IT’S HARD TO imagine a worse moment for Donald Trump to be caught in the Epstein dragnet than at the tail end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, with food benefits rattled, “affordability” on everyone’s minds, and his own voters starting to wonder if the guy in the red tie is actually on their side.
On the same day Trump finally signed a bill to reopen the government after 43 days of chaos, a coalition of House Democrats and Republicans dropped a tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails that punches holes straight through the president’s carefully curated story about a distant, long-ago acquaintance, with Epstein alleging Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours at my house” with one of the victims.
While the messages don’t show criminal conduct by Trump, they landed at a moment when Americans are already furious with his handling of Epstein’s files, the shutdown, and the basic question of whether their government works for the powerful or for everyone else. Together, they form a pincer around a president who keeps promising transparency and law and order, then flinching the second those promises threaten him personally.
A lot of his most likely insane followers were the original Q Anon weirdos who were believing every word of the Hillary Clinton/ Pizzagate/ Child Sex trafficking nonsense that got way out of hand, and then Trump courted those people because he had no problem with their ridiculous bullshit. Game recognizes game.
But I’d been following Jeffrey Epstein for a long time, since before his first arrest, and knew of his connection with Trump, and wondered how long it would take before the bets went around the table enough times that eventually it would come time to call the bet and show his cards - and we have finally reached that moment, and suddenly he doesn’t want to show his cards.
We hung in this long, kicking into the pot on each round and raising, and now we’ve reached the end, and we want to see those cards.