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The Felon is Killing America’s Position as the Premier Techno-Superpower

On the eve of WWI, Russia was industrializing rapidly and science and the arts were flourishing.  Enter the Bolsheviks after the fall of the monarchy and scientists and intellectuals who did not subscribe to Bolshevik ideology were killed or driven into exile. The Soviet Union did not regain the industrial level of 1913 until 1939.  Yes, some scientific research continued and was funded, but it always had to conform to the ideology of whoever then then dictator was and cronies rather than experts were too often put in places of power.  Ultimately, the Soviet Union and now Russia under Putin paid a high price and lost much of its technological advantage.  Fast forward to 2025 America and we see the same thing happening as the Felon's regime is slashing research funding and incompetent cronies are being high positions for which they are utterly unqualified.  Worse yet, top researchers are leaving America for more welcoming nations where they have free speech and knowledge is not being warped to support the MAGA agenda which at times seems to be an agenda of ending America's position as a technological super power.   Add to this the fixation of erasing all diversity, inclusion and equity policies so as to favor white heterosexual males.  All of this fits with the white "Christian" national agenda of Project 2025, which seeks to return American society to the 1950's with white supremacy. It also dovetails with the Christofascist agenda of erasing anyone and anything that threatens its archaic, ignorance based beliefs.  To this group, knowledge and science have always been deemed a threat. Long term, what is happening will do severe harm to America's future, with all Americans paying a high price.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at what is happening as the Felon's regime harms the nation's future.  Here are excerpts:

Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.

The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.’s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. . . . . By 1973, when Sagdeev was made director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, the nation’s top center for space science, the Soviets had ceded leadership in orbit to NASA. American astronauts had flown around the moon and left a thousand bootprints on its surface. Sagdeev’s institute was short on money. Many people who worked there had the right Communist Party connections, but no scientific training.

The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev’s most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year.

I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump’s second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she’s not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad.

The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.

Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The [Felon] Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science—the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others—and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded.

Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it’s drying up.

Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don’t lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany’s elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France’s Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American “science refugees.”

The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this.

[E]very scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. . . . . But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard.

Science in ancient Egypt and Greece followed a similar pattern: It thrived during good times and fell off in periods of plague, chaos, and impoverishment. But not every case of scientific decline has played out this way. Some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage.

Spanish science, for example, suffered grievously during the Inquisition. Scientists feared for their lives. They retreated from pursuits and associations that had a secular tinge and thought twice before corresponding with suspected heretics. The exchange of ideas slowed in Spain, and its research excellence declined relative to the rest of Europe. . . . In the 17th century, the Spanish made almost no contribution to the ongoing Scientific Revolution.

The Soviets sabotaged their own success in biomedicine. In the 1920s, the U.S.S.R. had one of the most advanced genetics programs in the world, but that was before Stalin empowered Trofim Lysenko, a political appointee who didn’t believe in Mendelian inheritance. Lysenko would eventually purge thousands of apostate biologists from their jobs, and ban the study of genetics outright. Some of the scientists were tossed into the Gulag; others starved or faced firing squads.

But it was Adolf Hitler who possessed the greatest talent for scientific self-harm. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. Germans had pioneered the modern research university by requiring that professors not only transmit knowledge but advance it, too. During the early 20th century, German scientists racked up Nobel Prizes.

When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged Germany’s universities of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule. Many scientists were murdered. Others fled the country. Quite a few settled in America. That’s how Einstein got to Princeton. After Hans Bethe was dismissed from his professorship in Tübingen, he landed at Cornell. Then he went to MIT to work on the radar technology that would reveal German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Some historians have argued that radar was more important to Allied victory than the Manhattan Project. But of course, that, too, was staffed with European scientific refugees, including Leo Szilard, a Jewish physicist who fled Berlin the year that Hitler took power; Edward Teller, who went on to build the first hydrogen bomb; and John von Neumann, who invented the architecture of the modern computer.

In a very short time, the center of gravity for science just up and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, it was American scientists who most regularly journeyed to Stockholm to receive medals. It was American scientists who built on von Neumann’s work to take an early lead in the Information Age that the U.S. has still not relinquished. And it was American scientists who developed the vaccines for polio and measles.

[U]ntil Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

If the U.S. is no longer the world’s technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America’s technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America, Shapin said. . . . . when I last spoke with Sagdeev, on July 4, he was feeling melancholy about the state of American science. Once again, he is watching a great scientific power in decline. He has read about the proposed funding cuts in the newspaper. He has heard about a group of researchers who are planning to leave the country. Sagdeev is 92 years old, and has no plans to join them. But as an American, it pains him to see them go.

