We have become way too accustomed to the idea that the founders of this country did not foresee the damage that could be done by a madman serving as president. Our problem isn’t just the unhinged lunatic whom 77 million of our fellow citizens saw fit to elect in 2024. It’s the whole fucking system.

This country is supposed to be comprised of three essential elements: The Constitution, our set of governing laws, which is written on paper and is kept in Washington D.C., the only piece of land in the United States that is not a state, but the “District of Columbia.”

The second element is the land. The United States started out with the 13 states that had been colonies of the British Empire. The country expanded as land was seized by force from indigenous people whose presence here predated settlers from Europe by thousands of years. It was further expanded by the Louisiana Purchase, which was not a transfer of title to land, much of which was unexplored at the time of its sale, but instead a granting by sale of the right to take lands controlled by indigenous tribes by treaty or conquest by war. The rest of the land we now consider the Continental United States was seized forcibly from Indian peoples or gained by war with Mexico or treaties and purchases from Spain.

The third element is people. I don’t use the term “citizens” here, because the founders did not grant citizenship except to white men. Citizenship had to be gained for slaves by fighting a Civil War with slave-owning states, and by amendments to the Constitution granting citizenship to former slaves and those born within the boundaries of the country and by the 19^th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

Our constitutional republic is failing because the Constitution is failing the other two elements or our country, the land and the people. The Constitution has been chipped away by the Supreme Court, which has imposed limits on citizenship of people by restricting the right to vote. The Congress, another branch, has abdicated its responsibility to provide a check on the other two branches by refusing to write laws limiting the power of either the judiciary or the executive.

This has left the executive – the president – unbound. The Supreme Court quite literally removed one check on the executive – the laws of the land – by granting the president immunity from prosecution for official acts taken as president. The Supreme Court, in Trump v. United States, did not immunize the president for private or unofficial conduct, but the Congress has done that already in requiring everyone serving in the government to abide by ethics laws barring conflicts of interest and self-dealing…except for the president.

What sense does it make that no one can engage in corruption and self-enrichment from public service, but the president can? It doesn’t make sense, but self-enrichment by powerful people, beginning with politicians, at the public trough has been baked into our constitutional republic from the beginning.

Take, for example, surveying. Land does not have value unless it can be defined, and boundaries defining pieces of land are determined by surveyors. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, our first and third presidents, were famously surveyors before they were presidents. This gave them enormous power to draw land boundaries that would become political lines of demarcation such as counties and towns and cities. And it enabled both men to favor friends over enemies in the defining of land on the basis of value beyond its worth in a sale and in disputes over boundaries that might involve water resources or agricultural land utility.

When Thomas Jefferson set out to explore the land beyond the Mississippi River that had been purchased from the French, he put his cousin Meriwether Lewis in charge of the expedition, promoting him for that purpose from lieutenant to Captain, and reducing in grade William Clark from captain to lieutenant. He made certain that Lewis was educated in science and navigation, ensuring he was taught the use of a sextant and giving him access to his own library at Monticello that was filled with maps and books on American geography.

Privilege by virtue of wealth and family connections was baked into our constitutional republic from its beginning. I’ll give you a more recent example of manipulation of American land for profit by the men who run our government. When President Eisenhower, working with Senator Albert Gore Sr. from Tennessee, got the Federal Aid Highway Act passed in 1956, surveyors set out to map it. Decisions were made within states about where the highway would go. This involved, in many cases, which farms would be bisected by the road that became Interstate 70 as it ran through, for example, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, just to list four of the ten states it passes through. So farms that were bisected would cost more money to run because the land was divided and farm equipment would have to cross the highway. Farm equipment might have to move miles and miles to reach bridges over the highway, costing money in fuel and wear on equipment, not to mention the farmers’ time. Farms that the highway avoided would be worth more money.

And crucially, everywhere a highway exit was to be established, the land around it would become extremely valuable because of businesses that over time would spring up, such as gas stations, convenience stores, motels, and later, office complexes.

These were political decisions with winners and losers. Anyone with advance knowledge of the route the road would take and the location of interchanges could buy land cheaply that would be worth much more when the road went through and exits to local roads were established.

