Donald Trump and maga Republicans must be reminded about how January 6th 2020 was treason

Echo essay reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Donald Trump's Indecency: At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. 

The gallows was erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” 

All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House, to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. 

Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys —believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys🤢 movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive (Oh no, no is not at all repetitive, it is first person reporting from the scene and must be told again). But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew. 😢

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

President Barack Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. 

Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going❗

Donald Trump and the ghost of "will not die" Jeffrey Epstein files

On July 26, 2025, Donald Trump played a round of golf at his own Turnberry course in Scotland. 

Echo opinion by Fintan O'Toole published in The New York Review of Books: A Guy Who Never Dies

Over footage of the event from Sky News, we hear a reporter shouting, “Mr. Trump, can you escape the Jeffrey Epstein crisis?” At that point in the clip, the volume surges on the song Trump’s large entourage is blasting: “Memory” from the musical Cats. The tinny playback of the singer’s voice envelops Trump as he gets back in his golf cart and drives away: “It’s so easy to leave me/All alone with the memory/Of my days in the sun.”

Trump does not look like he’s enjoying the memory of the days when he and Epstein were close friends. But, Donald Trump's staff know this song is an aural comfort blanket for their boss. 

In her memoir, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham writes that “when he was in a bad mood or a scary rage, we’d send for a staffer he referred to as ‘the Music Man.’” This aide would switch on “Trump's favorite songs—‘Memory’ from Cats, the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ and others—and the staffer would go in and play the music to distract or calm him down. It was sort of like soothing the savage beast.”

What is it about “the Jeffrey Epstein crisis” that triggered the urgent need for this auditory pacifier? Ten days before the Turnberry incident, Trump uncharacteristically vented his scary rage on those of his loyal fans who were demanding the release of all official files on Epstein, ranting on Truth Social:

My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will…. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Trump does not normally disavow support from anyone, however vile or extreme. For him to consign a large body of the MAGA base to a PAST (when presumably he and they knew what happiness was) suggests that something about the Epstein story gets under Trump’s very thick skin. It places him, for the first time in his astonishing political career, at the center of a cognitive maze from which he can see no exit.

For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. 

Jeffrey Epstein''s ghost: The Trumpian conspiracy that will not die

It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control.

Paranoia persists through every era of the history of the American republic. We can, for example, recall President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1961 of the far-right fringes of the Republican party: “They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water.”

He could be talking about Trump-world. But not exactly. For not all conspiracy theories work the same way. They can take one of two distinct shapes. The first is a false “explanation” for real events. This is what Kennedy was referring to in 1961:

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks. War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers. Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British, or tricked by the French, or deceived by the Russians. It was not the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe that drove it to communism, it was the sellout at Yalta. It was not a civil war that removed China from the Free World, it was treason in high places.

This is the classic form of the conspiracy theory. There is a genuine and undisputed fact—China going communist, a financial crisis, a military defeat, fluoride in the water, wildfires devouring the land. What is hidden is the surreptitious motive force: Communists, Freemasons, Jews, Jewish Communists, Jewish space lasers.

Yet Trumpian paranoia doesn’t quite take this form. Conspiracy theories are crucial to Trump’s appeal, but his are indifferent to the reality or otherwise of the phenomena they seek to explain. 

Trump's made up conspiracies may relate to external facts. Immigration happened because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris connived to bring “more than 20 million criminals into the country.” An apparently sluggish economy is an illusion created by a “rigged” set of official job creation figures. They can also be pure fabrications: Barack Obama was not born in America. Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of JFK. (“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot…. I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death❓”) 

Hillary Clinton was involved in an “unthinkable plot” to rig the 2016, presidential election by linking Trump to interference by Russia. To adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Trump’s “imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown,…/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Unlike the first, more basic kind of conspiracy theory, Trump’s version does not rely on agreed-upon public facts to generate emotions—fear, distrust, anger. As a federal judge put it in 2023 while dismissing Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others in relation to their alleged plot, the suit was “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” “Immaterial events” is an apt phrase: in Trump’s conspiracy theories, there is no genuine surface to go behind. Both the “event” and its “explanation” are cut from whole cloth.

Yet this tactic has of course been spectacularly successful—it has helped Trump to become a two-time president. It works because, being pure invention, it does not need to concern itself with mere evidence. These conspiracies float in the Trumpian universe of alternative facts—otherwise known as fictions. They are part of the never-ending show in which Trump demands of his fans not belief in the veracity of his claims but rather suspension of disbelief. What matters is those emotions of dread and antagonism, and Trump has always understood that lurid fictions are the most effective in provoking them. It is striking, indeed, that when Trump had to provide alleged facts to support his most important conspiracy theory—the stealing of his victory in the 2020, presidential election—he was risibly helpless. He pursued over sixty law cases and all of them were thrown out (some by judges he himself had appointed) or withdrawn because he could not present the courts with anything other than outlandish concoctions.

