James B. Comey is going to sleep well tonight. His lawyer, Michael R. Dreeben, spent the morning in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, appearing at a hearing ordered by U.S. District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff on the subject of the validity of the indictment Comey faces for lying to the Senate and obstructing Congress.

Oh, boy, now comes that classic phrase, “not to put too fine a point on it.” The day did not go well for either the Department of Justice, which following the orders of Donald Trump, arranged to have Comey indicted, or for Lindsay Halligan, allegedly the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who appears to have fucked up the Comey indictment in every possible way that an inexperienced lawyer could.

The hearing was on Comey’s motion to dismiss the indictment on the basis that it was brought on Trump’s orders to retaliate against him for critical interviews he has given and what he has written about Trump since 2017, when he was fired by Trump. Halligan sat at the table for the government, alongside two Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) from the state of North Carolina, to whom she was forced to turn when none of the experienced AUSAs in her own office would consent to become involved in the indictment of Comey, which had already been rejected by the U.S. Attorney whom Halligan had replaced, Erik S. Siebert.

The hearing quickly devolved into another issue entirely: whether the indictment against Comey had been brought properly at all. Judge Nachmanoff was understandably curious about why former U.S. Attorney Siebert had found insufficient cause to indict Comey when that decision was up to him. The judge asked one of Halligan’s hired-from-out-of-state assistants, N. Tyler Lemons, for the declination memo that is typically written when a U.S. Attorney declines to indict a suspect who has been under investigation for committing a crime. Lemons was, shall we say, not forthcoming, telling the judge, incredibly, “I don’t know the world of documents that exist.”

The judge stiffly reminded Assistant U.S. Attorney Lemons, “You are counsel of record in this case,” and asked him if he had been inclined to “seek out a declination memo.” I wasn’t present for the hearing, and there were no cameras or recordings of what happened, but I would take a wild guess that Lemons did some hemming and hawing as he attempted to answer the judge’s question, finally admitting that on the orders of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, he had been told not to even talk about the existence of any purported declination memo, because the Department of Justice was “studying” whether they could make a case that they were legally justified in refusing to disclose it.

Oh, boy, that must have made Judge Nachmanoff happy, to have this deputy assistant U.S. attorney imported from another state standing there and telling him that the rather notorious Deputy Attorney General, who had been Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and conducted the sham-at-all-costs interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, was interfering with the proper functioning of his courtroom from across the Potomac River. The Washington Post had already reported that two sources in the DOJ had told them that the declination memo indeed exists. It’s likely that Judge Nachmanoff, situated in Northern Virginia, reads the Washington Post, so he was probably already aware that the memo exists. And yet this pipsqueak purporting to be an assistant U.S. attorney was telling him that he couldn’t talk about it because Todd “I’m covering Trump’s ass as fast as I can” Blanche had told him not to talk about it.

Judge Nachmanoff was curious about the indictment of Comey because U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick had on Monday issued what the Post called a “blistering assessment” of the case against Comey and ordered that all grand jury material from the indictment of Comey be turned over to his defense lawyers because “government misconduct may have tainted the grand jury proceedings.” Among other things, Magistrate Fitzpatrick ruled that Halligan, who personally made the presentment to the grand jury, had made “fundamental misstatements of the law” that “potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”

Apparently because Halligan was the one who presented evidence to the grand jury, Judge Nachmanoff called her to the podium to personally answer his questions about how the grand jury proceedings were handled. He was so unimpressed by her command of the facts and law regarding the grand jury and the process of bringing an indictment that he “quickly dismissed” her and told her to “sit down,” according to the Post.

Comey’s attorney, Dreeben, put the issue on the table adroitly. It turns out that the indictment Comey is facing, on the two counts of lying to and obstructing Congress, is a replacement for an initial indictment that was for three counts. Halligan was apparently shocked and unhappy that the grand jury voted “no bill” on one of the counts in the first indictment, so she handwrote changes on the indictment, deleting the count that was no-billed, and took it back into the grand jury room to be signed again.

There was a problem, according to lawyer Dreeben. Magistrate Fitzpatrick’s Monday ruling had been made after he had read all the grand jury proceedings and included the interesting detail that when Halligan took the “new” indictment back into the grand jury room, 22 out of 23 members of the grand jury were not there. The only grand jury member present was the foreman, whom Halligan got to sign the indictment without the other members of the grand jury voting on the new indictment or even seeing it.

Because the grand jury had not voted, “there is no indictment Mr. Comey is facing,” Dreeben told the judge. “The new indictment wasn’t a new indictment.”