The corruption we see today with Donald Trump is nothing new. The only change might be that Trump has had to move overseas to ply much of his corrupt self-enrichment because so much of what we have here in this country has already been carved up by powerful men at the expense of the less powerful. A good example of this was the way interstate highways were surveyed to pass through poorer neighborhoods of cities, sparing more wealthy areas. Much later it would become known that highways brought pollution in the form of car and truck exhaust that would affect poorer areas much worse than wealthier ones. And this doesn’t even get into who got the construction contracts, who provided concrete and asphalt, who put up light poles in urban areas and around interchanges…

You get the picture. It’s never been of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s been of the wealthy, by the well connected, and for their friends and children and relatives right from the start.

It was worse in the beginning, as indigenous people were killed and forcibly removed from their land when territories and states were being carved out of wilderness and land was surveyed for government-granted homesteads and sale. This kind of extraordinary corruption continued when, after the Civil War, slaves were not granted land on which to farm and build businesses but were rather sold land by the plantation owners who had owned them.

How about that? You’re a slave, you can’t own anything but the clothes on your back, you aren’t allowed to own land, even freed slaves had difficulty buying land, and freed slaves were not permitted to own land collectively on which to build a church, for example. Groups like the KKK terrorized Black citizens to keep them from voting. They burned Black businesses and Black churches. The Tulsa riots burned to the ground an entire neighborhood of homes and businesses owned by Blacks to terrorize them into submission and control by whites.

This is what our constitutional republic has wrought in our tortured past. Today, what we have is what you might call continuation of the same terror by other means. Supreme Court decisions have reduced the meaning and power of the citizenship of Black Americans by, piece by piece, destroying the Voting Rights Act. The Citizens United decision reduced the power of everyone’s citizenship by allowing corporations to buy and sell not just individual politicians, but an entire political party. One man, Elon Musk, spent $300 million of his own enormous fortune to buy the presidency for a man who in return, granted him the unconstitutional power to formulate a government department, DOGE, without Congressional authority, and conduct unconstitutional raids on government departments and services that bedevil us nearly a year later.

The bought-and-paid-for political party has carried out the commands of its corporate and billionaire masters in other unconstitutional ways. The Republican-controlled Senate denied President Obama his right to appoint a member of the Supreme Court by simply sitting on its constitutional duty to advise and consent for nearly a year until Obama was out of office, then turning around and granting votes on nominees by Trump within a few months.

This is not the way that our system of government is supposed to work. We are seeing not just the flaunting of laws and constitutional norms but their end.

I know what you’re thinking: What can we do in the face of this continual corruption and lawlessness? In the short term, we can refuse to be a part of it. The musicians and actors and dancers who have cancelled their appearances at the Kennedy Center are providing a good example of what it means to refuse. That place clearly means so much to Trump that he went to the trouble of illegally – as if that even means anything – put his name on it. So hit him where it hurts. Don’t let him present a single act or production or event that is of any quality or talent at all.

What can we do? Don’t watch CBS News. The takeover of CBS by the Ellison family and their hand-puppet Bari Weiss will not work if we don’t let it. CBS Evening News is already in third place. Weiss just put what Gary Legum at “Wonkette” called “a jar of mayonnaise” in the anchor chair. Send Weiss and her new jar to the basement.

Do you know what today is? It’s January 2. It’s time to get ready for the midterm elections. With everything the Republicans are doing, and with the evident diminishment of Trump’s power and his physical and mental state, we can win back the House, and we stand a chance to control the Senate.

Our constitutional republic is groaning under the weight of 250 years of unconscionable political and moral mendacity. On July 4, Trump will make as big of a fool of himself as he did with his incredibly misbegotten parade last summer. We can do just the opposite. We can transform the celebration of our country’s 250^th birthday by turning out in all our diversity as the people who made this country what it is today. We don’t own this country like the Republican Party thinks it does, and the Supreme Court wants it to. But we live here. We are citizens. We are proud of being Americans, and we have the ability and the power to show them what that means.

Tomorrow, I will have a few ideas of how we can do this. Until then, chin up and chest out. This is going to be our year.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

By “selective universities,” I mean places like Ivy League schools, along with places like Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the Chicago. Such schools admit only a small fraction of their applicants. However, to reassure both insiders and outsiders that they are open to admitting a broad range of students–whatever their socioeconomic background–these schools also have large numbers of people working departments of admissions to screen and evaluate applicants.

