Trump's Big L

A while ago, I promised that I would report on the failures of the Trump administration as well as on his successes or the misrepresentations of him by the legacy media. So here we go, let’s look at the biggest disappointment of Trump’s second term to date: how he and his administration have handled the renewed investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

Personal Note

Let me start with a personal note here. I think it’s needed on this topic to clear up the inevitable misunderstandings that will transpire without it (and maybe even in spite of it). I’ve been controversial with friends and acquaintances, and many of my readers, for evaluating Donald Trump only on the things he does and says. This differs from many of my colleagues in the corporate news media, who evaluate Trump mostly on what people say he did or said. I’ve lost friends over this, because I insist on watching Trump’s speeches in full length and evaluating them myself and because I was, from the very beginning, pretty sceptical of things like the so-called scandal that was Russiagate — which in the end turned out to be complete bullshit. As I had always had the feeling it would. Not because I like Trump, but because I was scrutinising the reporting and, as a journalist, I could see the obvious holes in it.

Because of all of this, people keep saying I must be a fan of Trump. When in fact, I’m not a fan of any politician. I came to the conclusion many years ago, that all politicians are, more or less, bad people. If they aren’t when they enter the game, the nature of it will make sure that, sooner or later, they turn into bad people. Even people with a lot of integrity get eventually chewed up so badly by this horrible business that they will, at some point, invariably succumb to its pitfalls. Just take Bernie Sanders as an example. The guy was beaten down so many times by his own party, stabbed in the back and sidelined, that it broke him. He loves his party so much, and they were so horrible to him, that now he’s become a tool in their arsenal like any other party soldier. This man used to be ready to go to jail for people’s freedoms, now he’s destroying those same freedoms in the name of his party’s machine.

When I was in university studying Politics in the mid-2000s, I had a professor who told us that all politicians are the same. That, no matter how you enter that system, if you stay in it for any prolonged amount of time, it is because you crave power. And that this power will change you. At the time, that seemed so trite to me that I couldn’t believe a Politics professor would quote such base folk wisdom at us. I’m now in my forties and with all the shit I’ve seen in the last twenty years, I know that the man was right. He also told us that studying politics was the best way to make sure you never became a politician. My professor said something along the lines of: “I know of nobody who has studied politics or history thoroughly from the outside, who ever had the desire to become part of the political system. The more you see how it works, the less you want to be part of it.” That right there is some actual wisdom.

What finally drove this understanding home to me was Obama’s time in office. Here was someone who I was convinced was a good guy. He seemed smart, energetic and talked a big game. I had a lot of hope when he became president and it looked good there for a while. The dude even got a Nobel Peace Prize right off the bat. But then we learn he had regular “Terror Tuesday” meetings, where he pored over a kill list of civilians to attack with military drones. Not content with killing large ammounts of innocent citizens of other countries, including wedding guests, Obama pioneered legal arguments for killing his own citizens without a trial or due process. I remember vividly how he promised he would shut down Guantanamo Bay — well, that didn’t happen, did it? I could go on. Suffice it to say that at that point, I finally lost all faith in politicians and now I live my life by assuming all of them are liars or will, eventually, turn into liars.

So this is how I evaluate Donald Trump: like I evaluate all other politicians. I am not a fan of his and I don’t like him. Very much like I wasn’t a fan of Biden, or of Hillary Clinton, and how I don’t like Obama anymore.

Trump’s Record So Far

During Trump’s first term, there were many things that he did that I didn’t appreciate. His handling of the pandemic is probably topping that list. His assassination of a top Iranian general is most likely the next item. But I also give him credit for being the only one of those US presidents whose time in office I can consciously remember — George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden — who actually decreased the United States’s involvement in wars around the world. And since I feel that war is the most important issue in politics worldwide, this carried a lot of weight with me.

When Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine “in twenty-four hours”, I was sure that this was hyperbole, but I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. I did believe that he actually would at least try. And while he seems to have minimised US involvement in the war, it’s still going on, by some accounts worse than ever.

Together with the US involvement in Israel’s war on Iran, I considered this failure to fulfil his promises of peace the biggest failure of the second Trump administration until now. But this has changed. We now need to turn to domestic matters. Not because they are in itself actually that important, but because the administration’s handling of these matters embodies how it, once again, falls short of its promises to be an entirely different kind of government.

As happened with the pandemic during his first term in office, Trump’s second administration has now, in my opinion, reached the point where his mythos of being a different kind of politician — the underdog fighting for the people against established power centres — is exposed as a fraud once more. And while one could have believed, as many have said, that he simply wasn’t prepared for what he would face in his first term — including the all-out assault that was Russiagate — he doesn’t have that excuse this time. In his dealing with the Epstein matter, Trump has fucked up big time.

The Big Tease

I never followed the Jeffrey Epstein case very closely. One of the reasons being that child sex offenses don’t hold that special place in my mind that they do for other people. To me, rape is rape, no matter who the victim is. I attribute this to not having kids myself and not being very interested in anything having to do with kids. That’s just who I am. So this case never held more than a passing interest for me. I wasn’t surprised that rich and powerful people do these things, nor at the length they would go to in covering up their involvement.

I also didn’t especially care if the guy killed himself or was killed. In contrast to the death of John McAfee, that just didn’t seem to me to be the salient point about the case. Both possibilities would somewhat suggest that he was guilty and that someone, he himself or another person or group of people, couldn’t bear the consequences of his crimes. But wasn’t the key point here who he had trafficked those women and children to? And, since several sources reported that he had recorded those interactions on video, what did he subsequently use the incriminating material for?

