Oh, THOSE Epstein Files? Trump Always Supported Release Of THOSE Epstein Files!
He's not mad. Don't put in the paper that he's mad.
Like a sulky child caving in and eating his broccoli while snarling at his mother that when he has kids, he’s not going to make them eat their broccoli, Donald Trump on Sunday night called on Congress to release all the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. (Which he does not actually need Congress to make happen if he wants that to happen so badly.)
Being Donald Trump, he made the announcement with a 270-word rant on Truth Social. He needed every one of those 270 words to tell everyone how little he even cares about the Epstein files that may reveal just how involved he was with the dead financier’s years-long scheme to pimp out underage girls to all his wealthy friends.
Really, he doesn’t care. Just look at how little he cares:
Flailing very powerfully, Mr. President. Flailing at levels no one has ever seen before.
The reversal comes after months of Trump and his allies dragging the whole crisis out in, we don’t know, the hope everyone would forget about it? The hope that the public would be so happy with the allegedly booming economy that it would lose interest? The hope that Jeffrey Epstein rises from the dead long enough to exonerate Trump? The hope that nuclear war breaks out and incinerates Washington, DC, one weekend when the president is in Mar-a-Lago eating an overcooked steak?
First, House Speaker Mike Johnson found increasingly ridiculous excuses, including keeping the House in recess for a full two months, to not swear in newly elected Democratic congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who provided the 218th vote on a discharge petition that would force Johnson to put releasing the files up to a full vote of the House.
Then the government shutdown ended, leaving Johnson with no choice but to bring the House back into session. Grijalva was immediately sworn in, and she made signing the petition her first official act. Trump needed a new trick.
He tried dragging Republican congresswoman and Beetlejuice superfan Lauren Boebert into the White House Situation Room, where various high-level government officials (Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Vice President JD Vance, among others) tried to strong-arm her into not signing. Boebert, who has been a very loud voice for releasing all Epstein files for a long time, refused.
Then Trump ordered Bondi to investigate Democrats who might have been involved with Epstein, presumably in the desperate hope that people will care more if Bill Clinton, who has been out of office for a quarter of a century, ever visited Pedophile Island. Bondi quickly agreed, because she’s a suck-up with zero self-respect, and assigned a bona fide US attorney to lead the investigation.
One problem with that line of attack, besides it being so transparent it makes plastic wrap look cloudy, is that the House Republicans had released 20,000 pages of Epstein emails that had come into their possession. Somewhere in those pages was an email from Epstein saying that Clinton had never visited his island. So that line of attack was out the window.
Then Trump spent the weekend trying to figure out his message. On Friday he ranted that Epstein is the “Democrat’s problem,” and the Democrats are just trying to distract from their “SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT” that had much of the party furious with the Senate at the beginning of the week. Because Democrats can’t be concerned with two issues at the same time, apparently.
Then, after a full weekend of golf and fuming at his dollar-store Xanadu in Florida, Trump made his “I’m not mad, I’m laughing” post calling on Congress to release the files, and here we are.
The reason for Trump’s sudden reversal is likely a pretty simple one: despite holding back their signatures from the discharge petition, a large majority of the Republican caucus in the House was set to join with the Democrats in voting yes on a bill authorizing the release of the files. If enough senators also voted for the release, there would be big enough majorities to override any Trump veto.
So in the end, Trump apparently figured he’d get out ahead of it. Of course, if he really wanted to get ahead of it, he would order Bondi and Patel to bypass Congress and release the files themselves. Maybe they need a little more time to scrub the files of all references to him, who knows.
Or possibly Trump was told that because Bondi has opened some sort of investigation into any Democrats who might have been buddies with Epstein, she might be able to hold the files back by claiming they are evidence in a possible crime. So it costs him nothing to call for their release now; his attorney general can say no, and he can throw up his tiny hands and say that he’s powerless to do anything.
He’s Trump, so he might still wriggle out of this jam. But boy, he has handled it about as badly as it could be handled. He spent years encouraging the dumbest members of the Republican coalition — otherwise known as the Republican coalition — in their outlandish conspiracy theories about gangs of elite pedophiles running child-fucking rings across the nation. QAnon? Maybe there was something to it! Maybe Democrats really were keeping children as sex slaves in a secret lair beneath a pizza restaurant!
Republicans like Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — who Trump now apparently hates partly because of her stance on releasing the Epstein files — rode that wave into office. Then once in office, they didn’t give up. Trump seems to have not seen this coming, which is no surprise. We suspect that Trump every year doesn’t see winter coming.
Bed made, go lie in it, etc. and so forth.
[AP]
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“Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive”
And that’s the fucking problem.
"Then, after a full weekend of golf..."
Scott Bessent needs to revise his snarky comment of two weeks ago about Barack Obama having been the President who played the most rounds of golf (over his 8 years as President), since Trump has eclipsed that record in just 4 years, 10 months.