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The Epstein files
President Trump has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the results of the FBI investigation into his buddy Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking being released to the public, after promising his supporters for years that they would all be released and the prominent Democrats named therein would finally face their comeuppance. The obvious conclusion is that there's something really bad in there about him personally, and perhaps not much about prominent Democrats.
It's hard to imagine what could be in the Epstein files about Trump that's more scandalous than what we already know about his sex life: posing as his own assistant to "leak" stories about his prodigious sex drive, cheating widely, repeatedly, and publicly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to a hooker he was screwing while his wife was home with the newborn, musing publicly about dating his daughter, routinely dismissing women he dislikes as "fat", "ugly", or "Miss Piggy", walking in on half-dressed underage beauty contestants, raping a journalist, "grabbing them by the pussy", and I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch of things. Even if the investigation turned up something that would cost him a few percentage points of support with his loyal base, he no longer needs his loyal base to win elections: either he won't run again, or he will run again with no doubt about the outcome. And if there are crimes attributable to him, they're almost certainly past the statute of limitations.
But we're unlikely to see the full FBI files on Epstein while Trump is in office. Even with both houses of Congress demanding the full release of the files, by veto-proof majorities, he has a legitimate excuse for keeping them from the public as long as there's a criminal investigation underway in which they could be used as evidence -- and Pam Bondi obediently announced such an investigation a few days ago. That criminal investigation can go on as long as Trump and Bondi want it to.
And if we do see "the full FBI files on Epstein", and they actually are complete, it'll be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of mostly-boring stuff, which journalists (and self-appointed journalists) will have to comb through to find what's actually important and/or damaging to him (or other prominent people). For the vast majority of people who don't want to spend a good portion of their lives reading through this dreadful stuff, the files will be spun (as the much-shorter Mueller Report was) as "completely exonerating the President", and a good fraction of the American people will believe that. They may even be right: it may actually be a gigantic nothing-burger. And Trump will still be a senile, sadistic, mind-bogglingly corrupt, would-be dictator who's squandered and destroyed a century's worth of national progress in a few years.
It's hard to imagine what could be in the Epstein files about Trump that's more scandalous than what we already know about his sex life: posing as his own assistant to "leak" stories about his prodigious sex drive, cheating widely, repeatedly, and publicly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to a hooker he was screwing while his wife was home with the newborn, musing publicly about dating his daughter, routinely dismissing women he dislikes as "fat", "ugly", or "Miss Piggy", walking in on half-dressed underage beauty contestants, raping a journalist, "grabbing them by the pussy", and I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch of things. Even if the investigation turned up something that would cost him a few percentage points of support with his loyal base, he no longer needs his loyal base to win elections: either he won't run again, or he will run again with no doubt about the outcome. And if there are crimes attributable to him, they're almost certainly past the statute of limitations.
But we're unlikely to see the full FBI files on Epstein while Trump is in office. Even with both houses of Congress demanding the full release of the files, by veto-proof majorities, he has a legitimate excuse for keeping them from the public as long as there's a criminal investigation underway in which they could be used as evidence -- and Pam Bondi obediently announced such an investigation a few days ago. That criminal investigation can go on as long as Trump and Bondi want it to.
And if we do see "the full FBI files on Epstein", and they actually are complete, it'll be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of mostly-boring stuff, which journalists (and self-appointed journalists) will have to comb through to find what's actually important and/or damaging to him (or other prominent people). For the vast majority of people who don't want to spend a good portion of their lives reading through this dreadful stuff, the files will be spun (as the much-shorter Mueller Report was) as "completely exonerating the President", and a good fraction of the American people will believe that. They may even be right: it may actually be a gigantic nothing-burger. And Trump will still be a senile, sadistic, mind-bogglingly corrupt, would-be dictator who's squandered and destroyed a century's worth of national progress in a few years.
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I agree. And I think Trump flipped from opposing it to demanding it because he knows it can't hurt him but a lot of time will be wasted looking for things involving Democrats, which he will weaponize sans context knowing that even journalists, let alone regular citizens, won't do the work to dig through the whole mountain of stuff.