For the most part, though, Trump has been able to operate in that world of immaterial events. He has been greatly assisted by the potency within his base of a conspiracy theory that is even further removed from the idea of evidence: QAnon. It is not his creation but it overlaps with his own conspiratorial strategies. It has the same free-floating freedom from any agreed reality, the same fictive exuberance.

QAnon, like Trump himself, is a comic provocation that became an American truth. As James Ball showed in his excellent The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, it took off from the hacking by Russian intelligence and subsequent publication of a trove of e-mail archives belonging to Clinton’s adviser John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. The Podesta e-mails were disappointingly dull—they disclosed no crimes or conspiracies. But, as Ball explains, they served as the template for a word game played on the Internet forum 4chan:

Whether as a joke, a troll or some sort of political act, a few 4chan users jumped on the Podesta emails and decided to try to stoke up some interest in them. 

One technique worked beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone involved. A group of users decided that the seemingly innocuous emails were in fact a code. “Hotdog,” they decided, meant “boy.” “Pizza” meant “girl.” “Cheese” meant “little girl,” while “ice cream” meant “male prostitute.” The seemingly innocuous Podesta email cache in reality contained proof of a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by key aides of Hillary Clinton—and they had cracked the code used to discuss their crimes.

By 2020, fewer than half of Americans polled by Ipsos for NPR definitively rejected the proposition that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” with 37 percent unsure and 17 percent in agreement. In 2022, Trump semaphored his endorsement of QAnon by reposting an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin bearing the words “The Storm is Coming.” (In QAnon’s arcane lexicon the “storm” is Trump’s version of the Last Judgment, when his satanic opponents will be tried, and perhaps executed, live on television.)

QAnon, like Trump’s own conspiracy theories, is a solution without a problem, a signifier without a signified. It recycles preexisting paranoid tropes: the antisemitic myth of Jews preying on Christian children (one of QAnon’s most visible early influencers ranted about the “synagogue of Satan”); the threat of witches in league with the devil; the promise of an omnipotent messiah (in this case Trump himself) who will vanquish the evildoers and instigate a new order. It also offers a more specific flight from contemporary reality: it is hard not to see the popularity of QAnon among conservative Christians as a displacement of the anxiety generated by the revelation of widespread child abuse by evangelical church leaders and Catholic priests. (One study found that in 2016, and 2017, when QAnon was taking off, there were “192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography.”) The rerouting of these horrors onto a cabal of senior Democrats is a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance generated by the betrayals.

Trump could exploit QAnon because it functions in the way his own conspiracy theories do—in the absence of any agreed reality beyond itself. But only up to a point. That point has a local habitation and a name: Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the portal through which, as Ball puts it, “The real world provided a tantalizing way into the madness of QAnon.” And also the other way around: the Epstein case gave QAnon’s believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man with very close connections to business and political elites.

And there really are, as the investigative journalist Barry Levine recently noted in The New York Times, unanswered questions about Epstein’s ability to prey on children for so long with such impunity. How did he amass an estimated $600 million? How was he able to traffic girls and women into the US from Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan without apparent interference from the immigration authorities? Why was Alex Acosta—who as the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida gave Epstein an extraordinary lenient plea deal—told, as he later claimed, that “Mr. Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”? What is contained on the forty computer and electronic devices, twenty-six storage drives, more than seventy CDs, and six recording devices gathered by the FBI from Epstein’s properties?

And what exactly do all of these records say about Epstein’s close friendship over almost fifteen years with Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his pal was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”? In her book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who did the most to expose the Epstein scandal, recounts claims made in a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims:

Once, Epstein took the girl to Mar-a-Lago, where he introduced her to Donald Trump. She was fourteen at the time and recalls that upon meeting Trump, Epstein elbowed him and said: “This is a good one, right?” Trump smiled and nodded in agreement, the suit says.

Brown also writes that “in early 2016, an anonymous woman filed a civil complaint in federal court in California, under the pseudonym ‘Katie Johnson.’ She alleged that she was sexually abused and raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period from June to September 1994.”

Such allegations may well be untrue, and of course Trump denies any knowledge of, much less involvement in, Epstein’s crimes. At the time of the Katie Johnson lawsuit Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told the Miami Herald that its claims were “unequivocally false.” (A federal judge dismissed the first Johnson suit in May 2016; two subsequent suits were withdrawn.) Brown notes that “there has never been any evidence that [Trump] had inappropriate sexual relations with minors.” 

Many people have many reasons to want to smear him by association with Epstein, and it is important not to fall into the trap of believing allegations because they chime with established preconceptions.

