Saturday, November 22, 2025
Trump's Increasingly Dangerous Loss of Self-Control
Felon has long ignored norms of behavior and ignored the law whenever it is inconvenient to his personal wants and delusions. Indeed, he increasingly thinks himself as a monarch and failure to follow his orders is tantamount to treason in his sick, narcissistic mind. We have witnessed him ordering the murder of supposed drug traffickers, yet no proof has been offered to document the alleged drug activities. Seemingly, the only true justification has been the Felon's own declaration that the murdered individuals were drug traffickers. A top military lawyer has found the attacks and murders to be illegal yet was overruled by the Felon's minions. Hence the video prepared by some Democrat members of Congress that cautioned members of the military that under the the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) they are not to follow illegal orders given by superiors. This video caused the Felon to go ballistic and basically call for the execution of these members of Congress for treason, since in his self-centered mind, all allegiance should be solely to him and to hell with the U.S. Constitution. The Felon cannot help but know that some of his fanatical cultist followers could well take his rantings as authorization for violence against those targeted. Such outbursts are becoming more frequent and pose a danger to all Americans. A piece at The Atlantic looks at this growing danger:
Presidents often lose control over their agenda, or the policy process, or pieces of legislation. Sometimes, they even lose control of their party. But
Donald Trump[the Felon] seems to have lost control over the one thing every person, and especially those with immense power, should always maintain control over: himself. Yesterday the president called for the arrest and execution of elected American officials for the crime—as he sees it—of fidelity to the Constitution.It would be easy merely to note, yet again, that the president is a depraved man and a menace to the American system of government. As remarkable as it is to say it, however, the outbursts of this past week are different, and were likely triggered by Trump’s panic over the release of files about his former friend, the dead sex offender Jeffery Epstein. No one should treat this new phase in the president’s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show.
A group of Democratic legislators—all of them either military veterans or former national-security officials—may have helped to push the president over the edge. On Tuesday, they issued a video reminding members of the U.S. Armed Forces that their oath of service requires them to refuse illegal orders, and that their loyalty is owed not to any one president, but to the Constitution itself. Normally, legislators don’t feel the need to make such an obvious declaration, but the president is using the military—including deploying troops to U.S. cities and ordering the killing of people on the high seas—in ways that almost certainly involve illegal orders. Members of Congress have a right, even an obligation, to speak up.
The [Felon]
president was already showing strain before his attack on the legislators. Last Friday, he lashed out at a female journalist who asked about the Epstein files, calling her “piggy.” (Trump seems to revel in getting away with speaking to women as president in ways that would land him on the sidewalk back in Queens.) On Tuesday, as he sat next to the Saudi crown prince, a man credibly accused by U.S. intelligence of murdering an American journalist, he lashed out at yet another female reporter: He called Mary Bruce of ABC “insubordinate”—a rather telling choice of words—and threatened to use the FCC to attack her network. Tuesday, of course, was the day the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House by a vote of 427–1. The next day, it passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and a humiliated Trump signed the bill into law.Yesterday, Trump seemed to lose the last bit of his grip on his emotions as he fired off a fusillade of Truth Social posts. . . . . “This is really bad,” the president wrote, “and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???”
“Lock them up” is a favorite Trump chant, but he did not end with this classic demand. He went on: “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand - We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” The charge, according to the chief executive? “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He also reposted a comment that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
Trump’s posts risk putting the lives of American lawmakers in danger, and he almost certainly knows it. Many people who have publicly criticized the president have found themselves getting death threats from his most fervid followers. . . . . As Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former MAGA doyenne from Georgia whom Trump has now marked as a heretic, wrote on X last week, “A hot bed of threats against me are being fueled and egged on by the most powerful man in the world.” Senator Elissa Slotkin revealed that she is now traveling with a security detail because of what she called “a huge spike” in threats that came to her office after Trump’s eruption yesterday.