It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the actual effect of departments of admissions is that the student bodies of these institutions end up including more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than would happen if the schools just admitted students purely by SAT scores. Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John N. Friedman provide the evidence in “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, published online October 30, 2025, ungated copies available a various places, like here). They write at the start of the essay:

Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a small number of highly selective private colleges. Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. senators, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

From the abstract of the paper, they summarize the results this way (emphasis is mine):

We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admission rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of postcollege success.

In the paper, they write:

We consider a counterfactual admissions scenario in which colleges eliminate the three factors that drive the admis- sions advantage for students from high-income families—legacy preferences, the weight placed on nonacademic ratings, and the differential recruitment of athletes from high-income families—and refill slots with students who have the same distribution of test scores as the current class. Such an admissions policy would increase the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution by 8.8 percentage points …

The selective private colleges that are the focus of this study are what economists sometimes call “donative nonprofits,” meaning that they rely on donations (and earnings from an endowment based on those donations) as a major form of income. From a financial point of view, it is unsurprising that a donative nonprofit–with the potential for large future donations in mind–would tend to favor children of alumni or those from the top 1% of the income distribution over other applicants with equivalent test scores. But it’s useful to be clear on what’s happening here: when these selective schools tell potential applicants that they don’t just look at test scores, but instead use a variety of nonacademic criteria like being “well-rounded” or “authentic” for admissions, the actual result of their process is that applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted at a higher rate than others with the same test scores.

The post How Selective Universities Can Increase Socioeconomic Diversity: Admit by SAT Scores first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Just days after DCReport revealed the New York Fed quietly removed caps on emergency lending, the central bank injected another $34 billion into Wall Street—amid rising turmoil in precious metals markets.

On Sunday evening the New York Federal Reserve made another gigantic infusion of cash into one or more Wall Street banks.

On Monday DCReport revealed that after going more than five years with little to no cash infusions from the New York fed, one or more of the big Wall Street banks has been requiring gigantic infusions of cash since Halloween. On the day after Christmas at 8:00 in the morning there was a $17 billion cash infusion, our economics correspondent James S. Henry discovered.

Things have taken a turn for the worse.

On Sunday December 28th at 5 PM, when banks are closed, the New York Fed infused one or more Wall Street banks with $34 billion of cash.

Soon after, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange tightened requirements to speculate in silver and gold. The CME, as it’s known to traders, said this was a routine action to make sure the silver and gold markets remain liquid and firm.

The CME said the tightening was in response to volatility in the market for those two precious metals. That announcement went to subscribers to its alerts and was not reported, as best we can tell, in major press reports.

Cash infusions to banks are a standard operating practice. Sometimes banks get short on cash. But from early July of 2020 until Halloween there were virtually no such deals by the New York Fed helping Wall Street banks.

Then, in a scary move, one or more of the banks got $51 billion of cash on Halloween. The cash infusions from Friday and Sunday also equaled that amount. These huge cash infusions come after the New York Fed lifted the caps on how much the banking industry can get in emergency cash infusions.

The NYFed’s poorly worded Dec. 10 announcement went unreported by major news organizations.

At DCReport we think it’s an ominous sign that the NYFed is expecting more and larger cash calls soon. Why else would it make such a policy change?

The New York Fed does not disclose which banks benefit from these cash infusions, but people who follow precious metals markets and other speculative moves have been pointing for weeks to JP Morgan, the nation’s largest bank. One of JP Morgan’s units disclosed that it sold about 5,900 tons of silver it does not own in what’s known in the trade as a “short sale.”

Just as you can make money by buying something and holding on to it in the hope the price will rise, speculators can also do the opposite.

If you think the price of a commodity or any other assets are going to fall you can sell it at a high price hoping to buy it back at low price and profit off the price drop. The trading desks at the big banks do this by borrowing shares they don’t own or in some cases making “naked” sales of shares they don’t have at all.

The danger in a short sale is that if the price goes up there’s no limit to how much money you can lose.

Since the beginning of the year the price of silver has roughly tripled. That means those who sold short last year are in a squeeze and face cash calls that must be answered the same day if the price of silver or gold rises.

