Key topics:Trump embodies pride, greed, and lust, the top three deadly sins in politics.Epstein’s vault secrets threaten to unravel Trump’s support among MAGA followers.Media figures are turning on Trump over sex trafficking, risking his political future..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Dirk Hartford.Listen to this story instead:.Of the seven deadly sins of christian ethical teachings, usually listed in order of wickedness, the first three - pride, greed and lust - well describe the raison d’etre of many of the political and business elites dominating global headlines today.Trump, currently the most powerful man on the planet, is the epitome of these vices. His pride, the “original sin” that births all other vices, knows no bounds; nor does his greed. This is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.But just as one can’t teach colours to the blind and music to the deaf, his MAGA followers, the majority of whom are Christian conservative nationalists apparently averse to these sins, have turned a blind eye and deaf ear to his hubris and avarice and put him in power.But when it comes to lust, which by its very sexualised nature is typically the vice of the underworld, of secrets, of behind closed doors, it appears that his MAGA base and Americans in general are wanting to see and hear what was found hidden in Jeffrey Epstein’s vaults.Like the ambiguity in the mythical story of Pandora’s box, which when opened let out all the evils in the world leaving only hope behind, will that hope be preserved or obliterated among the MAGA’s in particular in the coming days.That is the situation facing Trump now, one on which his whole diabolical project might depend. The stakes couldn’t be higher for him six months into his dramatic revolutionary path to a new “golden age” for America.If his conspiracy laden MAGA base (19% of Americans believe QAnon’s deep state story of a satanic global pedophile clique sex trafficking children) lose hope in Trump’s promises to expose the deep state, all could start to unravel for him.The secrets from Epstein’s vault have become the touchstone for this and Trump has long promised his faithful followers that he will deliver.However his characteristic recent volte-face on this, unlike so many other earth shattering issues in the past six months, has not gone unnoticed by his MAGA base. Complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children is one thing.But when it comes to the sex trafficking of MAGA children, amongst others, it currently looks like there are forces in MAGA determined to draw a line in the sand. So far and no further.Trump is nothing if not the global grand master of propaganda and playing the media. It's his particular genius, despite the fact that his own media diet is largely cable tv and daily newspapers. Books are apparently too much for him.Already some of his biggest social media supporters like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owen have turned on him on this issue. They have followers that dwarf cable tv and the legacy print media. And they are not letting go..Read more:.Jeffrey Epstein files - a once friendly ghost haunting Trump, splitting MAGA base.There is a lot to say about Trump and Epstein, best bra’s for at least a decade. Why Epstein’s pimp Ghislane Maxwell even recruited some “chicks” for Epstein from Mar a Lago.It's probable that, taken together, more has been written and said about them than anyone else ever in history. There are a lot of dots to join out there even before the contents of the vault are revealed - if they ever are that is.And those dots already at least raise the possibility that it's not completely improbable that - surprise, surprise - Trump himself might be in the vault.Why else would he be trying to keep the vault closed to the public ? When else has Trump ever regarded anyone else as indispensable to his project ? Pray tell.Despite his increasingly frantic attempts to spin the story away, it's still boiling. And it doesn’t look right now that anything other than dropping an atomic bomb somewhere is going to distract Americans from it.If they succeed in forcing his hand to reveal the Epstein secrets, the who’s who of the global child sex trafficking ring, it will likely obliterate the hopes of his MAGA base that he is they key to the golden age.