Terror, Blame and Lies - Has MAGA Turned Into The French Revolution?

"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant." - Robespierre

Painting by Jean-Joseph Weerts (1897).

History has a cruel way of repeating itself, particularly when powerful figures find themselves backed into corners of their own making. The spectacle of Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and its political aftermath bears an eerie resemblance to Maximilien Robespierre's final desperate months during the French Revolution's Terror. Robespierre, the radical lawyer who became the chief architect of the Terror, a period of mass arrests and executions that claimed tens of thousands of lives in the name of revolutionary purity, (at least 300,000 were arrested; 17,000 were officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died in prison or without trial), transformed from revolutionary hero to tyrant in the span of months.

Both men, facing existential threats to their power, discovered that both success and survival required an ever-escalating commitment to extremism, lies, and the systematic destruction of truth itself, a path that ultimately consumed the Frenchman and whose outcome for Trump remains very much in question.

Robespierre's dilemma in 1794 was stark: having overthrown the establishment and orchestrated the execution of moderate revolutionaries deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause, royalists, and even fellow radicals, he had painted himself into a corner where any retreat meant certain death.

To put it simply, he ran out of people to blame.

The architect of the Terror could not simply call for moderation without admitting the very crimes that would see him follow his victims to the guillotine. His only option was to double down, to construct ever more elaborate justifications for the bloodshed, and to rewrite reality itself to maintain the illusion of righteous necessity. For a time, the bloodthirsty mob followed suit, and heads literally rolled down the streets of Paris as Robespierre looked to distract the angry crowds he had created from his own culpability.

Trump's Epstein moment represents a similar inflection point.