Christmas week the price rose to more than $84 on one of the metals exchanges and then fell 15% to a less than $72 a troy ounce. On another exchange the price didn’t rise quite as high before it fell 11.5% on the last day of 2025.

The concern here is not that the Fed can, and from time to time does, infuse banks with cash to cover shortfalls. It does this through a mechanism called a Repo in which the bank puts up collateral to cover the cash infusion. The rules include a sophisticated shield from federal Bankruptcy Court filings and with super low interest rates.

The issue is that after five years and three months with virtually no such cash infusions there’s suddenly a spate of them, three of them gigantic.

The Fed in New York has removed limits on the amount of cash it will provide the banking industry, although it is limiting individual banks to between $80 billion and $240 billion per day, depending on how you read its announcement.

Add the fact that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, after reviewing silver and gold market volatility, tightened up on speculation in silver and gold and these are clear early warning signs of trouble.

The last time we saw big cash shortfalls on Wall Street we saw the collapse of the economy in 2008. By some measures the Great Recession was more damaging and more enduring in the harm it caused than the Great Recession that began in 1929.

Families whose head was 35 or younger in 2008 were essentially wiped out financially.  Research by a California business school professor says the effect has been to wipe out the economy – the equivalent of two full years of all the economic activity in the U.S. since 2008. This means America is tens of trillions of dollars behind where it would be but for the misdeeds of Wall Street financiers during the George W. Bush administration, which basically let bankers ignore long established banking practices to minimize risk of systemic failures.

We still haven’t seen a word about this in any major publication that covers Wall Street.

Jim Henry and I know from experience that many of the journalists who cover Wall Street are masterful at developing sources and explaining what they’re told, but unlike DCReport they don’t routinely scour public disclosures, and they don’t have a deep understanding of the law and banking regulations, making them captive to their sources.

We also have yet to hear back from JPMorgan, five of whose spokespeople we reached out to for their side of this story. If and when they do reply, we will give you a full report of their stance.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post After ‘Unlimited’ Cash Shift, New York Fed Pumps Another $34B Into Wall Street appeared first on DCReport.org.

New Year’s Day feels like a time to reminisce about times past, to speculate about times to come, and to reflect and worry about one’s place along the journey. A concern that I perhaps share with others is that the pathway to future happiness may seem like a narrow one, so that my choices could so easily turn out to be incorrect, with catastrophic long-term consequences. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “On Self-Reliance” offers a number of reflections on this theme, include modern-sounding admonitions to trust your own intuition and ideas, and to push back as needed against social pressures and expectations.

The essay is perhaps best-known today for Emerson’s aphorism: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In other words, feeling an internal pressure to “be consistent” is another of those social pressures and expectations that should be critiqued and reconsidered. (Of course, being automatically opposed to social pressures and expectations would be another example of a “foolish consistency.” And making a change rather than giving in to “foolish consistency,” but then feeling compelled to stick to the change as new experience and evidence emerges, may only exchange one foolish consistency for another. I suspect that Emerson underestimates the difficulties of discerning, enunciating, and believing in one’s own intuition and ideas. Also, the possibility of “foolish consistency” does not rule out the possibility that a wise consistency may be a hallmark of great minds. This stuff isn’t easy.)

But on this re-reading of Emerson’s essay, I was struck by a comment that he attibutes to Caliph Ali: “Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.”

The phrase appears as the saying numbered XV in a 1717 manuscript Sentences of Ali, Son-in-law of Mohamet, and his fourth successor, translated from an authentick Arabick manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, by Simon Ockley. Caliph Ali (c 600-661) was a cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad.

Imagine that looking for your true long-term happiness, for your destiny, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. If so, the task may seem impossible. But now imagine that you are rolling around the haystack, or perhaps more apropos, that the haystack is also rolling around you. You become much more likely to be pricked with that needle, whether you are carefully searching for it or not, especially if you remain sensitive to the presence of the needle. I know that I’m a lucky guy. But many of the deepest connections and joys in my personal and work life in large part seemed to come seeking after me, and my task was to notice when they pricked my attention. May you experience your destiny seeking you in the year to come.