Trump’s difficulty with the QAnon-influenced section of his base, however, is that people whose preconceptions include the existence of a massive conspiracy of elite pedophile satanists are not well trained in the habits of skepticism. And for a time, rather than telling them to forget all about it, Trump encouraged those people to double down on their belief in a massive Epstein-related conspiracy. In August 2019, after Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, Trump retweeted a post: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! How does that happen #JefferyEpstein (sic) had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”

When he retweeted that post Trump clearly felt that Epstein really was safely dead and that questions about their long friendship had died with him. But in reality he was breathing life into Epstein’s corpse. To suggest that Epstein was murdered to silence him is to give him a vigorous afterlife of proliferating mysteries. In his current rage at the resurrection of this unfinished story, Trump railed against those who, instead of basking in the glory of his administration, keep talking about “a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” This is a strange echo of one of the celebrity tributes received by Epstein on his sixty-third birthday in 2016 and recently published by The New York Times. Woody Allen compared the sumptuous dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to those hosted in Castle Dracula, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place,” and suggested, about Epstein, that “one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach—as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances.” The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.

Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs.

It is the hybrid nature of the Epstein conspiracy theory—part rational demand for answers to legitimate public concerns, part QAnon fever dream—that stymies Trump’s response. It generates within the MAGA base what C. Wright Mills once called (in a very different context) crackpot realism, the belief that mad questions (in this case the truth about the satanic pedophile cabal) can be answered by sensible means (reading the trove of documents and examining the recordings that constitute the Epstein files). The word puzzle that began with the substitution of “pizza” with “girl” will be solved by poring over and teasing out the true meaning of millions of other words—if only Trump would do what the Russians did with the Podesta e-mails and set them free.

This naive faith is the other side of the American paranoid imagination. Even while it conjures the vast potency of the conspirators, it also takes it for granted that, inside the archives of the deep state, they have carefully preserved detailed proof of their plots to assassinate JFK, hide the visitations of aliens, and enable the satanic child abusers. Crackpot realism has a strange trust in the bureaucracy. In it, that most dully bureaucratic of words—files—becomes a magic elixir of truth.

Trump’s great tactical mistake in the Epstein story was to keep playing into this belief. In September 2024, in an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman, he went along with the suggestion that he would release the Epstein files alongside those relating to JFK’s assassination: “Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera, so Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing but I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

He ought to have known that, because of QAnon, anticipation of the release of the Epstein files is akin more to a millenarian religious fervor than to a documentary investigation. As Ball puts it, Trump serves in the QAnon worldview as “the genius mastermind orchestrating an equally complicated counter-movement” against the satanic cabal. The Epstein files are not just records of a criminal investigation, they are an updating of the Book of Revelation. To reveal them is to open the Seventh Seal and release God’s judgment onto the earth. How can the savior simply shrug and murmur that there is no seventh seal? It says a great deal about contemporary America that Trump’s breach of faith with this apocalyptic narrative is, for much of his political base, a far bigger betrayal than taking away its health care or failing to bring down food prices.

How could Trump find a way out of this maze? There are two threads he is trying to follow. One is to offer his base a substitute conspiracy theory: the whole Epstein story is a fiction, just another malicious invention. “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats…. It’s all been a hoax.” In this he is trying to switch the story from the first kind of conspiracy theory (the one with an objective correlative in real public events) to the second kind (his own practice of positing a conspiracy with no real-world referent). He is hoping to shift Epstein from the kind of ground where he loses his bearings onto the terrain where he feels more comfortable.

But this can’t work. Epstein can’t be turned into a product of the Democrats’ evil imagination because he is every bit as real for the MAGA people as he is for woke liberals. Perhaps, indeed, even more so: he is the tangible substance that gives credibility to their darkest visions of how the world works. In thinking that he can simply order his supporters to convert this substance into a mere shadow thrown by Democratic conspirators, he is succumbing to the dictator’s delusion that he can exert complete control over the thoughts of his subjects.

The second escape route is to offer Epstein’s consort and pander Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022, a pardon. In return, she would testify that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes and incriminate Democrats instead. The difficulty with this strategy is twofold. First, once pardoned, Maxwell would be free to say whatever she liked. Second, among the crimes for which she was sentenced was, literally, conspiracy. Using a conspirator to reassure the conspiracy-minded that there was no conspiracy that could possibly involve Trump does not seem like a winning stratagem.

On August 5 the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for several witnesses to appear at planning hearings into Epstein’s crimes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he also served the Justice Department a subpoena demanding that it produce its Epstein-related files by August 19. If Trump orders the department not to comply, he becomes part of the great conspiracy. This would become a satisfyingly shocking twist in this paranoid story: the good guy was actually the archvillain all along. If he allows it to comply, he feeds the beast he is trying to kill. We know that the release of documents never stops the search for the ultimate exposure of the plot. It gives the searchers a vast new terrain of clues and anomalies to explore, a giant new web of connections to map. And if Trump tries a middle course, releasing the documents with references to himself redacted, he merely proves that he has something to hide.