Up until Trump started campaigning for a second term in office, the question of what had happened on Epstein’s tropical island was a conspiracy theory like any other. It seemed obvious to me that the public record wasn’t the full story and that the reason the truth wasn’t coming out any time soon was the obvious, and much reported on, involvement of many rich and powerful persons. But then a number of people in Trump’s orbit, some of which were later appointed to important positions in his government, started talking about opening the government’s classified files on Epstein, getting to the bottom of whether he was killed and publishing what became known as his “client list”. Among them Dan Bongino, now Deputy Director of the FBI and, to a lesser extend, Kash Patel, who now heads the FBI. Trump himself, in a September 2024 interview with Lex Fridman, teased the idea that he might reveal this “client list”. A month later, his pick for vice president, J. D. Vance, did the same on Theo Von’s podcast.

When Trump won the election, Bongino and Patel continued to talk about releasing the information from “the Epstein files” held at the FBI. In February, Trump’s Attorney General and head of the DOJ, Pam Bondi, held an event at the White House where her department handed out big binders to social media influencers. The cover of these binders read “The Epstein Files: Phase 1 — by order of Attorney General Pamela Bondi & FBI Director Kash Patel” and also included the over-the-top label “The Most Transparent Administration in History”, referring to Trump’s current term in office. But the contents of these binders turned out to have “largely been circulating in the public domain for years”.

All this did was stoke even more public interest in a proper release of hitherto secret material from the FBI files and, possibly, Epstein’s much-teased “client list”. When was the big, cathartic release of information coming? When would all the secrets be revealed and the elites involved brought to justice — if not in a proper court then at least in the court of public opinion?

The Climbdown

Well, it seems there are no secrets to release. Despite what Bondi, Patel and Bongino have said previously, they came out on Monday to deny all of it. There is no client list, Epstein never “blackmailed prominent individuals” and he definitely killed himself, they said (full DOJ/FBI memo).

I am very much prepared to believe that this “client list” never existed. After all, if you’re, say, an intelligence operative masquerading as a financier who’s mission it is to get rich and influential people in compromising situations, —a time-honoured tradition in that profession — why the hell would you keep a client list? As far as I am concerned, this alleged list is as much a red herring as the question if Epstein killed himself or not. None of that matters.

What matters is the question why there were no investigations into the people who had sex with the women and under-age girls Epstein trafficked. It’s been established that he did that. There apparently was video evidence of it. Bondi said so in May. So why did the FBI not figure out who these people were? Absent a list one would imagine a well-funded intelligence service like the FBI would come up with a least a few suspects to look into. They apparently had flight logs and other leads that have been talked about in the press for years now.

And now we are supposed to believe that the FBI couldn’t figure out who Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were trafficking for? Or that this wasn’t a blackmail operation? What else was it? Where does all the misinformation about lists and videos come from in that case? Why is there no explanation of that? I would not believe Trump’s version even if Patel, Bongino or Bondi where convincing in their denials. But just look at their faces when they’re being questioned by reporters. I’ve never in my life seen people more akin to deer staring into headlights.

I am buying none of this. My disbelief starts with the doctored video they released to prove Epstein wasn’t murdered and ends with there being no list, no blackmail operation and no famous people being involved. This is all bullshit. I have no idea why they are lying, but I am pretty sure that they are doing it.

Maybe they are lying because Trump is a well-known associate of Epstein. Maybe the Mossad or the Russians also have the files and would immediately release any names in a doctored release that tried to protect some famous people. Maybe it’s some kind of global child porn MAD system for the elites — who knows? All I know is that this is a terrible look for Trump and much of his team.

In Conclusion

Why tease this material and then not release it? There are only three logical options:

1. They didn’t know there wasn’t actually any interesting material there to release and were talking out of their arse before they came into office.
2. They didn’t know the material included people they now want to protect and orchestrated their climbdown once they found out.
3. All of these people are completely incompetent.

Number 1 is unlikely, because they could’ve just released what they had and said “sorry we didn’t know better, not our fault”. The outcome from that would be preferable to losing the massive amount of trust they are losing now, one would think. When it comes to the more realistic options 2 and 3, I honestly don’t know what is worse.

In the great scheme of things, this issue might not be the most important. What with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East raging on and on and a worldwide political situation that is slipping ever closer to World War III and global thermonuclear war. But it has, nonetheless, captured the public’s imagination. As the idea of a conspiracy of rich and powerful paedophiles operating for decades with apparent protection from law enforcement and even, it seems, intelligence services like the FBI, naturally would. While the initial lawsuits involving Epstein happened under George W. Bush and Obama, the second criminal case in 2019 and Epstein’s subsequent death happened under Trump’s watch. And the question, of why there doesn’t seem to have been a proper investigation of the people who Epstein supplied with underage girls, is a salient one.

We should never stop to ask questions about this. Yes, all of this is based of a conspiracy theory, but it has been established pretty well — in court, no less — that there was an actual conspiracy. So it seems to me that this is a valid theory and that we need to find out more about what happened. No matter what Donald Trump and his FBI and DOJ stooges say.

Trump deserves all the criticism he gets on this. He brought all of this on himself and his about face in this issue looks fishy as hell.

Further Reading

“Poor, smart and desperate to be rich”: How Epstein went from teaching to Wall Street, Miami Herald
U.S. Virgin Islands Officials: Epstein Trafficked Girls On Private Island Until 2018, NPR
List of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates named in lawsuit can be unsealed, judge rules. Here are details on the document release, CBS News
US judge orders names of more than 170 Jeffrey Epstein associates to be released, The BBC
Jeffrey Epstein Was a “Terrific Guy,” Donald Trump Once Said. Now He’s “Not a Fan”, The New York Times
What really happened to Virginia Giuffre?, The Times