The post Is Your Destiny Seeking You? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Everybody is doing their annual wrap-ups, cataloging the ups and downs of 2025, celebrating the rise of the resistance, predicting success in the midterms in November, trashing Trump and MAGA.

Fine. I’ll go along with all that, as far as it goes.

This year reminds me of the YouTube show “Fuck This House” created by comedian Deric Cahill, whose perpetual need to repair the baseboard beneath the kitchen sink resides at the front of his mind like the Supreme Court – it’s going to break your back, and still you can’t fix it.

That’s the way I feel about the whole year. Even the wins weren’t really wins. Every time a district court judge issued an injunction against some outrage by Kristi Noem or tried to stop the firing of several thousand civil servants from a damaged governmental department like Education, the Supreme Court would use its fucking rocket docket to dump a bucket of shit all over rationality and the rule of law.

Look out the window. We have masked Nazis running amok in our streets. Did you grow up thinking that one day, we too would have our own Gestapo terrorizing an entire population of people just because they’re not walking around with proof of citizenship? I thought we were done with stop and frisk. Now it’s stop and throw on the ground and stomp their necks and toss them in cages.

Overseas it’s been no better, in some ways, even worse. Israel quite literally bombed Gaza back to the Stone Age. Russia is still rocketing kindergartens and maternity hospitals and murdering civilians in their beds in Kyiv. If another war breaks out in Africa, the continent will detach itself and drift south until it hits Antarctica.

Vladimir Putin seems to be aspiring to evil heretofore achieved only by Hitler and Stalin. And Donald Trump? Don’t even get me started. His hands appear to be falling off, and he’s going to have to install Ted Nugent in a Vegas-style residence at the Kennedy Center if he wants the place to continue to provide “performing arts” as its purpose was envisioned when it first opened in 1971. If he adds any more gold leaf to the White House, they’ll have to jack the place up and drill holes for new concrete piers to keep it from subsiding into the land-filled coastal floodplain that it was built on.

I swore to myself at one point in my career that I would never write anything with the word “dystopian” in it, but that pledge is out the fucking window with this column. This country has dumbed-down and red-necked itself into a level of promiscuous depravity and dishonor that would have been unimaginable to my own parents and grandparents, not to mention my ancestors who were not only present at the country’s founding 250 years ago but helped to provide something that now seems almost quaint: moral principles.

We have work to do. That’s the best I can say. We still have enough good, thinking, reasonable people that we can get that work done. We are not yet doomed, but a lot of our fellow Americans want our dream of self-government to fail, and they’re coming close to making that happen. Our love of this country can save us, but we’d better get busy spreading it around.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

Do you know what week it is? It’s the week between Christmas and New Years. People are off work for the holidays. Lots of people on the slopes out in Colorado and Wyoming; thousands on Cruise ships enjoying the sun in the Caribbean; families gathering at home to celebrate the holidays.

It’s a happy season: sun, surf, slopes, golf…

But not at Mar a Lago. Down there in Palm Beach where Donald Trump goes to relax, there hasn’t been much relaxing and no golf at all over the weekend. Yesterday, Trump met with Volodymyr Zelensky for more than three hours to discuss how to bring an end to the War in Ukraine. Today, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss… well, it wasn’t clear what they discussed or why the meeting even occurred in the first place.

The headlines out of both meetings were best described as blah. “Trump and Zelensky Meet to Iron Out Peace Plan, but Deal Remains Elusive,” the New York Times headlined yesterday. That headline could have been written six months ago. In fact, some version of it probably was. Today, the Times headline was even lamer: “President and Netanyahu Exchange Praise After Meeting Showing Few Signs of Strain.” Gee, I didn’t know Israel and the U.S. were getting along, did you? Trump is calling for his pal Netanyahu to get a pardon for his ongoing legal travails. There’s another forehead slapper I couldn’t have predicted, could you?

Trump’s meeting with the Ukrainian president was preceded and followed by lengthy conversations with his good buddy, Vladimir Putin. Yet another big surprise. And you’ll never guess what Putin was doing over the Christmas holidays: bombing the living shit out of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, and every other major population center in Ukraine, plunging hundreds of thousands into darkness by knocking out power. It’s what you do when you know peace is going to be on the table: unleash ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and swarms of drones. Then get on the blower and tell Trump how badly you want peace.

