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.
I feel like even aside from turning Trump’s base against him, history should always remember the valuable lesson about the domino effect that can happen when you refuse to let shit go.
Think of the long trail of elite assholes who were thrown under the bus as a distraction/sacrifice in an attempt to kick the can further down the road. Unrelenting public scrutiny was directly responsible for a member of the royal family having his titles revoked. For something his family had already known about for decades and tried to ignore/hope eventually we would just let it go.