In what must be a first for any White House official, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had to step forward and answer whether the president of the United States wants to kill members of Congress. In a ringing defense of American values and constitutional order, she responded to the question by saying:
“No.”
Leavitt then tried to turn the entire ghastly business on its head. . . . . This is now the position of the Trump administration: Members of the Article I branch of government who insist that the armed forces must be faithful to the law are inducing potentially fatal disorder among the troops. Not only is Leavitt wrong—the “sanctity” of the military rests on the Constitution, not the chain of command—but she is showing a remarkable lack of faith in the officers and enlisted personnel of the United States military, implying that they will become a violent rabble if they refuse illegal orders.
Trump’s reaction to the statement by these members of Congress shows why such statements are now necessary in the first place. He is acting like a man who is cornered, terrified, and irrational. In 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was worried about the mental state of Richard Nixon, who was facing impeachment and almost certain conviction. Nixon was becoming erratic and drinking too much, so Schlesinger told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that any “unusual” orders from Nixon should be routed over to him.
And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is no Jim Schlesinger.
Americans, and especially their elected representatives, must pay attention to Trump now in a way that many of them have never thought to do before. The president of the United States is publicly howling for the arrest and execution of members of Congress, knowing that he commands a base that will take him seriously and has people in it that might act on his demands. (And no, Leavitt’s curt denials are not a reassurance.) Despite Nixon’s famous 1977 assertion, things do not become legal just because the president wants to do them. This is a new and dire development in the ongoing American constitutional crisis. The voters, Congress, and, yes, the U.S. military must all now be more vigilant than at any time in our modern history.
Friday, November 21, 2025
The Trump DOJ Comedy of Errors
I was a litigator for 21 years, and it’s safe to say that I never witnessed the level of legal incompetence that we are witnessing from the Trump administration.
Consider two stories, both from this week alone. First, on Monday, William Fitzpatrick, a federal magistrate judge who is assisting Michael Nachmanoff, the federal judge presiding over the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released an opinion about a series of staggering procedural irregularities that originated with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the case.
The magistrate didn’t recommend dismissing the case (at least not yet), but he did take the highly unusual step of ordering the administration to release otherwise-confidential information about the grand jury proceedings, a move that could very well lay the foundation for dismissal.
The judge found that the prosecutors had mishandled attorney-client communications between Comey and one of his former lawyers, Daniel Richman, who is a law professor at Columbia Law School and a personal friend of Comey’s.
Attorney-client privilege is sacred in the law, and the Trump administration not only abandoned normal Department of Justice procedures for evaluating whether it had seized privileged information when it executed search warrants against Richman during Trump’s first term, it may have even used privileged information to make its case to the grand jury — a gross violation of Comey’s rights
That’s not the only administration failure in Comey’s case. The magistrate also raised concerns about whether the Trump F.B.I. “complied with a fundamental requirement of the Fourth Amendment” when it executed the Richman search.
To be clear, search warrants are supposed to be narrow and precise. Law enforcement is only supposed to seize evidence that is potentially relevant to the underlying crimes under investigation. That’s not what happened here.
So that’s a second grave breach of legal standards. But there’s more — it also appears that Halligan misled the grand jury by misstating one of the basic elements of constitutional law.
According to the magistrate, when grand jurors challenged Halligan on the strength of the evidence against Comey, Halligan responded with a “fundamental and highly prejudicial misstatement of the law that suggests to the grand jury that Mr. Comey does not have a Fifth Amendment right not to testify at trial.”
In other words, she may have wrongly suggested that it would be up to Comey to disprove the allegations against him, rather than properly placing the burden of proof on the prosecution.
It gets worse. Halligan also seemed to assure the grand jury that “they did not have to rely on the record before them to determine probable cause, but could be assured that the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”
“It is elementary that the grand jury is supposed to consider the evidence in the record and not make assumptions about other evidence the government may or may not have.”