All this time, U.S. Attorney Lindsay Halligan was sitting there at the prosecution table, mute in the face of Dreeben’s indictment of her as an incompetent, ignorant fool.

The actual subject of the hearing – the Comey motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive and retaliatory, was discussed until Judge Nachmanoff, having listened to arguments on both sides, announced that the issues in question were “too weighty and complex” to deal with immediately and said he would rule on that question after further consideration.

Comey’s attorneys had argued that Trump’s animus to Comey was obvious from his years of criticisms of Comey, including calling him a “traitor” and “guilty as hell” in social media posts and public statements. The fact that Trump fired former U.S. Attorney Seibert when he refused to indict Comey and appointed another of his personal lawyers, Halligan, in his place with orders to indict him, was even more evidence that Trump had singled out Comey in a discriminatory manner.

In reply to these facts, the two out-of-state assistant U.S. attorneys brought in to clean up after Halligan had soiled the courthouse, argued that the decision to prosecute Comey had been made “independently” by the Department of Justice, and all the evidence of Trump’s years of animus to Comey and his calls to prosecute him amounted to “legitimate prosecutorial motive.”

That’s right. Halligan had her two go-fers argue in court that Trump’s obvious discrimination against Comey wasn’t evidence of “discrimination,” because there had to be an “admission of discriminatory purpose” by Trump. Instead, they argued, “the only direct admission from the President is that DOJ officials decided whether to prosecute, not him.”

That is the logic presented by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to a federal district judge who will rule on whether the indictment of James Comey is legitimate or illegitimate. If Halligan had stood at the podium under questioning from Judge Nachmanoff and just shouted like a kindergartener, “because,” she would have stood a better chance today.

Instead, court-watchers and legal experts were unanimous that the indictment of James Comey is likely to be thrown out “with prejudice,” which means that it cannot be appealed to a higher court or brought again before a new grand jury.

Here is the thing about an autocrat who achieves a form of absolute power: Donald Trump is fond of telling his audiences that “I can do anything I want!” Yes, he can. He can appoint an incompetent, arrogant, ignorant fool such as Lindsay Halligan to an important position, and she is all the evidence you need that autocracy is a bad way of achieving your goals. Because when what you want to accomplish meets rules and evidence and logic in a court of law, the Lindsay Halligans of the world will not prevail. Comey will walk free one day soon, and he will be able to sit back and watch Donald Trump try to lie his way out of a whole bunch of evidence that shows his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is the one corrupt thing he won’t get away with.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

While the legacy press loves to run one hundred “DEMS IN DISARRAY!!!” stories at the first sign two Democrats don't agree on the precise shade of red of a stop sign, they’re much less interested in writing about the internal struggles of the Republican Party. It won’t do to have the public see the GOP as weak or ineffective or pulling itself apart at the seams. Why, that might give an advantage to Democrats and that would just be biased!

Anyway! There are, in fact, multiple civil wars tearing at the Republican Party, any of which should be front-page news but, you know, probably not that big a deal.

First, there’s the party fighting Donald Trump. It’s true Trump won that fight a long time ago. The vast majority of Republicans, cowards all, rolled over and let Trump do anything he wanted because it was easier than standing on what little principles they have. The few that refused to go full fash were run out of the party.

But that was then, and this is now.

Now, Trump is weak and failing. He’s physically and mentally compromised to a startling degree. The legacy press has gone to heroic lengths not to see Trump’s mental decay for a full decade, but it’s reaching the point where they’ll literally have to use an AI version of him to continue to fool the public.

For the first time, Republicans are looking to a post-Trump world, and they see a vicious backlash coming against the regime’s violence and corruption and incompetence. Best not to be too closely tied to Trump and hope to ride out the destruction.

A separate but related fight is over who defends pedophiles and who doesn’t. There are a lot of Republicans willing to fall on their sword to protect Trump and the other rich rapists in the files. But an awful lot of other Republicans are not willing to sacrifice themselves to protect pedophiles, rich or not.

Some of this has to do with protecting Trump and avoiding the fallout when Trump implodes. But there’s also the quieter war over the right’s move to embrace pedophilia. The legacy press ABSOLUTELY will not talk about that because it’s indefensible. For now.

The right has been working on moving the Overton Window on raping young teens for years, and the groundwork is not nearly in place. The Epstein files have forced the issue to the surface looong before the right was ready to have this discussion. That doesn’t mean they’ll give up, though. This is very important to them.

But here’s the fight currently raging that is more dangerous than anything else: The Nazis are trying to take over the Republican Party. And I’m sorry to say they’re going to win.

It’s not inevitable the Nazis are going to take over the Republican Party, but I would not bet against it even if I were using Donald Trump’s (stolen) money.