Will this bring him down? Almost certainly not. But it may deprive him of his greatest asset: his immunity from scandal. It is a force field that, once breached, ceases to function. If he loses his power to decree that all evidence of his misdeeds is a hoax, the rest of his term will be soundtracked not by the sweet melancholy of “Memory” but by the more agonized strains of “Suspicious Minds.”

Donald Trump is obviously in melt down mode about the disappearing Epstein Files.- "he doth protest too much" said Shakespeare

Finally❗ A report about the hideous Epstein files in a coherent excellent analysis by Heather Cox Richardson!  Recommend for everyone to follow her superb commentaries on Substack. 

Attorney General 3-D printer Pam Bondi somehow made the Epstein files on her desk disappear❗

An extraordinary rift in MAGA world.

Letter from an American by Heather Cox Richardson

The conflict began last Monday when the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a memo saying that it had conducted a thorough review of all the evidence the department had collected about convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, who died in his prison cell in 2019 awaiting trial on additional sex-trafficking charges. The memo said that the department’s “systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list’” and that there was “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” It said the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which operates within the DOJ, had determined “that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

The memo also said FBI investigators had concluded that Epstein died by suicide, releasing footage from a camera from the unit in which Epstein was being held at the time of his death.

For years now, Trump and his loyalists have claimed Epstein was murdered to protect the rich and powerful men who were preying on children. This theory dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory that Trump was combating a secret ring of cannibalistic child molesters who included Democratic politicians, government officials, film stars, and businessmen. MAGA influencers, including Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, pushed the Epstein theories, and MAGA followers believed them, hoping to bring down Democratic politicians like the Clintons.

Once in power, they vowed, they would release the client list and provide the truth about Epstein’s death. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi told the Fox News Channel that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now.” Patel is now director of the FBI—in part because MAGA senators like Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) believed he would release more information on Epstein and child sex trafficking rings—and Bongino is the FBI’s deputy director. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called for Americans to vote for Trump in 2024, because “Americans deserve to know why Epstein didn’t kill himself.”

The announcement that the DOJ would not provide further information and that Epstein had died by suicide set off a firestorm among MAGA. Far-right influencer Jack Posobiec wrote: “We were all told more was coming. That answers were out there and would be provided.”

When a reporter asked about Epstein during a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, Trump responded: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.”

Trump’s attempt to turn attention away from the story only drew attention to it. While MAGA focused on the idea that the people on an Epstein client list would be Democrats, in fact the person most closely associated with Epstein in popular culture was Trump himself. The two men were photographed and filmed together a number of times. In 2002, according to New York magazine, Trump said: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy…. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

On June 5, after a falling-out with Trump, billionaire Elon Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” He followed that post up with another saying: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.” He later deleted the posts and said they had gone too far.

After Trump tried to downplay the story last week, it gained momentum. MAGA influencers began to call for Bondi to be fired, and Bongino began to talk of resigning from the FBI over Bondi’s memo and handling of the issue.

Then, at 5:21 Saturday evening, Eastern Daylight Time, Trump posted a long, incoherent screed on social media. In it, he defended Attorney General Pam Bondi—who is, of course, doing his bidding concerning the files—and tried to bring MAGA together again, warning that “selfish people” were trying to hurt his “PERFECT administration” by focusing on Epstein. In apparent contradiction to the story Bondi had told, he suggested the Epstein files existed, but then nonsensically said they were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files,” he wrote.

“No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY,” Trump wrote.

Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and the Epstein magic show❗

“The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB—SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024—That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more.

“One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

For the first time ever, Trump got ratioed on his own platform, meaning that there were more comments on his post than likes or shares, showing disapproval of his message. According to Jordan King of Newsweek, by 10:45 this morning (Eastern Time) it had more than 36,000 replies but only 11,000 reposts and 32,000 likes.

Trump sounds panicked, not only over the Epstein issue itself, but also because he cannot control the narrative his followers are embracing. After stoking the fire of his followers’ anger against what they seemed to see as powerful men getting away with crimes against children, he is now being burned by it. His reflex is to return to his greatest hits, accusing Democrats of writing the Epstein files and then, as he always, always, always does, snapping back to the Russia scandal and calling it a hoax.

Over the weekend, attendees at a conference held by the right-wing Turning Point USA booed the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case. MAGA influencers kept up the drumbeat; Matt Walsh called the administration’s about-face on releasing information “obvious bullsh*t.” Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported that even the Fox News Channel warned this morning that “[t]here has to be some explanation” and that questions about the way the administration is handling the Epstein files were “very valid.”