Halligan also appears to have completely botched the process of securing the indictment. She sought a three-count indictment, but the grand jury indicted only on two counts. Yet, through a mysterious series of events, she signed two different indictments — a first indictment that, according to the magistrate, “indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count” and a two-count indictment that didn’t include the rejected third count.
Compounding the problem, at a court hearing on Wednesday, the D.O.J. admitted that it never presented the two-count indictment to the full grand jury. Instead, Halligan seems to have copied the two approved counts into a new document and discussed it with the foreperson without returning to the grand jury.
Wednesday’s hearing also contained another bombshell. As my newsroom colleagues wrote, “one of Ms. Halligan’s subordinates, Tyler Lemons, acknowledged that someone in the deputy attorney general’s office had instructed him not to discuss in open court whether his predecessors had — or had not — written a memo laying out their reasons for not bringing charges, because that was privileged information.”
We do not yet know if Halligan’s procedural irregularities will be fatal to the case, but I do know that if I’d committed that level of malpractice when I was litigating, it would have been instantly fatal to my continued employment.
Just when I thought we were reaching peak legal incompetence, I read a court opinion on Tuesday that made me realize that levels of legal buffoonery exist that I find it hard to imagine.
A three-judge federal panel issued a 2-to-1 opinion striking down the recent Texas gerrymander that was designed to engineer more safe seats for Republican representatives to the House. The majority opinion is by Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee.
If you’re a state government, it’s actually hard to lose a gerrymandering case. . . . . Unless you’re the Trump administration. Then, you’ll write a letter to the state of Texas ordering it to change the racial composition of its congressional districts.
That’s exactly what the Department of Justice did. The Trump administration accused Texas of racial gerrymandering when it created the districts, but then tried to argue that the remedy for a racial gerrymander was … another racial gerrymander. As the court wrote, “the remedy for such racial gerrymandering, according to D.O.J., is to change the offending districts’ racial makeup.”
The judge was scathing. “It’s challenging to unpack the D.O.J. letter,” he wrote, “because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors. Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas attorney general — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump administration — describe the D.O.J. Letter as ‘legally unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’ ”
While we don’t know how the courts will ultimately rule (Texas has appealed, and the law still favors . . . rtisan gerrymanders), it is now quite possible that the Republican Party could lose control of the House in part because the Trump administration was too incompetent to rig the districts properly.
Don’t think for a second that I’ve simply cherry-picked two bad moments from what is otherwise a parade of legal excellence. While there are good lawyers on Trump’s legal teams (the solicitor general, D. John Sauer, for example, is a very effective advocate), the Trump team’s lies, distortions and shortcuts are causing problems in case after case after case after case.
But the culture of authoritarianism magnifies this problem. Authoritarians want you to follow their will, not the law; they value personal loyalty over party loyalty; and they tend to erupt over disagreement and dissent, viewing it as a betrayal. They are often quite keen to enrich themselves, and they build loyalty by enriching their allies and punishing their enemies, justice be damned.
Authoritarian incompetence can be a profound mercy. . . . Trumpist incompetence is also a mercy to America. So long as America’s judges retain their independence, they can and will swat aside his worst arguments and block his worst actions. In this way, he is actually making it easier for judges to resist his worst impulses. He undermines his own legal position. He creates the conditions that will make him lose cases that better and more effective leaders could win.
When Trump is angry, he tends to escalate, not retreat (and retreats only as a last resort), and even the most incompetent men can get their way if they’re powerful enough, brutal enough and relentless enough to keep pushing until rival institutions crumble, crack and fall.
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Trump Chaos - Is 2025 A Rerun of 2017
President Donald Trump’s[The Felon's] administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election.That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.
Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original. And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead.
This was not the plan. Trump and his inner circle used their four years out of office to create a policy blueprint—drawn substantially from Project 2025—and form a disciplined team of true believers who used their experience with the levers of power to dominate their political opposition. The beginning of Trump’s second term was marked by an unprecedented display of executive authority, as the president dominated a subservient Congress and defied the courts, brought to heel some of the nation’s most formidable institutions and wealthiest people, fulfilled long-held conservative wishes to dramatically shrink the size and influence of the federal government, reoriented the nation’s relationship with the rest of the world, and rammed through legislation that benefited the rich over the working class and the poor. Trump has been a steamroller.
