“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein — this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time?”
President Trump at a White House press conference
Trump is normally far better at messaging than this.
I irritate readers sometimes by writing about how successful Trump is at manipulating the message. He throws up diversions. He turns accusations against himself into attacks on the accuser. He makes transparent lies. Yet he gets away with it because he seems so self-confident and insistent. He has a gift.
But I never understood what Trump was doing with the Jeffrey Epstein case, tweeting about it, encouraging his MAGA team to promise they would get to the bottom of it, implying that Democrats were the ones in trouble here. I thought he was playing with fire, a fire that was too close to home. There are real photos of Trump and Epstein together, and video of Trump looking lustily at young women at an Epstein party. There is Trump's reputation. There are witnesses, and vivid, mentally-sticky public statements from young women. A woman, then 13, says she gave a hand job to Trump at an Epstein party. She used a glove, having been instructed that "No one touches Mr. Trump's penis without wrapping it up."
With all that out there, it would have been smart for Trump to have stayed far, far away from the Epstein mess, but the conspiracy, if it could be laid onto Democrats, was too tantalizing to avoid. There is a conspiracy cabal within MAGA drawn to the idea that rich and powerful people -- Democrats or Republican opponents of Trump -- are evil and nasty. Trump stoked those fires.
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| See! We have Epstein files ready to show! |
Now it is blowing up in his face. The worst way in the world to get people to move on from a deliciously evil story of rich men and young women in private jets and hide-away islands is to tell people not, not, not to bother looking into it.
Trump and his top campaign spent years assuring people that they would get the goods, that they had the goods including huge hoards of videotapes and photos, and then -- wait for it -- the big reveal is coming! -- it's on the attorney general's desk! --Never mind. Zero. Nothing to see here.
Well, that is a letdown.
Nothing? That doesn't sound right. There must be something really, really awful in those file after all that build up. Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for something. Right?
You don't have to be a Trump-hater or a conspiracy kook to think this looks suspicious. It looks like a cover-up. It looks like Trump has something to hide.
So Trump is scrambling, and there is a desperate quality to it. His long Truth Social post yesterday begins with an appeal to the team to do this for the Gipper, to go with loyalty to the MAGA team, not truth and transparency.
What's going on with my "boys" and, in some cases, "gals?" They're all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We're on one Team, MAGA, and I don't like what's happening. . . ."
He goes on to blame the files -- files that aren't there -- on Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan and Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration. He doesn't have his story straight. Democratic files, fake files or no files?
Trump did a good job selling a tawdry product: the idea that Epstein was in some dark conspiratorial way tangled up with Trump's enemies. There was a big audience for that. But now even people in the center of the MAGA world are asking what the heck happened. This is too weird to be true. What's the real story? They are demanding answers.[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com/ Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]
5 comments:
Let’s see… Trump is a rapist and has sexual relations with 13 year olds along with a very long list of despicable behaviors. At some point people who profess to be moral will reject him, right?
What’s odd is that Trump didn’t bluster like this about Epstein when the Epstein materials were in the hands of Joe Biden’s Justice Department, which surely would have employed anything incriminating against Trump.
That leaves either it truly being a nothingburger after all, and Trump childishly resenting the distraction, or a coverup by bipartisan consensus, which would require the domestic and/or international stakes to be very high indeed.
"You can fool all of the people some of the time, some people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time."
The current Occupant should know better than to over promise and under deliver, even to his cult.
Maybe I missed it, but was there an official MAGA investigation of "pizzagate"?
This could be the start of a big fall-out against Trump. FBI Asst. Director Dan Bongino is threatening to quit if Pam Bondi stays. Someone is going to bite the dust. Trump's MAGA followers aren't blindly following Trump on this issue. They want to see the lurid details of the Epstein investigation with names. Trump's party is over.
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