Musk, who controls the X/ social media platform preferred by the right wing, is amplifying the story. After Trump’s Saturday post, Musk wrote to his 222 million followers: “Seriously. He said ‘Epstein’ half a dozen times while telling everyone to stop talking about Epstein. Just release the files as promised.”

Trump appears to be planning to regain control of the narrative by persecuting his political opponents.

But it is not clear that will silence MAGA voters who backed Trump in part because they thought he would lead the fight against an elite group of pedophiles controlling the country. As Trump’s policies on the economy, immigration, tax cuts, firing of government employees, and gutting of disaster relief have soured Americans on his administration, loyalists stayed behind him. Now he has turned against their chief cause, giving them an off-ramp from a presidency that seems increasingly off the rails.

Mike Flynn, who served as Trump’s first national security advisor until forced to resign for lying about his contact with Russian operatives, posted on social media: “[President Trump] please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away. If the administration doesn’t address the massive number of unanswered questions about Epstein, especially the ABUSE OF CHILDREN BY ELITES (it is very clear that abuse occurred), then moving forward on so many other monumental challenges our nation is facing becomes much harder.”

Flynn concluded: “We cannot allow pedophiles to get away. I don’t personally care who they are or what elite or powerful position they hold. They must be exposed and held accountable!!!”
—
Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline

Haley Chi-Sing, “Bondi says Epstein client list ‘sitting on my desk right now,’ and is reviewing JFK, MLK files,” Fox News, February 21, 2025.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-jeffrey-epstein-question-this-creep/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-puts-bomb-thrower-dan-bongino-on-blast-for-epstein-files-meltdown/

Emma Colton, “DOJ brass vowed full transparency on Epstein before turning up empty-handed,” Fox News, July 13, 2025.
The Bulwark
Case Closed on Epstein? Not So Fast
A HOST OF NERVOUS INDIVIDUALS—including President Donald J. Trump—must have breathed a sigh of relief over the weekend when the Department of Justice announced that “no fu…
Read more
3 days ago · 389 likes · Philip Rotner

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/6/what-has-musk-accused-trump-of-in-relation-to-the-epstein-files

Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, July 12, 2025, 5:21 p.m.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein-truth-social-post-pam-bondi-2098351

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/7/epstein-no-client-list-died-suicide-justice-department-says

https://newsletters.democracydocket.com/trumps-epstein-problem
The Bulwark
The Case for Epstein Trutherism
1. The Lost City of E…
Read more
5 days ago · 707 likes · 544 comments · Jonathan V. Last

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/12/turning-point-usa-conference-concerns-trump/

https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-breaks-silence-on-donald-trumps-epstein-file-demand/

https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/14/politics/michael-flynn-resigns-timeline

X:

elonmusk/status/1944239510604460045

GenFlynn/status/1944214943198286033

Bluesky:

did:plc:4lx6nur5wstwoc4wtgj56kyu/post/3lturenqtlc2c

marcelias.bsky.social/post/3ltscrpm4js24

thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3ltvbqkutuc26

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Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has a lot of explaining to do for her constituents

About the time Congresswoman Stefanik is criticized by national and her own home state media, he has a lot of explaining to do.😮😬

Elise Stefanik ambitiously wants to be the former guy's choice to run (reported in the The Washington Post)...as vice-president❓ Obviously, Stefanik never learned Mother Lesson 101:  Beware who you choose for friends, because they will define you.

Rep. Elise Stefanik is obsessed with former guy Trump

An opinion published in the Albany, New York newspaper Times Union: No doubt U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York District 21 Schuylerville is basking in the outrageous national outrage over her use of the word “hostages” to express her wrong minded sympathy — even solidarity — with the hundreds of seditionists, police assailants, vandals and other thugs convicted in the January 6, 2021, attack on our democracy. Provoking outrage to generate attention is, of course, the MAGA modus operandi.

January 6th convicted sedition rioter the QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley

But this is not just the usual hyperbolic blather from another sycophant of Donald Trump. And Americans shrug off such rhetoric at our nation’s peril.

This offense — a perversion of the very meaning of the word “hostage” — is not some mere bit of demagoguery. It’s part of a broad and relentless assault on the foundations of our republic by Mr. Trump and his loyalists.

There was Ms. Stefanik on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, echoing Mr. Trump’s depiction of the Jan. 6 mob as “hostages,” even as she equivocated by insisting she condemns violence. She’s still using the incendiary rhetoric — the big lie that the 2020, presidential election was stolen from Mr. Trump — that incited that violence.

