A senior White House official has told me the real threat to Trump

The manner in which Donald Trump was forced, in the end, to agree this week to the publication of the Epstein files should worry the President far more than anything that might be in them.

I very much doubt Trump has to fear a smoking gun. If there was anything truly damning about him in the files it would surely have come out by now, given the number of people who've had access to them over the years, including many of his enemies.

But it was worse than humiliating that he had to agree to them becoming public — it was the starkest indication yet that he's losing his grip over the MAGA movement, through which he's hitherto ruled the Republican Party with an iron hand.

'President Trump remains the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party,' says Karoline Leavitt. When the President's most senior official spokesperson feels compelled to make such a declaration you can be pretty sure his control is slipping.

Trump campaigned to release the Epstein files ahead of last year's presidential election. He vowed to do so in a broadcast interview. It was one of the issues that fired up his MAGA base, whose outer reaches have long thought the files would vindicate their bizarre belief that there is an extensive pedophile ring operating at the heart of the federal government.

Yet when Trump was safely ensconced back in the White House, he changed his mind, for reasons that remain inexplicable, especially since it made him look as if he had something to hide (which he probably hasn't). Suddenly it was all a 'Democratic hoax' to publish them.

Nobody bought that.

But Trump twisted arms to get his way. MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert were leant on — heavily. Boebert was even reportedly summoned to the White House Situation Room to be pressured hard by no less than FBI boss Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

But she didn't buckle. Nor did her fellow dissidents. By last Sunday, with defeat in Congress staring him in the face, it was Trump who buckled.

The House and Senate have overwhelmingly approved their publication. Trump will sign the measure into law, just as he's finished schmoozing the Saudi Crown Prince, who's on an official visit this week.

Trump's defeat over the Epstein files is only the most visible of several recent setbacks when it comes to getting his way in the GOP.

He's been urging Republicans in Indiana to revisit their redistricting plans to give the Party additional seats in the House. But the Hoosier GOP knocked him back. So did Republicans in Kansas on the same issue.

Trump hasn't had much luck recently on Capitol Hill either. He lobbied the Senate to scrap its famous and long-standing filibuster rule, which allows a measure to be talked out if it can't muster at least 60 of the 100 votes in the Senate. But Republican grandees on the Hill weren't interested — they might need to deploy it themselves in years to come when Trump is long gone.

The MAGA base has also been discombobulated by Trump's support for H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers (true believers think America has all the skills it needs) and for the President's continued penchant for overseas adventures, from the Middle East to Venezuela, which they see as harking back to the neo-conservative days of George W Bush, who they despise.

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It's significant that, though Trump eventually turned on Greene over the Epstein files, she'd already started to part company with him over immigration and foreign policy. Fissures in the MAGA movement are beginning to emerge on a number fronts that have nothing to do with Epstein.

They're surfacing at a time when MAGA has developed a liking for knocking lumps out of each other rather than the Democrats. This used to be the preserve of the Left, which has always had a passion for splits over policy and personalities which has undermined its effectiveness.

MAGA is following suit, at least on its outer extremities. Ever since Charlie Kirk's appalling assassination, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, the evil Nick Fuentes, even Ben Shapiro and many others have sparked a MAGA internecine warfare in which bashing your own side takes precedence over attacking the other side.

This is doing MAGA no good. But then its most visible warriors don't necessarily have the interests of Trump or MAGA uppermost anyway.

They are the Masters of the Attention Economy and their business models depend on driving traffic to their various platforms and gobbling up rivals' market share.

If that's best done by beating up on your own side and staking out ever-more extreme positions, then so be it — and hang the consequences for MAGA Republicans. Bernie Sanders and AOC can only dream of doing such damage.

Trump, of course, should be knocking heads together and sending some of these tedious bloviators to the woodshed until they see sense. But so far he's shown no inclination to do so, even though anti-Semitism, white supremacy, misogyny and Nazi-loving are becoming part of MAGA far-right discourse.

There is no future in any of that for MAGA. Yet Trump hasn't even managed to muster a bad word about Fuentes.

There's another even more significant factor at work eating away at the Trump presidency.

At a time when public debate is often dominated by identity politics and culture wars, old-fashioned bread and butter issues have made a comeback — and not to Trump's benefit.

The President boasts about falling prices. But voters know that not to be true. Just as they rumbled Joe Biden when he claimed, wrongly, that inflation would only be transitory, so they now have the measure of Trump.

'Politicians can lie about all manner of matters and get away with it,' a senior White House official tells me. 'But not when it's about food prices or healthcare or anything people need to survive. They see the truth at the checkout counter, in rising rents and utility bills and in their healthcare premiums.'

'I don't want to hear about affordability,' said a frustrated Trump recently. But he needs to. In crucial elections earlier this month, whether it was their moderate candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey or a self-styled socialist mayoral candidate in New York, the Democrats won by campaigning on cost-of-living issues — and won big.

The cost of everyday staples is not falling. Rather, the more than 20 percent rise in grocery prices of the Biden years is now baked in — and they're still rising by almost three percent a year. Beef is up 14 percent since January, coffee 19 percent from last September, and a loaf of bread these days is often closer to $4 than $3.

Health insurance costs rose this year by six percent on average and are likely to rise even more in 2026 as subsidies are phased out. Home ownership is out of the reach of most young families — but rent rises are crippling.

All of this naturally affects those on average pay and below — which, of course, is the very heart of the Republican Party's MAGA base these days. It is a major reason why MAGA has become so fractious — and why Trump's approval ratings have slumped from 47 percent on Inauguration Day to 38 percent now.

The President might not be able to do much about MAGA's squabbling pontificators, who have their own self-serving agendas, or about what's in the Epstein files. But he needs to get a grip on the growing affordability crisis (dropping tariffs would at least be a start).

Otherwise, MAGA's prospects for next November's midterm elections look grim — and Trump will be a lame-duck president long before he needs to be.