Make America Squirm Again
For months, Donald Trump’s presidential path has been determined, both overtly and implicity, by his glaringly obvious desperation to quell the public appetite for transparency about “the Epstein files,” a grotesque treasure trove of documents which, as we already know, includes so many references or allusions to Trump’s long-term friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and so many indications of his deep knowledge and long association (however tangential) with the creepy activities of those two convicted serial sex offenders, that even the most shameless and truth-repellent man in American history has been unable to shake off the dread of the naked fullness of his involvement with those vermin being revealed at last for all the world, and especially for his sixty million cult members, to review in detail.
Suddenly today, in a social media post, after months of increasingly intense efforts by the administation and affiliated lackeys (e.g., House Leader Mike Johnson) to resist an impending House of Representatives vote on releasing those files, Trump declares, “I DON’T CARE!” In other words, he now claims he has no objection to the House vote on releasing these files.
The meaning of this last-minute hundred-and-eighty-degree turn from Trump: He knows he has lost this round, and there are many Republicans willing to vote against his will and in favor of releasing the files. That is, he sees that this vote, this week, is about to expose the beginning of the end of the most pernicious and virulent personality cult in American history, and so, in a final Hail Mary pass, Trump is trying to avert the one outcome he has feared the most all his life — having to stand alone, without the protective shield of a manipulable mass of weak-minded followers and fans — by giving in to the apparent House Republican juggernaut, pretending that he is suddenly on the side of releasing the Epstein files, so that he can argue after the fact that this vote, whatever its result, indicates no separation after all between himself and “his” party.
Right. That’s why he has been on a personal vendetta for months against Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman leading the movement to release the files, all the way up to this week’s gruesome social media assault on Massie (whose wife died last year) and his new wife, proving for the zillionth time that there is no low too low for this sociopathic empty shell.
That’s why Trump sent his former personal attorney and current Department of Justice official Todd Blanche to meet in person with a convicted sex trafficker, and why, after that meeting, that convicted sex trafficker was suddenly moved to a comfortable low-security prison to which convicted sex traffickers are never sent, where she is notoriously being given luxury treatment even by the standards of that facility.
That’s why Trump has fallen into a petty public catfight (Trump being the more stereotypically girlish of the two) with longtime congressional ally and defender Marjorie Taylor Greene, a catfight precipitated entirely by her support for Massie’s initiative to release the files.
That’s why he is known to have contacted friendly House members to personally discourage them from supporting the release of the files.
No no, he has nothing to hide, nothing to fear, no reason to oppose the release of these Epstein files. Of course not, nothing at all. Not, for example, the e-mails released last week in which Epstein, during Trump’s first presidential term, described offering information about Trump to Vladimir Putin’s top Kremlin henchmen. Not the e-mails in which Epstein and Maxwell discussed Trump’s knowledge of their underage sex trafficking ring. Not the possible existence — one can almost imagine him not lying awake at night at all over such a thing! — of video or photographic evidence even creepier than the well-known public images we have already seen showing the easygoing closeness of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, specifically in the context of enjoying the company of bevies of “young women.”
No, he is not concerned. As he says in his sudden quasi-endorsement of the House vote — the vote he already knows he is about to lose in a humiliating way — “All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”
Exactly. After all, it has been frustratingly, distractingly off point for the Republican Party, which has hitherto been so thoroughly in thrall before Trump’s authority, or more plausibly in terror of Trump’s brownshirt mobs, to suddenly be acting as if they have minds and wills of their own, and worst of all acting as if they might be doubting the ultimate defensibility of the lame duck reality-TV flim-flam man to whom they have all rented their souls these many shameful years. Imagine what might happen to the GOP if a healthy chunk of them actually relearned the virtue of independence, the meaning of elected representation, and the pleasure they likely all felt once or twice as children when they had the moral rectitude to act as their mothers would have wanted them to, rather than succumbing to the temptations or the bullying of the ne’er-do-wells in the schoolyard.