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The Felon's Flawed Tariff Policies

Today many of the Felon's tariffs go into effect, including 35% tariffs against Canada.  The international stock and financial markets have dropped in recognition of how bad these tariffs will be for the global economy.  And, of course, the arbitrary tariffs will do nothing for most American consumers since consumer prices will rise and long time allies will feel betrayed and realize America cannot be trusted with a madman in the White House and a GOP controlled Congress which will do nothing to assert its legal authority over tariffs. Indeed, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals gave a frosty reception to the Felon's claimed authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act because in truth, there is no emergency justifying the Felon's policies - only the Felon's desire to bully other nations and and force they to prostitute themselves to him as Republicans up and down political offices have done.  Indeed, there is nothing "America First" - a phrase that has an ugly history - about the tariffs.  Canada is pushing ahead with switching trading partners and the European Union is being pushed into the waiting arms of China.  A  piece in Atlantic looks at the Felon's warped trade policies that will harm Americans and likely weaken the nation over all.  Here are excepts:

When Trump began his political career, he said he would put “America First,” rather than using American power to enforce values overseas. Wars to fight repressive autocrats were foolish ways to burn cash and squander American lives. The promotion of human rights and democracy were soft-headed, bleeding-heart causes. Trump, a man of business, was going to look out for the bottom line without getting tangled up in high-minded crusades. Now that’s exactly what he’s doing: using trade as a way to make grand statements about values—his own, if not America’s.

This is troubling on legal, moral, and diplomatic levels. The Constitution specifically delegates the power to levy tariffs to Congress, but legislators have delegated some of that capacity to the president. Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows him to impose tariffs in response to an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” on the basis that Congress cannot act quickly enough. This use of the law is, as Conor Friedersdorf and Ilya Somin wrote in The Atlantic in May, absurd.

Understanding why Trump would be sensitive about Bolsonaro’s prosecution, which stems from Bolsonaro’s attempt to cling to power after losing the 2022 election, is not difficult—the parallels between the two have been often noted—but that doesn’t make it a threat to the United States, much less an “unusual and extraordinary” one. Likewise, Canadian recognition of a Palestinian state is unwelcome news for Trump’s close alliance with Israel, but it poses no obvious security or economic danger to the U.S. A Congress or Supreme Court interested in limiting presidential power could seize on these statements to arrest Trump’s trade war, but these are not the legislators or justices we have.

Setting aside the legal problems, Trump’s statements about Brazil and Canada represent an abandonment of the realpolitik approach he once promised. Even if Carney were to back down on Palestinian statehood, or Brazil to call off Bolsonaro’s prosecution, the United States wouldn’t see any economic gain. Trump is purely using American economic might to achieve noneconomic goals.

Previous presidents have frequently used U.S. economic hegemony to further national goals—or, less charitably, interfered in the domestic affairs of other sovereign nations. But no one needs to accept any nihilistic false equivalences. Trump wrote in a July 9 letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that the case against Bolsonaro was “an international disgrace” and (naturally) a “Witch Hunt.” Although the U.S. has taken steps to isolate repressive governments, Trump’s attempts to bail out Bolsonaro are nothing of the sort. The U.S. can’t with a straight face argue that charging Bolsonaro is improper, and it can’t accuse Brazil of convicting him in a kangaroo court, because no trial has yet been held.

[S]lapping tariffs on Canada for a symbolic decision such as this [recognizing Palestine] seems unlikely to dissuade Carney or do anything beyond further stoking nascent Canadian nationalism.

This is not the only way in which Trump’s blunt wielding of tariffs is likely to backfire on the United States. Consumers in the U.S. will pay higher prices, and overseas, Jerusalem Demsas warned in April, “the credibility of the nation’s promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks.” But it’s not just trust with foreign countries that the president has betrayed. It’s the pact he made with voters. Trump promised voters an “America First” approach. Instead, they’re getting a “Bolsonaro and Netanyahu First” government.