Listen to what Trump said about Putin’s desire for peace after wreaking four years of killing and destruction on his neighbor, Ukraine: “He wants to see it happen, he wants to see it. He told me very strongly,” Trump said of Putin’s desire for peace. “I believe him.”

Meanwhile, Putin sent out Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to shoot down practically every idea discussed over lunch at Mar a Lago by Trump and Zelensky. No peacekeepers. No demilitarized zone. No “opportunity zone” in the Donbas, even after Trump has sent Witkoff and Kushner over to Moscow to talk business deals here, there, and everywhere.

Putin doesn’t want deals. He wants Ukraine.

Netanyahu is building military outposts from one end of Gaza to the other, and he’s got new settlements being built in the West Bank in areas they’ve never been before.

He doesn’t want peace with the Palestinians. He wants Gaza. He wants the West Bank. He wants the whole thing.

And we know all this. We know Putin doesn’t want peace; he wants more of Ukraine. He can’t settle for half a loaf now, after a million casualties, a broken economy, and pariah status for every Russian who wants to play in the villas they have on the Riviera or in condos in London that they can’t visit anymore. And we know Netanyahu isn’t going to let up after leveling Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians.

So what the fuck is Trump doing at Mar a Lago? The Golfer In Chief isn’t out there on the links. He’s meeting with Zelensky and Netanyahu and babbling to the press and doing his two-week thing that he always does when he has nothing to show for his peace-making. “It’s possible it doesn’t happen. In a few weeks, we’ll know one way or another.”

But he’s got his headlines. He’s got his photo ops. Hell, he pushed the Epstein files right out of the headlines.

You remember the Epstein files, don’t you? The day before Christmas…it seems like it was last month, but it was only five days ago...Trump’s DOJ found itself announcing that they had suddenly – surprise, surprise! – found one million new Epstein files. A million! And we know there’s good stuff in there, because most of them come from the Southern District in Manhattan out of the prosecution of Epstein in 2019 that put him behind bars for the first time since 2008. They presented evidence and testimony to a grand jury for three months. Can you imagine being one of 23 Manhattan grand jurors sitting in a room in a courthouse listening to prosecutors while they show you photos and papers and videos…all the stuff they found when they executed search warrants on Epstein’s townhouse in New York, and his Palm Beach mansion, and his ranch in New Mexico, and his island in the Caribbean.

Those million pages of Epstein files are crammed with the kind of stuff that Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone to see. Hell, today the New York Times published a long piece about Marjorie Taylor Greene in which she revealed that Trump told her if the Epstein files come out, “My friends will get hurt.”

Trump knew that profile of Greene was coming today. So yesterday and today he was doing one of the things he hates most in the world: He was holding meetings and listening to boring shit about making peace in Ukraine that he knows isn’t coming, and peace in Gaza that he knows is a pipe dream. And then he went before the press, which he hates, and he babbled a bunch of nonsense about his peace-making and his glorious conversations with his pal Putin, and he whined that after four years of Putin bombing and shelling and rocketing the shit out Ukraine, it was so unfair that Ukraine managed to hit one of Putin’s homes in the Novgorod region of Russia. “I was very angry about it,” Trump told reporters today at Mar a Lago. “It’s a delicate period of time. It’s another thing to attack his house.”

This after Putin over just the last couple of weeks sent thousands of missiles and drones across the border into Ukraine hitting apartment buildings, stores, rail depots, power stations, killing civilians, all with the purpose of terrorizing the people of Ukraine.

It’s been a delicate period of time for Ukraine for more than 1,400 days and nights since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. The houses of tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been destroyed by Russian bombs and rockets and drones. So, shut your fucking burger-hole about Putin and his fucking house.

Donald Trump doesn’t want peace in Ukraine or peace in Gaza. He knows what is in the Epstein files. He knows how many times they have found his name in there. He knows how many times he was on Epstein’s private jet. He knows where he went. He knows what he did. He wants to survive the biggest threat to himself and his presidency and his hold on the Republican Party that he has ever faced. He wants the whole Epstein files thing to go away.

But it’s not going away. He’ll probably make it to one of his golf courses tomorrow, but he’s going to be one miserable son of a bitch trying to hit that ball.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share