from the studio to the bureau, he’s running into the hard limits of what that audience is willing to believe. It turns out that once you train MAGA warriors to see every inconvenient fact as a lie, they don’t stop just because you’re the one delivering it. Bongino spent years peddling deep state suspicions, and now he’s supposed to be the deep state’s public face. And MAGA influencers and adherents are turning on him.

“On this claim that Epstein’s death is not a cover-up I call bullshit,” Jones posted on X. He was far from alone.

The outcry from the MAGA faithful underscores just how deep the delusion runs. If someone like Bongino, one of their most trusted champions, can’t pierce through the conspiratorial noise, no one can. After all, he wasn’t just another pundit; he was an evangelist for the cause, someone widely seen as a bombastic truth teller. And yet, even he is now being dismissed as part of the cover up, a traitor to the cause.

Bongino and Attorney General Pam Bondi—who has yet to fulfill her vow to unmask shadowy elites connected to the late financier with the release of so-called “Epstein Files"—are learning the hard way that the conspiratorial politics they entertained are difficult to clean up. The MAGA base wants secrets unveiled, arrests made, and heads to roll. They were promised revelations. But they’re getting the run around.

“I think, big picture, DOJ is making a huge mistake—huge mistake—in promising to reveal things and then not revealing them,” Carlson said Friday on his show, questioning why Trump's Justice Department hasn’t released evidence to back up its claims.

Others, including the far-right extremist Laura Loomer, have called for Bondi to resign over the broken promises.

The predicament is rich with irony. They helped create a media environment where the truth is whatever gets listeners to tune in, where doubt is a product and certainty is suspect. Now, they're appealing to unseen evidence and procedure, tools Bongino spent years convincing his audience not to trust.

The pushback is the inevitable consequence of turning politics into performance. The trio—and others like them—spent years inflaming the public with tales of deep state villainy, secret cabals, and government assassins. But now that they’re holding the reins of actual power, they’re discovering something uncomfortable: it’s easy to sell conspiracy theories. It’s a hell of a lot harder to shut them down.