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The Book "1984" Hasn’t Changed, But America Under the Felon/GOP Has

As a high school student, I read the book "1984" which at the time was viewed by many as an example of how a totalitarian regime tried to erase the truth and anything else that ran contrary to the agenda and propaganda of the dictatorial regime.  Back  then, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, many viewed the book as an example of how the Soviet Union tried to censor anything that might go against the ruling regime.  What many Americans back then did not realize is that America through the CIA was actively smuggling 1984 and other literature banned by the Soviet regime into both the Soviet Union and other countries behind the so-called Iron Curtain.  Fast forward to 2025 America and red states and the Felon's regime are banning books - including 1984 - and/or seeking to censor individuals and media outlets that rightfully criticize the increasingly fascist regime pushed by the Felon, red state GOP governors and GOP controlled legislatures, and, of course, the Christian nationalist architects of Project 2025.  As frequently noted at this blog, the white "godly Christians" constantly seek to erase anything and anyone who challenges their 12th century beliefs (many of which stem from Bronze Age myths and oral traditions), LGBT individuals being but one of their many targets.  A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at the parallels between the Soviet agenda of yesterday - which was similar to that of the Nazis -  and today's agenda of the Felon and the modern day Republican Party.  Here are column excerpts:

There are myriad reasons the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989. The economic stagnation of the East and the war in Afghanistan are two of the most commonly cited. But literature also played its part, thanks to a long-running U.S. operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency that covertly moved millions of books through the Iron Curtain in a bid to undermine Communist Party censorship.

While it is hard to quantify the program’s effect in absolute terms, its history offers valuable lessons for today, not least since some of the very same titles and authors the C.I.A. sent East during the Cold War — including “1984”— are now deemed objectionable by a network of conservative groups across the United States.

First published in English in 1949, Orwell’s novel describes the dystopian world of Oceania, a totalitarian state where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in a huge government department called the Ministry of Truth. The ministry is ironically named: Its role is not to safeguard the truth but to destroy it, to edit history to fit the present needs of the party and its leader, Big Brother, since, as the slogan runs, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In the real Soviet system, every country had its equivalent of the Ministry of Truth, modeled on the Moscow template. In Poland, the largest Eastern European nation outside the Soviet Union, this censorship and propaganda apparatus was called the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances, and its headquarters occupied most of a city block in downtown Warsaw.

From art to advertising, television to theater, the Main Office reached into all aspects of Polish life. It had employees in every TV and radio station, every film studio and every publishing house. Every typewriter in Poland had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted, and a permit was needed even to buy a ream of paper. Books that did not conform to the censor’s rules were pulped. . . . [T]he Warsaw Pact was said to protect Poland from attack by “revisionist” German neo-Nazis and “Western imperialists,” even though the main imperialist threat came from the East.

Troublesome people, inconvenient facts and awkward areas of journalistic inquiry were removed from public life. It was forbidden to reference the fraught history of Russo-Polish relations, for instance, or the secret police massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, or mention the fact that Poland had a giant alcoholism problem. People existed in a world of Orwellian “doublethink,” believing certain things to be true at home, but adopting a very different, party-sanctioned “truth” outside it.

Orwell was made a “nonperson” in the Soviet Union, after the publication of his satire of the Russian Revolution, “Animal Farm,” in 1945. It was dangerous even to mention the author’s name in print there, and when “1984” was published it was banned in the Eastern Bloc in all languages. But when copies of the novel did slip through the Iron Curtain, they had enormous power.

What some Eastern European readers of contraband copies of “1984” suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that these and millions of other uncensored texts were not reaching them entirely by chance, but were part of a decades-long U.S. intelligence operation called the “C.I.A. book program,” based for much of its existence in the nondescript office building at 475 Park Avenue South in Midtown Manhattan. There, a small team of C.I.A. employees organized the infiltration of 10 million books and periodicals into the Eastern Bloc, sending literature by every imaginable means: in trucks fitted with secret compartments, on yachts that traversed the stormy Baltic, in the mail, or slipped into the luggage of countless travelers from Eastern Europe who dropped in at C.I.A. distribution hubs in the West.

The C.I.A. program operated across the Eastern Bloc and assigned specialist editors for each country, from Hungary to the mighty Soviet Union itself. But it was in Poland that the books were most warmly received, partly because the Warsaw regime was more liberal than others in Eastern Europe and partly because Poland had a long tradition of underground literature dating back to tsarist times.

By the mid-1980s, Poland was flooded with uncensored publications, some smuggled in, many printed underground. The system of Communist Party censorship started to break down, and in losing its grip on information, the Polish state lost its grip on the people too. The Communists were forced to hold semi-free elections in June of 1989, which were won by the opposition movement, Solidarity. After Poland came the deluge: A year later, all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been replaced by democratically elected governments.

In the mid-2020s, “1984” is again being restricted, this time by conservative, Trump-aligned politicians in the United States. In May 2023, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law Senate File 496, which according to the governor “puts parents in the driver’s seat” when it comes to their children’s education. In fact SF 496 forces Iowa schools to remove from their libraries thousands of books of which cultural conservatives disapprove.

