President Donald Trump lied to the press on Wednesday when he dismissed reporting that White House officials would join a secret meeting to discuss how to deal with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. As it turns out, the meeting did happen, MSNBC reported Thursday. It's likely because Trump is feeling "deeply betrayed" by his supporters who believed what he told them.

Writing on Thursday, The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire explained that Trump spent so much time "intimating during the campaign that something was nefarious about the government’s handling of the [Epstein] case."

Now, MAGA doesn't believe him when he claims that it was all "fake news."

He's done everything he can to try and distract from the matter, from implying his government could indict former President Barack Obama to claiming he's taking over Washington, D.C., he attacked Rosie O'Donnell, cut the Department of Education by 40%, bragged he was "saved by God," got into a fight over windmills with Scotland and Republicans, announced he was suing Fox and Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, and many many more. Nothing has worked.

"He—the president, their leader, the martyr who had endured scandals and prosecution and an assassin’s bullet on their behalf—had repeatedly told them it was time to move on, and that alone should suffice," wrote Lemire in July. "Why, he groused, would the White House add fuel to the fire, would it play into the media’s narrative?"

He recalled an interview with Steve Bannon "War Room" correspondent Natalie Winters, who told The New York Times that the Epstein case goes to the "very foundation of MAGA" because "it gets to the heart of who is in control of the country."

“I just think it’s frankly very grifty to have spent your entire career promoting, even if it weren’t the Epstein thing directly, but the idea that there is this deep state, the idea that there’s this unelected class of, you know, bankers, corporation, countries, intel agencies, blah, blah, blah,” she told the Times. "And then finally, you have the power to expose it, and either you’re not, because there’s nothing there, in which case it makes you a liar—and I don’t believe that—or you’re ineffective, or you’re compromised."

Lemire noted that Trump is even raging about MAGA influencers who he thinks used him to profit and get famous and now have abandoned him. Trump told one outside advisor that “disloyal” influencers “have forgotten whose name is above the door.”

Read the full report here.