But that has begun to change. Voters punished Trump’s party in this month’s elections, seeming to condemn his presidential overreach and the abandonment of his central campaign promise to rehabilitate the nation’s economy. A rare Republican rebellion on Capitol Hill rattled the West Wing and embarrassed the president. And although the White House likes to project a political image of never surrendering, a pair of retreats in the past few days has punctured Trump’s aura of invincibility.
Few things have frustrated Trump like his inability to make Jeffrey Epstein go away. . . . . But questions about the powerful men with whom he associated—and the mystery around his death in prison, which was ruled a suicide—created a conspiracy theory in the MAGA base that has overwhelmed the White House. Trump angrily ordered his supporters to let the matter go this past summer but was largely ignored. And then, last week, four GOP lawmakers—some of whom have been among Trump’s most ardent acolytes—triggered a full House vote to release Department of Justice records related to Epstein.
Revolt was in the air. One of those defiant lawmakers, the MAGA icon Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, did not buckle, even as Trump called her a traitor. “Let me tell you what a traitor is,” she responded yesterday. “A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves.” GOP leadership signaled to the White House that most lawmakers could not put their name to a vote to protect a pedophile . . . . Trump was furious, but he didn’t want to be seen as getting rolled by his own party.
Trying to save face, he begrudgingly posted on social media that he would support Republicans who voted to release the files. The measure passed the House yesterday 427–1. It then cleared the Senate by unanimous consent. Trump announced tonight he had signed it.
The other Trump walk-back came far less dramatically, buried in the text of an executive order released late Friday. But it was no less noteworthy. Trump, as is often said, has few constant ideological stances, yet one is that tariffs will spur economic growth and benefit the consumer. In a tacit admission that tariffs have, in fact, caused prices to rise (as most economists have long said), the administration quietly lifted tariffs on goods such as bananas, beef, and coffee.
The reversal came days after Republicans were swept in off-year elections in places such as Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. Voters made clear that the GOP was not fulfilling its promises on affordability that helped Trump get elected last year. A number of Republican lawmakers loudly insisted that Trump needs to refocus on prices and inflation . . . .
Chaos within the White House was the norm during Trump’s first term. This time around, the president’s team has prioritized professionalism and tried to minimize turnover. . . . Trump’s first administration was plagued by sloppiness; the original travel ban, Trump veterans will remember with a shudder, was hastily scrawled by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and not properly reviewed by government attorneys before it was enacted. (It was promptly tossed out by a federal court.) This time, Trump aides vowed they would be methodical and efficient, and for months, they faced little resistance as they rolled out the president’s agenda.
But that sense of disorder has returned, and the losses have begun to pile up. Just in the past two weeks: Trump’s prized tariffs were greeted with great skepticism by the Supreme Court, with the justices appearing unsympathetic to the notion that the president could usurp what is normally congressional power on the back of a flimsy declaration of a national emergency.
The president’s campaign of retribution may have hit a snag when a federal judge found that the case put forth by Trump’s handpicked interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was marred by a series of errors that could lead to the dismissal of the criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey.
And yesterday, a Trump-appointed federal judge issued a rebuke of the methodology used by Republicans in Texas to redistrict the state’s congressional map. . . . . Trump, desperate for his party to keep control of both houses of Congress next fall, had pushed for a number of GOP-led states to create more Republican seats, but he took a loss in Texas and has been rebuffed by Indiana, meaning that the Democrats—who responded to the Texas push by successfully creating friendly districts in California and may follow suit in Virginia and Maryland—could end up besting the Republicans at their own game.