It’s important to understand that since the Civil War, yes, THAT one, the American right has not even TRIED to de-escalate. They moderated at the point of a gun during Reconstruction and immediately went on a decades-long murder spree the second the North withdrew its troops. Then the right fell in love with Nazism and when we went to war with Germany, they moved on to Jim Crow and then the Southern Strategy and then the War on Terror and then the Tea Party, always with the fucking Confederate flag waving in the background. Then they embraced Trumpism with screaming hate and open arms.

Now we’re back to the goddamn fucking Nazis.

Nick Fuentes has been increasing his power and influence in the Republican Party for years. He openly calls himself a Nazi. Please take note that the press, even now, refuses to call him one. After all, we don’t want to call Republicans Nazis, do we? That would be biased, even when they are literally calling themselves fucking Nazis.

One faction of Republicans is aghast to discover that their party is full of Nazis. To which one can only wonder where the fuck have they been for the last 10 years? Did they really think Charlottesville wasn’t Nazis? Did they think all the times Republicans waxed on and on about their love for Hitler or joked about “having a Nazi streak” were just little oopsies they didn’t mean?

Bullshit. They all knew exactly who and what their party was. They knew the GOP was the party of hate and rage and violence. But they thought THEY were in control. Not the Nazis.

It’s really important to understand that the American right is explicitly racist. White supremacy is their starting point and has been for over 160 years. They have devolved into white nationalism over that time, where just having white people as the apex was no longer enough. This had to be a nation of and for whites only. Those People were no longer welcome.

But it’s a very small step from “no longer welcome” to “Why not just kill them?” which is where the Nazis come in. To be a Nazi is to embrace an ideology of genocide. Homosexuals cannot just be erased from public life. They have to be killed. Deporting Latinos isn’t good enough. There can be no more Latinos. Blacks can live (some of them, at least) in chains and on plantations because those were the good ol’ days. But Jews? The Holocaust didn’t go far enough. The handicapped and mentally ill? A drain on society. Better to just eliminate them.

This is what it means to be a Nazi. This is where the American right has always been heading. This is the natural endpoint for a movement that can only escalate in hate and violence and cruelty.

Every time there is an off-ramp, they refuse to take it. Every time there’s a way back to the center and greater appeal to the wider public, they double down on hate and rigged elections and minority rule.

The right’s turn to fascism was not an accident. That was the plan all along.

That’s why the fight we are seeing is not one of morality; it’s one of timing.

The religious right needs Jews to fulfill their biblical prophecy in the Middle East to bring about the return of Jesus and the Rapture and blablabla. Nazis do not care about any of that and want all Jews everywhere dead. Accordingly, Nick Fuentes and his followers have zero desire to continue supporting Israel. That’s a dealbreaker for the Evangelicals. They all hate Jews, but one side wants to use them and the other wants them all dead right now.

But the greater hate always wins with the American right. Always. The more intense the rage, the quicker it absorbs the party and Nazis are nothing BUT hate. Hate and rage and spite.

Remember, Republicans just lost an election. Badly. They’re facing an electoral wipeout in the midterms, and Trump is so mentally compromised and consumed by his pedophile scandal, it’s no sure thing his regime will be able to stop the elections from happening. After that, it’s all downhill and the 2028 election will be a bloodbath for an already collapsing GOP.

Faced with loss after loss after loss, and the intense backlash of an enraged public demanding accountability for the crimes and corruption of the regime, the American right could take a step back and reorient itself as a movement dedicated to law and order (but for real). They could reject the criminal excesses and fascism of Trumpism. They could reject the politics of hate.

But they won’t because they haven’t done that since long before I was born, and I’m pretty fucking old.1 Instead, they will lurch to the right as they always do, insisting that if they could ONLY be more extreme, that would solve all of their problems. And who will be waiting to lead the way? Nick Fuentes and the neo-Nazis, because there is precious little room on the right left to lurch to.

Not for nothing, what’s beyond the total genocidal lunacy of Nazism? Double Nazis? Extra Crispy Nazism? Nazi Plus?

Nah. Faced with extinction in a country that rejected Trump and his fascism, the Republican Party will seek out the next Big Thing to energize their base of rage junkies, and that will be the swastika and calls for racial purity. Then Republicans will have no choice but to get on board and seig heil or exit politics because very few of them will find a home in the Democratic Party after spending a decade bending the knee to Trump.

I think a lot of people will be deeply dismayed at how many Republicans suddenly discover their deep and abiding love of Adolf Hitler.

