The Epstein files divided Trump's base and now more fights are brewing

The release of the Epstein files followed a rare revolt against Donald Trump by some of his most dedicated supporters.

It also led to Trump's dramatic falling out with Marjorie Taylor Greene — the diehard MAGA congresswoman who had been an earlier adopter of Trumpism, but became disillusioned with what it turned into.

Greene is preparing to leave Congress early in the new year, with a long list of gripes about the president she once loved. She believes many of his voters harbour similar grievances.

"The base is jaded," she recently told The Washington Post.

While Trump is still enjoying strong approval ratings among Republicans, a growing number of issues are fuelling conflict among his MAGA followers.

The divisions were on full display over the weekend. Leading conservatives attacked one another at AmericaFest, the annual convention run by the late Charlie Kirk's organisation, Turning Point USA.

"Say what you want about AmFest, but it's definitely not boring," Kirk's widow, Erika Kirk, said at the event. "Feels like a Thanksgiving dinner where your family's hashing out the family business."

Here are six of the issues causing bitter fights in the American right.

'America First'

US support for Israel was one of the first issues where Greene split with Trump and most of her party.

She branded Israel's attacks on Gaza a "genocide" in July, becoming the first Republican in Congress to say so, even before the UN's commission of inquiry made that assessment in September.

Right-wing broadcasters Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have also been critical of US support for Israel.

"The idea that they've killed tens of thousands of women and children, non-combatants, accidentally, is a lie," Carlson said on his show recently.

"No, they've murdered them."

With the exception of Trump critic Thomas Massie, Republicans in Congress are still staunch in their support for Israel, dismissive of international condemnation of its actions in Gaza.

Polls suggest most of their voters feel the same way.

But younger Republicans are more likely to have a different view.

In one recent poll, 27 per cent of millennial and generation Z Republicans said the US had given too much military aid to Israel, compared to 16 per cent of older Republicans.

For many MAGA Republicans, criticism of US military support for Israel is part of a bigger complaint about US involvement in foreign wars.

Greene, Carlson and Bannon have also pushed against US aid for Ukraine, arguing it goes against Trump's "America First" platform.

Nick Fuentes

One of the most controversial recent events in the MAGA media sphere was Carlson's decision to bring Nick Fuentes onto his show for a friendly interview.

Fuentes is a white supremacist who regularly praises Hitler as "cool". A lot of Republicans deride him as an extremist and fringe, but he has 1.2 million followers on X and more on other platforms.

Carlson hosted Fuentes on his program in October, triggering outrage among some on the right.

Podcaster Ben Shapiro called Carlson a "super-spreader of vile ideas". Senator Ted Cruz said he had "spread a poison that is profoundly dangerous", and said too many Republican politicians were too scared of Carlson to speak up.

The fallout was especially felt at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the contentious Project 2025 manifesto.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts defended Carlson from the "venomous coalition" that criticised him. Roberts's comments prompted several Heritage board members to resign, including two last week.

The controversy, and a broader debate about who is welcome inside the MAGA tent, was still a topic of conversation at AmericaFest on the weekend.

US Vice-President JD Vance, without explicitly mentioning Fuentes, warned Republicans against applying "purity tests" to others on their side of politics. "We have far more important work to do than cancelling each other," he told the conference.

But Vance, who has condemned Fuentes in the past, also told online magazine UnHerd: "Anyone that attacks my wife, whether their name is [cable TV host] Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit."

Fuentes has used racist slurs when referring to Vance's wife, who has Indian heritage.

Health insurance

A fight between Democrats and Republicans over the cost of health insurance ultimately caused the US government's recent record-length shutdown.

It came down to Democrats insisting that Congress keep funding subsidies that lower health insurance costs. Trump was determined to make sure Republicans did not cave to their demands.

But now some Republicans also want Congress to fund the subsidies.

When the Republican leaders who control Congress refused to allow a vote on the issue, four Republicans last week joined Democrats in signing a discharge petition to force a vote.

It was a rare move, but exactly the same manoeuvre that brought a vote on the Epstein files being released — with four different Republican defectors.

One of the Republicans who signed the health insurance petition, Mike Lawler, said he was "pissed for the American people".

Another Republican, Kevin Kiley, attacked his party's "failure of leadership".

A poll commissioned by a Republican political group found half of Republican respondents also wanted the subsidies kept in place.

But support for the subsidies fell significantly after respondents heard Republican arguments against them, including that the subsidies shifted the cost of health care to taxpayers while insurers kept charging high prices.

Under the rules of Congress, the vote does not need to happen until January.

H-1B visas

These skilled worker visas sparked a public intra-MAGA argument shortly after Trump's election, before he had even made it back to the White House.

Big Tech and its supporters defended the visas, commonly used to import Silicon Valley specialists, against vocal MAGA followers who said the visas were frequently abused to rob Americans of jobs.

The debate has continued to rage since Trump's return to the presidency.

The conservative commentator Charlie Kirk had tweeted "let's end the H-1B scam" in August, a month before his death.

Texas's Young Republicans have voted to only endorse candidates who oppose the H-1B program.

Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, ordered his state's universities to stop hiring people on the visas.

Trump has put a $US100,000 ($151,000) fee on the visas. However, he backed the overall program in an interview with Fox News's Laura Ingraham in November, saying America had to "bring in talent".

The exchange went viral and triggered blowback from some of Trump's vocal online supporters.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson said it was the "very first time I have seen so many people who have long been supporters of the president furious with the president".

"As he says stuff like this, he exacerbates the splits and his movement is going to splinter," he said.

Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories about the killing of Charlie Kirk have proliferated online since he was shot in September.

One of the most prominent peddlers of these theories is Candace Owens, who has one of the most popular podcasts on the political right.

Owens was a friend of Kirk's and worked as communications director at his Turning Point organisation from 2017 to 2019.

She has baselessly suggested that Israeli, French and Egyptian operatives could have been behind his killing.

Some other conservative podcasters have been fiercely critical.

"Candace Owens is a f***ing evil scumbag," Tim Pool said on his popular podcast.

Shapiro told the AmericaFest convention that too many conservatives had failed to call Owens out for "vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square".

"The people who refuse to condemn Candace's truly vicious attacks, and some of them are speaking here, are guilty of cowardice," he said.

When Kirk's widow was asked recently what she would say to Owens, she said: "Stop. That's it. That's all I have to say. Stop."

The pair later had what Owens calls an "extremely productive" four-and-a-half-hour meeting.

"We agreed much more than I had anticipated," Owens wrote on X last week. "Of course, we also disagreed on various points and people as well."

Cost of living

Trump's aides are known to be pushing the president to talk more about "affordability", but he is struggling to stay on message.

At his first stop on a national campaign-style tour to talk about the issue, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania: "If I read what's on the teleprompter, you'd all be falling asleep right now."

He went on to rail against the constant focus on the issue, which he keeps calling a Democratic hoax.

"They have a new word. You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is affordability," he said.

In polls, Americans mark Trump pretty poorly on the issue. He scored a 31 per cent approval rating on cost of living in a December Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Republicans gave him a much healthier 69 per cent — 10 percentage points higher than the previous month.

But some of his advisers and supporters are warning him he needs to do much more to help Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Pollster Mark Mitchell said he encouraged Trump to embrace "pragmatic economic populism" during a recent White House meeting.

But, "to the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn't as interested as I would have hoped", Mitchell told The Washington Post.