There have been other recent flashbacks to Trump’s first term. Much like in 2018, the president and the Republicans were on the losing end of a government shutdown. . . . . And yesterday, the president ignored the CIA’s conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman played a role in the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi—much as in Helsinki in 2018, when Trump famously sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian election interference. When an ABC News reporter asked about Khashoggi in front of MBS, Trump threatened to revoke the network’s broadcast license. . . . . White House aides have privately admitted that this month has been the most challenging stretch of Trump’s second term.
Other Republicans have begun to notice. Some of Trump’s closest allies have warned him about polls that show the public is unhappy with some of his extreme moves, including cheering on masked ICE raids and demolishing the East Wing of the White House. Trump has so far been unwilling to do much to take on—or even acknowledge—the problem of affordability
Meanwhile, an urgency has set in: The calendar churns even for a president who has wielded power in extraordinary ways. Each day closer to next year’s midterms is a reminder that Trump is a lame duck whose time governing with Republicans in charge at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue could soon be coming to a close. Even before then, his sway within his own party appears to be ebbing. One official who worked in both Trump administrations told me, “The president has had absolute loyalty from Republicans this year.” But, the official added, “losing that would be the first step toward losing power—and relevancy.”
We can only hope that 1026 proves devastating to Republicans up and down the ballot.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
ICE/MAGA Versus Religious Clergy
Nearly two dozen people including many faith leaders were arrested outside the Broadview ICE facility in Illinois this week after a tense standoff with federal officers, marking the latest flashpoint in a series of confrontations between clergy demonstrators and law enforcement under President Donald Trump’s renewed immigration crackdown.
Clergy representing Catholic, Jewish, Episcopal and interfaith coalitions gathered Friday morning to demand an end to workplace raids and mass detentions. The protest escalated when officers ordered the group to disperse; several faith leaders refused, kneeling in the street in prayer before being taken into custody, according to Reuters. Organizers say at least one of the arrestees was a 72-year-old priest who has participated in immigration vigils for more than a decade.
The arrests come just weeks after a separate incident in Chicago in which a Methodist minister was struck in the head by a pepper-ball projectile during a police response to a protest outside a migrant intake center. Earlier this fall, a group of faith leaders including priests and nuns were detained after being refused admission inside to administer communion, an essential element of a Catholic’s faith life. Immigrant-rights groups say the pattern reflects a broader escalation in the policing of clergy-led actions, many of which have historically been peaceful.
Legal experts note that faith-led protests often invoke First Amendment protections for both free exercise of religion and free assembly, making these clashes particularly sensitive. While authorities argue that restrictions are tied to safety and facility security, civil liberties groups warn that aggressive enforcement, especially when directed at clergy, can have a chilling effect on religious and political expression.
ICE officials said the Broadview arrests occurred only after “multiple lawful orders were ignored.” Organizers counter that civil disobedience is central to their mission and vowed to continue holding weekly vigils outside the facility, calling the arrests a sign that we are in “a spiritual emergency.”
ICE has coldheartedly announced it will be raiding Spanish speaking church through the holiday season. The disconnect between MAGA's feign fealty to a non-white Middle Eastern savior and how brown skinned refugees are being brutalized could not be more stark.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Is MAGA Finally Beginning to Fracture?
This [past] weekend, Donald Trump picked a fight with two Republicans in Congress and lost.
The president has reportedly been apoplectic about a House vote, which could come as soon as Tuesday, ordering the Justice Department to release its files on the sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein. On Friday Trump attacked Thomas Massie, the eccentric conservative who, along with the California Democrat Ro Khanna, spearheaded a maneuver to bypass House leadership and force the Epstein measure to the floor. Massie’s wife of three decades died unexpectedly last year, and on social media, Trump mocked him for remarrying. “Boy, that was quick!” he wrote, adding, “His wife will soon find out that she’s stuck with a LOSER!”
Then, on Saturday, Trump lashed out at Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA die-hard who has been loudly demanding transparency on Epstein, calling her, among other things, a traitor.