Mostly, SF 496, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, bans books that feature L.G.B.T.Q.+ characters or progressive themes such as feminism or are written by people of color. But the legislation also sweeps up several authors whose works lampoon totalitarianism and that were sent east by the C.I.A. book program, including Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut and Orwell, whose “1984” and “Animal Farm” are both on banned lists.

SF 496 is but one cog in the growing apparatus of American censorship, as conservative action groups seek to ban books around the country. PEN America has documented close to 16,000 bans (instances in which a book has been withdrawn or access to it has been restricted because of its content) in schools since 2021, with 10,046 in the 2023-24 school year alone. The censorship efforts are mostly driven by Republican state legislators and[right wing] parental-rights groups. Florida takes the lead, with more than 4,561 book bans recorded in that school year — including in one case a graphic novel adaptation of “1984” — via a combination of new state laws and parental pressure. Next come Iowa (with 3,671 book bans that year), Texas (538), Wisconsin (408), Virginia (121) and Kentucky (100).

Banning books doesn’t stop at the local level.This year, after Mr. Trump signed three executive orders aimed at combating “wokeness,” the Department of Defense’s education agency removed and reviewed more than 500 titles from its school system, including, according to one report, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which the C.I.A. had sent to the Eastern Bloc. Federal funding agencies have compiled a list of more than 350 banned words and phrases, including “women,” “diversity” and “ethnicity.”

In the Cold War, the United States chose “freedom” — democratic freedom, freedom of speech, intellectual freedom and freedom of choice — as its key point of difference with the Soviet enemy. . . . [the Felon] Mr. Trump, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis and their fellow travelers expound the virtues of the First Amendment while dismantling guardrails against disinformation and working to suppress political ideas they oppose. Book bans aren’t their only tool. They also block access for independent journalists, intimidate news organizations and defund outlets they perceive as hostile to the MAGA agenda, including NPR, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.

There are two lessons from the history of the C.I.A. book program that the book banners would do well to heed. One is that censorship — whether by Communists, fascists or democratic governments — tends to create demand for the works it targets. (That, and Mr. Trump’s Orwellian tactics, may explain why “1984” has been surging up the book charts in recent years.)

The other is that the totalitarians lost the Cold War, and freedom of thought won the day. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, whose own works were promoted by the C.I.A., presumably without his knowledge, said: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.”

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The Felon's Epstein Denials Are Unconvincing

The Felon has resorted to his usual tactics as the Epstein scandal shows no sign of abating: endless lies, efforts to distract the public by ridiculous claims against Barrack Obama and others, and then fleeing to Scotland to golf at one of his resorts- spending millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.   Luckily, his efforts appear to be failing and many in Scotland gave him a less than friendly welcome (as the photo shows - fyi, a jobbie is a turd).  Like many, I fear the Felon will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell or she may suddenly become another "suicide" victim.  The irony of the ongoing furor is that the Felon fanned conspiracy theories about Epstein having been murdered and that his client list includes high ranking Democrats and "elites" so hated by the knuckle dragging MAGA crowd. Now, it is all biting the Felon in his very large ass and few outside of MAGA Kool-Aid drinkers are finding his denials convincing.  Let's hope the furor continues and that somehow the Epstein files are made public, likely exposing the Felon as an Epstein buddy and client.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the unconvincing denials: 

Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.

Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that.

The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men’s friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. . . . one that was instantly falsified by Trump’s well-documented penchant for doodling.

On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is “fake news,” that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch’s ethics rather than his own.

Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. . . . Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama.

Trump has yet to specify why the “witch hunt” he’s been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new “witch hunt” he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address.

In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 presidential election.

By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound more world-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump’s position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein’s crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Biden won the 2020 election (i.e., 100 percent real).

House Speaker Mike Johnson, faced with demands by some Republican members to pass a nonbinding resolution calling for full disclosure of the government’s files relating to the Epstein investigation, announced that he would instead shut down the House for summer recess. Given that Trump had previously been eager to squeeze as many working days out of his narrow legislative majority as he could get, and the impression in Washington that Johnson will not so much as go to the bathroom without Trump’s permission, declaring early recess communicates extreme desperation on the part of the president.

Also yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was releasing thousands of pages of documents relating to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It is difficult to see why this disclosure was suddenly necessary. Trump’s contention that the Epstein scandal is too dull and familiar to be worth discussing seems to be ever so slightly in tension with the notion that the death of King, in 1968, is fresh material. If anything, the disclosure of documents nobody asked to see painfully highlights his unwillingness to disclose the documents everybody is clamoring for. If the police ask to look in your basement for a missing hitchhiker recently spotted in your car, and you offer to let them inspect your desk and closet instead, this will not dispel suspicions about what a basement inspection might reveal.

Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.

 

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