To call the January 6th insurrectionists “hostages” is to turn the word on its head. It demeans and diminishes the plight of the very real hostages being held around the world. The terrorist organization Hamas still holds an estimated 120 of the more than 230 Israelis and other foreign nationals it kidnapped in the brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Russia is said to have taken at least 20,000 Ukrainian children captive in its invasion of Ukraine, though some estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. Russian President Vladimir Putin wantonly imprisons political rivals and critics of his war, and even foreign journalists such as Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal. Russia and other repressive regimes like Iran and North Korea have held Americans and other foreigners hostage on minor or trumped-up charges as propaganda tools or pawns in foreign policy.

The January 6th rioters aren’t unwitting, innocent victims of a terrorist organization or a rogue regime. They’re criminals who attacked the heart of our republic, the Capitol in which the representatives of the people had gathered to affirm the results of a free and fair election, the very foundation of our representative democracy. They sought to overturn the results of the 2020, election — which President Joe Biden won decisively by more than 7 million votes — and to reinstall Donald Trump as president instead.

Of the more than 1,230 people charged with federal crimes for their role in that attack, about 730 have pleaded guilty and roughly 170 were convicted at trial, according to The Associated Press. 

Two suspects were acquitted. Some of the leaders of armed, violent anti-government groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump, drew long sentences of up to 22 years in prison. Others with lesser involvement were sentenced to terms of months or even days.

It’s worth noting that, according to The Washington Post, the majority of punishments — 67 percent — were below federal sentencing guidelines.

Yet here comes Mr. Trump, calling these thugs “hostages,” and suggesting that he’ll pardon them if he’s elected president. There’s Ms. Stefanik right behind him, parroting his corruption of the word and recklessly speculating that these people have been treated unfairly.

Who is it, we wonder, that Mr. Trump and Ms. Stefanik so sympathize with? Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, perhaps, who drew the longest sentence, whom Judge Amit P. Mehta called “an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the republic and the very fabric of our democracy”? Or Christopher Worrell, who was convicted of using pepper spray gel on police officers? Or Jonathan Pollock, who has been on the run for months, accused of punching police officers, pulling one down a set of steps and attacking another with a riot shield? Or Danny Rodriguez, who drove a stun gun into a police officer’s neck? Or Thomas Webster — a retired New York Police Department officer — who used a metal flagpole to assault an officer defending the Capitol that day?

It doesn’t take a mind reader to know that Ms. Stefanik’s concern isn’t on the conviction of these criminals, but on her own political fortunes, which she has chosen to bond with her obsession for Mr. Trump’s.

Donald Trump tells American who he is. A Putin supporter who should expatriate to Russia!

Shame on University of New Hampshire for being the host venue where Trumpziim hate speech in the Whittemore Center, was spewed with venom.

Echo report published in the Boston Globe by Isaac Arnsdorf:

DURHAM, New Hampshire - Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden.

His speech at a presidential campaign rally here on Saturday also reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler's fixation on blood purity.

And he used the term "hostages" to describe people charged with violent crimes in the January 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.

The comments came as experts, historians and political opponents have voiced growing alarm about Trump's rhetoric, ideas and emerging plans for a second term, pointing to parallels to past and present authoritarian leaders.

"Donald Trump sees American democracy as a sham and he wants to convince his followers to see it that way too," said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who researches democracy and rhetoric. "Putin hates western values like democracy and the rule of law, so does Trump."

Donald Trump is a Putin asset

Trump quoted Putin, the dictatorial Russia president who invaded neighboring Ukraine, criticizing the criminal charges against Trump, who is accused in four separate cases of falsifying business records in a hush money scheme, mishandling classified documents, and trying to overturn the 2020, election results. In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump's own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.

"It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy," Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: "They're all laughing at us."

He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country's constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an "illiberal" state and has opposed immigration for leading to "mixed race" Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.

But Trump called him "highly respected" and welcomed his praise as "the man who can save the Western world."
In the speech, Trump also repeated his own inflammatory language against undocumented immigrants, by accusing them of "poisoning the blood of our country" - a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates have condemned as reminiscent as Hitler in his book "Mein Kampf," in which he told Germans to "care for the purity of their own blood" by eliminating Jews.

The crowd of thousands in a college arena cheered Trump's recitation of an anti-immigrant poem called "The Snake" that he has repeated on the campaign trail and popularized since the 2016, campaign.

And approaching the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump came to the defense of alleged violent offenders who have been detained awaiting trial on the order of judges.

"I don't call them prisoners, I call them hostages," he said. "They're hostages."

The speech drew renewed criticism from Democrats. "Donald Trump is campaigning on an extreme MAGA agenda that would rip away hard-won freedoms from Americans - it's as simple as that," Democratic National Committee press secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. "If he takes power, Trump will waste no time implementing his dangerous vision for America."

Trump's speech began with an economic focus, with a new tagline of "Better off with Trump" and a recitation of statistics comparing affordability under his presidency to now. But Trump became more animated as he returned to his material on immigration and the charges against him.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that Trump "gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park" in front of a large crowd.

