Round Up the Usual Suspect

Wednesday morning, Democrats released three emails from Trump’s former best buddy, neighbor and secret sharer Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious pedophile. Predictably, this sent Republicans scurrying toward Mike Johnson’s Fortress of Ineptitude in the Land of I Don’t Know, and the president toward the Situation Room, where he could threaten GOP lawmakers without being recorded. The rest of us told our jokes and took to the shrugging couch.

Most news doesn’t arrive this old, or this expected. Donald Trump is the most “Oh, yeah, he did it” public official in American history. His pre-political career was based on robbing customers and contractors; he’s already a felon, he’s already an adjudicated rapist, and once a week he brags about a new set of people he’s murdered. What’s pedophilia to Trump’s legacy but the unpunched square on a major crimes card entitling him to a sandwich on Jared Fogle’s dime? The only surprises left will come when two institutionalized lies finally collide: The notion that we don’t know everything, and the fantasy that Donald Trump knows anything at all.

In their sedulous abandonment of the unspoken maxim that one should not print lies in the newspaper, the mainstream press has constructed a kind of Heisenberg presidency, whose characteristics change with the motives of the observer. The Trump taken at face value exists at the same time as the one dragging an Appalachian Trail’s worth of 30,000 first-term lies behind him. We as readers also possess a simultaneous superabundance of savvy and childish misunderstanding. With the Epstein story, these two sides are like a Möbius strip: It was ignorant to expect more Epstein coverage because we already knew everything. 

Although Trump-Epstein periodically flares up like herpes, it has never received the bombshell treatment of, say, “People who self-identify as fascists told us that Harvard’s Black president’s academic paraphrases of basic facts were plagiarism and we didn’t have time to check until after publishing 30 stories on it.” Or consider the torrent of 2024 reporting on Joe Biden’s senility and unsuitability for office compared to the treatment of Trump’s obvious mental degradation. The same election that saw Biden being an existential threat to American security saw an incident worth forgetting about within 48 hours when Trump stood on stage listening to music for over half an hour and looking like he was deep into his own monologue about how, yep, that’s him, and you’re probably wondering how he got here.

Trump’s brain was soup even when it was healthy. Now it’s like someone reduced a stock pot of Gowanus Canal water until it turned into disease gravy. Even if he weren’t regularly confused and enfeebled, he started out powered by a world historic ignorance. It has been clear for years now that Trump does not understand the concept of political asylum and thinks asylum seekers are people fleeing to the United States because the mental institutions back home closed. He doesn’t have the first understanding of how tariffs — his signature issue — function in any way, except as a corrupt extortion tool. He does not understand any aspect of the health care system and thinks devolving health care funding to individuals would save them money — a mortally comic example of misunderstanding economies of scale that anyone with a Costco card could explain to someone as thick as Michael Barbaro. Today’s $100 health care bill will be minus-$1,400 tomorrow. The body has a finite lifetime supply of energy. You need a photo ID to buy groceries. Only raking prevents forest fires. Windmills cause cancer. You erase a computer by pouring bleach on it. You cure infections by taking the UV light from your air conditioning duct and jamming it inside you and turning it on. The president also appears to think stealth aircraft are literally invisible.

Calling Trump a half-wit overstates the case by 1,500%, and yet he is still covered like a person who knows anything at all. The real Trump, evident to everyone at home since Day 1 — i.e. someone dumber than a sack of hair — makes only cursory media appearances, mostly in op-ed spaces, and is spared the simple trial of being measured by reality. 

He is instead depicted daily as the author of his own administration, despite every indication telling us that his staff are drawing up policy kill lists and waiting for the Big Man to get mad at something they already have a knife for.

On the other side of this relationship are us — the idiots — possessed of object permanence, a sense of linear time and an overweening fondness for consequences, who heard the Epstein saga as it unfolded and were able to figure out what two plus two adds up to. We listened to Trump say that his underage daughter forbade him to date girls younger than her. He was the same Trump who bragged about buying a beauty pageant and walking in on the underage girls changing. The same Trump so desperate to swaddle himself in every signifier of wealth, privilege and overindulgence that he absolutely sounds like someone who would rape children just for the exclusivity of it. The same Trump who was best friends with the extremely notorious pedophile with the pedophile island and “spent hours” in private with his victims, employed his victims and has already been accused of rape by his victims. 

There is the conventional wisdom of a punditocracy indifferent to the consequences of serial dishonesty and failure, and then there is the naïveté of the rest of us wallowing in our flyover squalor, forced to play the politics home game of connecting the dots. And, boy, but there are a lot more here to link than there were between Hillary’s emails and “???”; Bill talking to Loretta Lynch on the tarmac and “???”; and Hunter Biden trading on his name like everyone else and … ”???” It turns out adding a fog machine to a wisp of smoke doesn’t lead to a conflagration, but if you follow a black thread of it stretched across the sky, you’ll end up at a fire. 

The only surprise left is how fast the fabricated image of Trump — the polymath president with octopus-like control of his administration — is transformed into the dumbass he’s always been, and by whose hands. How could he know! He’s just a little guy! Someone must’ve taken advantage of this lifelong criminal. The Epstein story is for good now, barging its way into a permanent residency in the public imagination despite repeated efforts to depict it as ephemeral, a distraction — a provocative curio for a few days to be sure, but still on the order of something trivial, like the time the president’s brain shut off on stage and some Heritage Nazi with the aux cable rushed to play Andrea Bocelli on the PA again. The Epstein problem, long managed by make-believe, has run out of non-make-believe solutions. It can’t be drowned out, whistled past or danced away anymore. The only way this Trump isn’t guilty is if it was a different Trump all this time.