Trump seemed to be trying to dissuade other Republicans from voting yes on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Khanna wrote. But many were still planning to defect, with Massie predicting as many as 100 Republicans might join him. Such defiance, Khanna told me, would show “how weak Trump’s hold is becoming on his own caucus, and it may signal the beginning of the end of Trump’s dominance.”
Perhaps Trump agreed, because on Sunday night he reversed course, announcing that Republicans should go ahead and vote for the release of the Epstein files. In doing so, he avoided a humiliating public rebuke. What he cannot avoid, however, is the growing disillusionment among conservatives with their deeply unpopular lame-duck leader.
The last wretched decade shows that reports of a MAGA crackup ought to be viewed somewhat skeptically. There have, after all, been many moments when Trump seemed to be losing his grip on the right, only for his hold to grow stronger.
But a few things are different now. In his first term, Trump inherited a good economy from Barack Obama, and the establishment Republicans who surrounded him prevented him from tanking it with major trade wars or mass deportations. Much of Trump’s base distrusted these figures, seeing them as part of a deep state cabal trying to thwart his populist agenda. But they shielded the country from at least part of the price of Trump’s erraticism.
This time, however, Trump came into office with a much shakier economy, and, unrestrained by Washington technocrats, has proceeded to make it worse, putting the country in a sour mood. “The five-alarm fire is health care and affordability for Americans,” Greene told Politico. “And that’s where the focus should be.”
For a while, Republicans could dismiss polls showing public unhappiness with Trump as fake news. Such denial has become harder in the wake of this month’s elections, in which Democrats made outsize gains virtually everywhere. As Axios has reported, Republicans are now worried about the possibility of a Democratic upset in a Tennessee district that Trump won by 22 points.
When a president becomes a drag on his party, it can have a psychological effect on partisans. Suddenly, flaws they’d barely registered come into focus. . . . . We may never see a Republican stampede away from Trump, but some of his supporters are experiencing a moment of clarity about his character.
Even before this weekend, many conservatives were livid about an interview he gave to Laura Ingraham of Fox News explaining the need for H1-B visas, which American employers use to hire foreign workers for certain high-skilled jobs. The visas, Trump told Ingraham, were necessary to bring in talent. “We have plenty of talented people,” Ingraham said. “No, you don’t,” Trump replied.
To many Trump supporters, angry about both immigration and an increasingly bleak job market, his words were a slap in the face. “We’ve never seen an administration crash and burn in its first year so badly,” wrote Anthony Sabatini, a Republican county commissioner in Florida.
A few days later, Mike Cernovich, the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and MAGA influencer, posted a surprising critique of the administration. During a visit to Washington, he wrote, “the talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history books.” Many, he said, were asking, “Do people just think Democrats will never win and they’ll all get away with this?”
Now, no remotely savvy person can be surprised by this White House’s epic graft. . . . But as Trump burns up political capital on personal enrichment, some on the right might be starting to suspect that it’s not just the libs being owned.
It was against this backdrop of conservative disaffection that Trump rebuked Greene and Massie. Many right-wing influencers reacted with unusual fury, some posting images of burning MAGA hats. Trisha Hope, a Texas Republican who was at Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, wrote that she was no longer entertained by Trump, and was “beginning to find him repulsive.” Scott Morefield, a columnist for the right-wing site Townhall, called Trump’s posts “cruel in a way that should make any human with basic empathy question what kind of human he is.”
[I]n the past, when Trump has turned on Republicans, his base has tended to follow. Trump ended the political careers of Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, once a darling of the Tea Party; Bob Good, former chair of the right-wing House Freedom caucus; and his own first vice president, Mike Pence. His inability to stand up to Greene and Massie suggests that something has changed.
Trump’s grudging endorsement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is kind of absurd, since he could, if he wanted, simply instruct the Justice Department to release the files. Even if Khanna’s bill passes the House, Trump will have levers to thwart the files’ disclosure. Republicans might kill the measure in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes. Last week, under pressure from Trump, the Justice Department announced an investigation into prominent Democrats who’ve been associated with Epstein, and the administration may say it needs to keep the files under wraps while that inquiry is open.