In a move that experts said could have the effect of confusing voters about the true dangers to democracy, Trump has begun deflecting from reports that he would seek revenge on his critics in a second term, accusing Biden of acting like a dictator because of the prosecutions against Trump. Two of the cases were brought by local prosecutors, and the two federal cases are being handled by a special counsel acting independently of the White House in accordance with Justice Department rules.

Without evidence, Trump is portrayed all four cases as a coordinated persecution against him because of his lead in primary and general-election polls. As he pushed that theme on Saturday, the slogan "BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY" flashed across the screen above him.

The speech ended with an instrumental track that Trump has continued using at rallies despite becoming associated with the QAnon online extremist movement.

Kevin McCarthy sold his political soul to the conspiracy coalition

 Thin GOP majority, dangerous game

Echo opinion letter published in theNews-Post a newspaper in Fort Myers, Florida:

Now that the GOP (QOP) House has a scant new majority of four seats: Republicans are going to play Russian Roulette with our debt ceiling and decimate our full faith and credit and threaten a shutdown at the worst possible time as we are clawing back from COVID. 

Speaker McCarthy has given new life to the cause of being a dummy. Who is his ventriloquist.

Because Kevin McCarthy promised everything to hardliners to get the gavel after 15 votes, we now have election deniers, conspiracy proponents and QAnon proponents like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert sitting predominantly on the Government Oversight Committee and Jim Jordan (#GymJimJordan!) heading up the Judicial Committee. 

Their first order of business should be the debt ceiling and helping our economy bounce back but, instead, they’re going to concentrate on impeaching Joe Biden and investigating his son. The well-being of their constituents and the electorate is way on the back on the list of possible achievements. They probably will have their very thin majority for two years so this is what we have to deal with till then but it could be too late.

From Glenn Chenot, in Cape Coral

Republican lies are like a Twilight zone immersion in hypocrisy

Echo opinion by Dana Milbank published in The Washington Post:

Ryan Zinke stepped up to the microphone and into the Twilight Zone.  "Time for telling lies!"

Republican hypocrisy has led them into a political twilight zone

“Despite the ‘deep state’s’ repeated attempts to stop me, I stand before you as a duly elected member of the United States Congress and tell you that a deep state exists and is perhaps the strongest covert weapon the left has against the American people,” he told the House. The Montana Republican, who has returned to Congress after a scandal-plagued stint in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, informed his colleagues that “the deep state runs secret messaging campaigns” and is trying “to wipe out the American cowboy.”

Yee-haw! Zinke was speaking in support of a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, or, as Democrats call it, the “Tinfoil Hat Committee.” In substance, it’s the QAnon committee, with a remit to probe the “deep state” and other wacky conspiracy theories. 

With the panel’s creation, QAnon completes its journey from message board for the paranoid to official policy of the House Republican majority.

After the chaos of the first week of the 118th Congress, many Americans wondered: If it took them 15 ballots just to choose a speaker, how could Republicans possibly govern? 

Now we know. Republicans are going to govern by fantasy and legislate on the basis of fiction.

On Monday, their first day of legislative business, they voted to repeal funding for a fictitious “87,000 IRS agents” who don’t exist and never will. On Wednesday, they approved legislation purporting to outlaw infanticide, which is already illegal and always has been. In between, they set up the deep state committee.

What next? Sorry, that’s secret. And therein might be the biggest falsehood of all. After numerous promises of “transparency” from the new leaders, they are refusing to reveal multiple backroom concessions Kevin McCarthy made to secure the speakership. 

You might even call it a conspiracy of silence.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the GOP conference chair, boasted this week that “we passed the most … transparent rules package in history.” McCarthy tweeted that the new rules would “increase transparency” and that “Republicans are keeping our commitment to make Congress more open.” 

Republicans are governing by spreading lies and hypocrisy!

Alas, the transparency claims could not survive the light of day. Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy’s team had inked a secret three-page “addendum” to the rules package outlining the giveaways he bartered with holdouts blocking him from becoming speaker.

McCarthy, in a caucus meeting Tuesday, reportedly denied the addendum existed. Alas for McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers claimed to have read the document whose existence McCarthy denied.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) told Axios he was personally reviewing the document. Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) acknowledged that “it has to be out there.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), leaving the caucus meeting in the Capitol basement Tuesday, told a group of journalists that there remained “questions that I think many of us have about what side deals may or may not have been made.”

On the floor, where Democrats were hollering about the “secret three-page addendum,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who negotiated much of the deal, countered that it was “classic swamp speak” to be “talking about secret deals.” But negotiating such secret deals is totally fine? 

One change Republicans did reveal is the gutting of the Office of Congressional Ethics (it won’t be able to hire new staff when current employees leave), which will help shield lawmakers’ wrongdoing from public scrutiny. Also made known: a commitment to vote on abolishing the IRS and eliminating income taxes.