I, however, will not be one of them. My opinion of Republicans cannot possibly get any lower. I have more respect for the Ebola virus and cockroaches. I fully expect the majority of the party to convert and for Nick Fuentes to rise to prominence before inevitably self-destructing as a pedophile or a rapist or some other creepy sexual perversion that seems to go hand in hand with white nationalism and Nazis. But the party will soldier on, goose-stepping and praising eugenics and the white race even as the legacy press struggles to find a way to equate genocide and demands for racial equality. Can’t both parties find a middle ground? Maybe some rights for Blacks and a little bit of genocide for Jews? It’s only fair!!!

I’d love to be wrong, but nothing these shitheels have done in the last century and a half gives me any reason to believe otherwise. They are what they are, and we had best come to terms with that reality and treat them like the cancer they’ve always been before they kill us all.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 349 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The House voted 427 to one to order the release of the files kept by the Department of Justice on convicted sex-trafficker, well-known pedophile, and friend of Donald Trump and other powerful men, Jeffrey Epstein. It turns my stomach to write a sentence containing that vote count. Just two days ago, the vote on the discharge petition to force today’s vote was 218 to 217, with only four Republicans voting for the petition. That the rest of them, save for the execrable Clay Higgins, changed their vote after Trump essentially gave them permission, turns my stomach.

And the shit keeps flowing downhill, as usual. I picked up the New York Times at Walgreens, and my eye caught this headline – a subhed, actually: “Bondi rushes to investigate Democrats.”

This is just wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. First, in my mind, is the normalization of this outrage by the Times in the manner the subhed is presented: flat, matter of fact, as if an Attorney General of the United States is ordered by the President of the United States to investigate members of a political party – and only members of that party – every day. This is not the way the system of law enforcement is supposed to work in this country. To my recollection, and I’ve been covering politics and government for a long, long time, this has never happened before.

Trump and his minions will say that it happened to him – that President Biden ordered the DOJ to investigate and prosecute Trump -- but it’s a lie. Trump was investigated for his theft of classified documents because the National Archives had repeatedly demanded that Trump return documents that he had taken from the White House. When several boxes of documents were finally presented by Trump’s team in January of 2022, months after they had been requested, the Archives discovered that they contained classified information and notified the DOJ in February. The DOJ ordered the FBI to investigate to see if other classified information had been taken from the White House and thus began what turned into the “classified documents case” that ended up being charged and prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The White House had nothing to do with this referral. President Biden was not even aware that this had taken place.

The Times story is accurate, in that it depicts Trump’s order to Bondi to investigate Democrats for their connections to Epstein as a tactic to distract from the DOJ documents, which are expected to show a close connection between Trump and Epstein. Such a connection has already been shown in the emails produced by the Epstein estate last week. The latest count of the number of times Trump’s name appears in the emails to and from Epstein is 2,020. You can be certain that was noticed by Trump and his people, and so the wheels of The Great Lie Machine were put in operation with the order to Bondi to investigate Democrats. The Times even came up with the number of minutes that transpire between Trump’s order to Bondi and her announcement that she had appointed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to head the investigation: 217 minutes.

So, all that is to the good. The Times is on the story of how Trump is “weaponizing” the DOJ, to use another word had not been in use to describe our system of law enforcement until Trump came along. But there is a way to take note of how unusual this is. The Times could have used the word “unprecedented” to describe Bondi’s “rush” to investigate Democrats on the orders of President Trump.

But come to think of it, so much has been unprecedented about Trump’s behavior since he took office in January of this year that the word has lost its meaning, and I guess you could make a case that the Times is justified, to some extent anyway, in dropping “unprecedented” from use in its headlines. There have been days, after all, that “unprecedented” would have appeared in every single headline in the New York Times in stories about Trump’s moves in office. His pardons of over 1,000 January 6 insurrectionists on the same day he ordered the closure of entire departments of the government by executive order come immediately to mind.

In yet another disgusting development, my colleague Nina Burleigh has done us the great favor of diving deeply enough into the Epstein emails that she has come up with a shit-spray of nuggets of exchanges between Epstein and Steve Bannon. The sickening details of the frat-boy back-and-forth between these two bottom-feeders are best read with one’s head close by the nearest toilet.

Burleigh reveals the, yes, stomach-turning fact that at the time Epstein was arrested in 2019, Bannon was in the process of making a documentary film about him.

Let us stop and consider that for a moment. Epstein had been convicted of the crime of “felony solicitation of a minor for prostitution” in Florida. At the time of his conviction, Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, wrote a series of articles that exposed the secret and extraordinarily corrupt plea deal Epstein had worked out with Trump’s DOJ to avoid federal prosecution. She identified 80 – eighty – of Epstein’s victims and proved beyond a shadow of doubt that in addition to his conviction for a sex crime, Epstein had for years been running an extensive sex ring, trafficking underage girls to wealthy and powerful men.