But even if the files never come out, it’s increasingly clear that the MAGA coalition is fragmenting. On Monday, I asked Morefield how significant he thought the fissures in the movement were. “I think it’s pretty serious,” he said. “Epstein really started it. It was like the crack in the dam, I think.”
Even if the dam holds for a while longer, we can now see how brittle it is.
Monday, November 17, 2025
The Felon And the Epstein Scandal
In a sharp reversal, the Felon overnight said that House Republicans should vote for the release of all of the Epstein files. The Washington Post reports:
In a sharp reversal, President Donald Trump said late Sunday that House Republicans should support a measure that would require the Justice Department to release the information it has related to its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — after key lawmakers said support was building ahead of a closely watched vote. . . . . Before Trump’s post, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who introduced the legislation with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), suggested that “100 or more” House Republicans could vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files this week despite opposition from Trump.
Why the change? Obviously, the Felon believes he will lose the vote in the House - and hopefully the Senate as well - and doesn't want a glaring defeat that would be trumpeted by the news media. This change in posture doesn't demonstrates any interest in doing the right thing, merely not wanting to look like a "loser" or that he has lost his stranglehold over the GOP. Another possibility is that he believe there will not be 60 votes in the Senate, so he can afford to pretend to support accountability. Meanwhile, as a piece in the New Republic lays out, the felon remains very panicked by the Epstein files and their possible release:
The key thing about [the Felon's]
Donald Trump’spresidency, when you examine it alongside the history of every other Oval Office occupant, is that to understand what drives him day-to-day, you have to have a handle on his psychology—all those twisted urges and impulses that twitch through his brain. This is because so much of what he does is by pure instinct—id unchecked by superego; animal urge unmitigated by conscience. That, plus the fact that all he really cares about is how he looks on TV (more specifically, Fox News and Newsmax). Who can doubt that part of what he loves about bombing those boats in the Caribbean is that he loves seeing them go boom on a big screen?So, when we analyze this administration, we have to look for the psychological “tells” in a way we simply didn’t with any other president, because the other presidents, no matter their politics, weren’t emotional 5-year-olds who lived in an impenetrable image bubble created and maintained by their staffs and their propagandists with press passes. And the psychological tell of the week? Hauling Representative Lauren Boebert into the White House Situation Room to try to break her down and make her change her vote on the Jeffrey Epstein discharge petition.
Think about this purely as a presidential decision. We don’t know whether this was his idea or if an aide hatched this plan and he liked it, but it amounts to the same thing. Yeah, we can picture Trump thinking: the Situation Room; secret, private, all those fancy screens and maps—that’ll intimidate her.
When LBJ had a recalcitrant member of Congress to win over, he invited him up to the Truman Balcony for a bourbon. Trump locked Boebert in the room that’s supposed to be used to monitor military operations. . . . . willing hacks Pam Bondi and Kash Patel showed up. Wait, what? What was their presence meant to imply? Why did the attorney general and the FBI director need to be present on a legislative matter? Was the idea to hint to Boebert that she could face some sort of legal consequences if she didn’t capitulate? On a congressional vote?
Boebert laughed it all off, but she didn’t cave. In fact, the strong-arming apparently left her all the more convinced Trump may be hiding something. Hard to imagine I’d ever be saying this, but: good for her.
[The Felon]
Trumpis clearly in a dead panic about this. We saw this week the reason why. Many of the Epstein emails released this week were—at least in the court of public opinion—incriminating to one degree or another; none more so than the one Epstein wrote to an unnamed acquaintance in December 2018, in which he announced: “i am the one able to take him down.” Also: “I know how dirty donald is.”But just stop and think: We are sitting here, in November 2025, in the middle (or the beginning-middle) of a credible investigation into whether the president of the United States engaged in sex acts with underage girls. (And when media allies such as Megyn Kelly publicly try to finesse the differences between having sex with a 5-year-old versus having sex with a 15-year-old, that’s not a good sign.)