The one beacon of transparency in this sea of opacity? McCarthy’s leading critic, Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). He wants to free C-SPAN cameras to film the House floor the way they did during last week’s speaker-vote chaos — during which the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee was physically restrained from lunging at Gaetz.

Steve Scalise is the ideal majority leader for the post-truth era.

Boasting to reporters about passage of “the bill to repeal those 87,000 IRS agents,” he claimed that the Congressional Budget Office “confirmed” that those agents would “go after people making less than $200,000 a year,” including “the single mom who’s working two shifts at a restaurant.”

In reality, the IRS is hiring only about 6,500 agents — and that’s over a decade. In reality, the CBO said that only “a small fraction” of revenue from increased enforcement would come from taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year.

Here’s what else Congressional Budget Office (CB) said: The Republicans’ bill to cut funds to the IRS — the new majority’s first legislation — would add $114 billion to the deficit. So much for fiscal responsibility.

Beth Van Duyne (R-Tex.) added the inventive claim that the fake agents would “make the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI and Border Control together.” The Defense Department alone employs about 3 million people.

Former majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told the House it was the “most dishonest, demagogic rhetoric that I have seen.” But he hadn’t yet witnessed the infanticide debate.

But Republicans spent the entire debate repeating the outright falsehood that 87,000 “agents” would “target American working-class families” (Jason T. Smith, Mo.) and “harass and spy on middle-class and low-income families” (Michelle Steel, Calif.). Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) falsely said the CBO had projected “as many as 700,000 more audits, [of] Americans making less than $75,000 a year.”

“If a baby is born alive, outside the womb, alive, how could you kill that baby and that be legal?” Scalise asked during debate on the Republicans’ “born-alive” abortion bill. “And yet in a number of states, it is legal and happening today.”

No, it isn’t. Infanticide, of course, has always been murder, and a 2002 “born alive” law affirmed that.

The dispute is limited to rare cases, typically involving a fetus born or aborted with a medical condition that isn’t survivable: Should it be treated with heroic measures or compassionate care? Infanticide isn’t on the table.

The bill was one of three antiabortion measures House Republicans prioritized in their first week of legislating: New House rules promising a vote on permanently banning federal abortion funds, a denunciation of violence against antiabortion groups and the born-alive bill.

It was a curious response to the 2022, elections, when voters angered by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade propelled Democrats to better-than-expected results, and abortion rights supporters prevailed even in red states such as Kentucky and Kansas. “We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week,” complained Mace, the South Carolina Republican. “What are we doing to protect victims of rape and victims of incest? Nothing.” She said her GOP colleagues were only “muddying the waters and paying lip service.”

Perhaps that’s to be expected from a GOP leadership in which, as Business Insider pointed out, there will be more guys named “Mike” running committees — six — than there are women in charge of them (just three of the 21 chairs). The old boys of the House Republican caucus might benefit from a Mike drop.

What will be the priorities of this new House majority? Well, let us take them at their word.

(Fake!) Fox News host Sean Hannity visited the Rayburn Room off the House floor this week where, under the watchful eye of a George Washington oil portrait, he broadcast interviews with McCarthy and his (Fake!) leadership team.

Total mentions of inflation: 1.

Total mentions of jobs: 1.

Total mentions of the economy: 2.

Total mentions of investigations: 20.

“Thank you, brother,” McCarthy said to Hannity before they got down to probing all of the planned probes: investigating the FBI, DOJ, China, the “weaponized” feds, the Afghanistan pullout, covid-19’s origins, Anthony Fauci, the “Biden family syndicate,” Hunter Biden’s laptop and more.

Hypocrisy is a chronic form of lying

And now: President Biden’s handling of classified documents. Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (Ohio), who dismissed Trump’s hoarding of classified documents as a “bookkeeping issue,” now demands “a full and thorough review” of Biden’s conduct. Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.), who said probing the Trump documents would “not be a priority,” said of Biden’s documents: “We’re probing it.”

https://twitter.com/mstee0226/status/1613240798992113664?s=20&t=-adi8ZpDPmX314NciuFsVg
"Jim Jordan should not be in charged of the juridical committee his ass should be in prison. This is the most corrupt GOP in history. All they want to do is chase phantom election conspiracies & Hunter Biden. President Biden would never knowingly keep Natl Security Docs. PERIOD!!" @mstee0226 (Twitter)

Oversight is important, but the deep state committee in particular goes beyond oversight and into the realm of vengeance. Under the chairmanship of the voluble (aka "Gym Jim Jordan!") Jim Jordan (Ohio), it gives lawmakers powers to interfere in active criminal investigations — including, potentially, investigations into themselves. (Six House Republicans requested pardons from then-President Trump for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.)