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.
It’s weird and disturbing that the headline is probably true.
If the world made sense, it would be more than enough that he is, right now, moment-to-moment, obviously deeply mentally ill and wantonly destructive - a grotesquely corrupt pathological liar, vindictive narcissist, and raging sociopath who blatantly has done and is doing more harm to the US than any president at least in the modern era and quite possibly ever.
How has that not already been enough? I don’t think I’ll ever really understand that.