There’s still plenty of reason to think we’ll never get a satisfactory answer about Trump’s place in Epstein’s grotesque constellation of decadent elites. Trump still has a number of roadblocks to put in the way of getting to the point of the files being released. First and foremost, there’s the Senate. Because once the House votes to release the files, then the Senate has to. I haven’t seen much handicapping on this yet. But it would have to clear the 60-vote cloture hurdle, meaning that 13 Republicans would have to vote with the Democrats to bring the matter to final passage.
Then, of course, even if it does pass the Senate, Trump can veto it. At that point, two-thirds of each House would be required to override the veto. And even then, if all that happens, there’s still Bondi. She could just say, No, I’m not going to do it. Yes, that would be defying an act of Congress. Do you really have trouble picturing her doing that?
Of course, if this gets to that point, we’ll have a major national scandal on our hands, for one simple reason that will be crystal clear to a comfortable majority of the American people: If Trump and his goons are going to those lengths to keep these files from being made public, then he must obviously have something bad to hide.
This, however, is different. He’s not defending anything that could remotely be called a principle, and he’s not slaying any America-hating dragons. He’s just covering up his own potential monstrous crimes. Given the way we’ve already seen this issue divide MAGA land, even some percentage of Trump’s hard-shell base will surely see the difference.
Sunday, November 16, 2025
The Felon Lashes Out at Republicans” Demanding Release of Epstein Files
For someone who claims to be innocent of any wrong doing in the context of the Epstein files, the Felon sure is acting very guilty and like someone who has a great deal to hide. Plus, there are reports his name appears in the recently released Epstein emails over 1600 times. Perhaps more dangerous for the nation, he seems desperate to generate distractions to get the media reporting on other stories. The Felon has order the Department of Justice to investigate Democrats even though former prosecutors found no basis for any charges. Perhaps most dangerously, the Felon may well be on the verge of launching a poorly thought out war on Venezuela, allegedly because of drug trafficking, but truth be told, it's all about distracting the media and the public. Such military action would cost lives - possibly some American lives - not that the Felon cares as demonstrated by the strikes against fishing boats where no proof of drug smuggling has been provided. As for Republicans pushing for the release of the Epstein files, the Felon is downright apoplectic and hash lashed out at Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massie among others. A piece at Salon looks at the Felon's growing desperation. Here are excerpts:
President Donald Trump[The Felon] is continuing to distance himself from the fallout of the latest release of Jeffrey Epstein‘s emails, blaming Democrats and criticizing Republicans calling for a full release of the Epstein files.Trump took to Truth Social today to vent his frustration, calling his involvement with Epstein a “hoax.”
“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem,” Trump wrote. “Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” he said, calling out members of his own party.
Republicans are indeed breaking ranks to join a bipartisan bill demanding the release of the Epstein files. The effort, led by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Rep. Ro Khana, D-Calif., is gaining traction, so much so that House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised that it will be voted on “next week.”
Massie said that the bill faces an uncertain future, requiring two-thirds of the House to vote in favor to prevent a veto from Trump.
“But if we are somehow able to get two-thirds vote here in the House, that puts a lot of pressure on the Senate, and also, if the Senate does pass it, that’s a very serious step for the president,” Massie told CNN.
A senior White House official, speaking with CNN, said that Trump and Johnson met and discussed the looming vote before the speaker’s announcement on Wednesday. “It was made clear to President Trump, and he understands that this is an inevitable reality,” the official said.
Still, Trump is on the defensive, saying that “Democrats, not Republicans,” are the ones who are involved with Epstein, and calling for an investigation into influential Democrats. “I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people,” a Thursday post on Truth Social read.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Trump said.
Again, if the Felon is totally innocent, why the desperation to keep the Epstein files from being released? I believe we know the answer: the Felon is NOT innocent.
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