Bannon knew this, and still he was arranging to make a kiss-kiss-and-let’s-forget-the-details documentary about Epstein.

Bannon was all over Epstein with requests for money and jet-favors and business advice, but then, that’s in character for the man who was convicted of fleecing suckers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scam that involved promising to help Trump build his wall on the border with Mexico. The only thing that got built was additions to Bannon’s bank account. When he was arrested for the crime, he was on a billionaire’s mega-yacht off the coast of Connecticut.

Emails between the two reveal that Epstein provided his private jet for Bannon to fly all over the world for meetings with billionaire financiers including Qatari sheiks and a former Gulf prime minister. To describe the flavor of their emails as “locker room talk” insults both locker rooms and the act of talking. Here is just one nugget from Burleigh’s Substack, "American Freakshow."

“Short notice for jet charter,” Jeff texted Steve in November 2018. “But can for tomorrow morning to Paris lunch in Paris then fly you to wherever”. Bannon replied, “What a life.” and “u r a pretty good asst.” Epstein responded, “Massages. Not included”.

Epstein and Bannon took to referring to one another as “brother,” a rather dated form of hip-speak commonly used by stiff-backed squares thinking they are getting down with the dudes, if you catch my drift. The diminutive for “brother,” “bro,” isn’t found in the emails uncovered by Burleigh, but among the 20,000-some that were produced last week, I can guarantee you “bro” is in there somewhere.

Disgusting references to women pepper the emails throughout. Listen to this, from Burleigh’s Substack: “How was Paris fashion week,” Steve inquired in Spring 2018. “There’s nothing left in my testicles but a speck of dust .. and a puff of air,” Jeff replied. “Im putting up a poster of you in my apartment,” Steve wrote back.

You ask yourself how much lower could scum like Bannon go in his quest to become one of this country’s most repellent public characters, and then you discover that the last email message Epstein sent was from Teterboro Airport on July 6, 2019, as FBI agents closed in on his jet to arrest him for sex trafficking minors. They had been discussing the documentary film that Bannon had been working on, and the message Epstein sent was to, you guessed it, his “brother,” Steve Bannon. Here it is in its entirety:

“All cancelled.”

If only these assholes could be cancelled, every one of them, forever. But they are still here among us, living it up in spas for the super-rich like Palm Beach and on ranches in Montana and New Mexico, at the tops of Manhattan skyscrapers, flying hither and yon on their Gulfstream jets that cost in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was learned today that Larry Summers, about whose alleged contrition over his Epstein connections I wrote last night, will continue to teach five classes at Harvard on the subject of economics, because of course Summers was such an economic genius that he frequently went to Jeffrey Epstein for investment advice. We should have known that was coming. Summers is a member of the club. Harvard is the club. The way the club has always worked is to close ranks around even the worst of its members in their time of need, especially when they are men.

This is hard to say, but the problems we have in this country are deeper than the organized sexual abuse of minors. We know that some of these masters of the universe have indeed been involved with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and taken part in sexual abuse of minors. They have also taken their money and donated it to a political party that has the single aim of undermining our democratic system and denying ordinary citizens the right to vote because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity or even their gender. And far, far too many of them are bent in their determination to control the lives of women.

Epstein and Trump and the wriggling, oily likes of Steve Bannon are part of a deeper rot in the soul of this nation. Money is at the heart of it. The more money these monsters accumulate, the worse things get for the rest of us. It is no coincidence that when we speak of the “powerful men” who were befriended by Epstein and along with him took advantage of underage girls – we may learn that underage boys were abused as well – we are speaking of men who shared secrets not only about sex but about how to make themselves and each other even more wealthy.

It turns my stomach to say this, but we have not yet seen the bottom into which these wicked creatures have led us. Not even close.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

How much additional money is the US government raising with its tariffs? Jay Shambaugh offers some useful perspective in “Tariffs are a particularly bad way to raise revenue” (Brookings Institutions, November 5, 2025).

This figure shows tariff revenues as a share of GDP in the US and the OECD countries (that is, mainly high-income countries) since 2005. As you can see, average pre-Trump tariff revenues for these countries were around 0.2% of GDP. The US level bumped up a bit in the first Trump administration, but since has skyrocketed: the final US data point is monthly data for August 2025.

Total US federal revenue in the last 50-60 years has been about 16-18% of GDP. Against that base, an increase of 1% of GDP is notable.

How does the new US level of tariffs rank internationally? