Several people advised Nixon just to burn the Watergate tapes. Looking back after he left office, Nixon concluded that the “lesson of Watergate” is “burn the tapes.”
From the perspective of Mango Mussolini, the least bad alternative for him would be to have a bonfire on the White House lawn and burn all the Epstein files. It would be a terrible alternative for him, but it would nevertheless be the least bad alternative for him.
Right now, he’s just flailing—bleating random bullshit and throwing spaghetti at the wall.
More than two millennia ago, Chinese leaders discovered that, if barbarians want to engage in mutually destructive fights among themselves, the thing for China to do is to hold their beer and let them have at it.
Today, they are delighted to see us destroy ourselves.
After Trump moved to dismember the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which backed internationally oriented outlets such as Voice of America, Chinese state-made broadcasts took the place of U.S. programming on TV networks in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Nigeria. Trump, like a growing number of Republicans, viewed the media properties as suspicious fonts of “anti-American” liberalism. But Chinese propagandists exulted at the demise of these U.S.-funded news operations, which had, to varying extents, chronicled the state of pro-democracy movements around the world and provided space for dissident voices in countries where political freedoms are curtailed.
“The Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within,” cheered Hu Xijin, former chief editor of the Global Times, a Chinese state-run, English-language newspaper, this year on social media.
In a video circulating this month, Victor Gao, a former Chinese diplomat and vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, mused whether Trump may come to be remembered as an American Mikhail Gorbachev. The comparison to the late Soviet leader and famous author of glasnost and perestroika was not meant to be flattering: Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, Gao said, precipitated the collapse of the Soviet empire and unleashed a “trauma” still being felt today.
Gao suggested that by the end of the decade, Trump’s own attempt at reforms will have “fundamentally changed” both the United States and NATO, likely for the worse. Trump would not have made America “bigger, stronger, greater,” Gao said, but rather may have “led it astray, like Gorbachev.”
The fall of the Soviet Union isn’t the only historical parallel alive in Chinese discourse about the U.S. A host of Chinese commentators see in MAGA a whiff of China’s own Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, which saw myriad purges and the defenestration of ranks of the intellectual classes and political elites. “Mao unleashed the Red Guards to ‘smash’ the police, prosecutors, and courts, so that loyal revolutionaries could seize control of state machinery,” Zhang Qianfan, a constitutional law professor in Beijing, recently told CNN. “Trump brought Elon Musk and six young Silicon Valley executives into the White House under the banner of eliminating corruption, waste, and inefficiency — akin to the ‘Cultural Revolution Leadership Group’ entering the party’s central leadership.” …
Various “initiatives” promulgated by Xion development, security and cultural harmony have put forward a rosy Chinese vision of global cooperation and prosperity stripped of liberal ideals around universal rights and democracy. China’s position is gaining ground thanks to the shifts in Washington. “Beijing’s assessment right now is that the United States is dismantling, fairly systematically, the sources of its strength,” Julian Gewirtz, a China scholar and former Biden administration official, said in a recent interview.
“The United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,” Gewirtz told the Wire China. “It is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. China’s view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.”
The two news articles are from this afternoon. The Chait opinion piece is from this morning.
So, here’s my top list of things I’d like to know.
I’d like to see the whole 2003 Epstein birthday book. By the way, someone almost surely has the original. Who has it, how can we get it, whose messages does it contain, and what do the messages say? (And if, perchance, the original has been misplaced, there are bound to be copies of the book.)
There are said to be thousands of pages of investigative files. Do those thousands of pages enlighten us about who, if anyone, other than Jeffrey and Ghislaine were using the girls? And, were there blackmail materials on these other people, if there were other people? Was blackmail being paid, and, if so, by whom?
And was Trump among the customers, assuming there were any customers? (The FBI, we are told, has had a host of minions examine the files, marking references to Trump. What kind of work product did the minions produce? Just lists of references to specific documents and pages? Annotated lists? Memos? How can we get the work product, and what will we learn from it?)
In advance of knowing these things, I would like to know why, if Trump is not as guilty as homemade sin, why he is acting as if he were as guilty as homemade sin. Like a guilty thing surprised.
Jonathan Chait would like to know these things, too. He writes,
Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.
Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that.
The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after TheWall Street Journalreportedthat Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men’s friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. “I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal—an oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written “may every day be another wonderful secret” to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trump’s well-documented penchant for doodling.
On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is “fake news,” that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch’s ethics rather than his own.
Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadn’t) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent bipartisan Senate-committee investigation all concluded it had done).
Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama.
“I don’t really follow that too much,” he said of the Epstein matter. “It’s sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.” Trump has yet to specify why the “witch hunt” he’s been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new “witch hunt” he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address.
In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 presidential election. (“And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.”) You might think that this link would increase Trump’s curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time!
By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound moreworld-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump’s position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein’s crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Biden won the 2020 election (i.e., 100 percent real). …
Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.
I was writing this post in my head when the Wall Street Journal served up this treat today at dinner time.
Donald Trump is, and has been for a long time, a bully, a liar, a con man, and a sociopath. Now he is something else as well—a doddering old fool. Whatever coherence his ramblings once had is disappearing fast. That said, one can construct something out of his disjointed utterings.
When Trump says that Thing X is a “hoax,” he means that
Thing X actually occurred or is now occurring, and that
Public knowledge about Thing X would reflect very badly on him—worse even than public knowledge that he routinely grabbed adult women by their genitalia, and bragged about this behavior.
I won’t regurgitate the whole sordid business. But it seems clear beyond peradventure of doubt that Trump is in the voluminous Epstein investigatory files, and that he is drenched in flop sweat.
To address this predicament, Trump now wants everyone to believe that Epstein was not in fact a pedophile; that he should not have been prosecuted (during Trump’s first administration) because Epstein did nothing wrong; and—by implication—that Epstein’s lover and co-conspirator, now in jail, did nothing wrong either; and that these wrongful prosecutions were the result of evil Democrats, just like the January 6 prosecutions.
To this end, Trump will cast James Comey’s daughter and career federal prosecutor, Maureen Comey, as chief villainess in the purportedly unjust prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That’s why he fired her yesterday.
From Team Trump’s perspective, firing Ms. Comey was a very bad idea.
As a former corporate advisor, I always told people to be careful about firing unsatisfactory employees who had dirt on you.
Firing Ms. Comey is mistake number 796. She has dirt on Trump.
Meanwhile, In Late Evening Developments
Trump says he is suing the Wall Street Journal, and all its corporate uncles, cousins, and aunts, for publishing the Epstein birthday letter.
It is widely reported that MAGA influencers—trying to play both ends against the middle—are asserting that the WSJ story about the birthday letter is fake news.
And Trump says he’s ordered the Justice Department to go to court to seek public disclosure of grand jury materials relating to Epstein.
Facing MAGA 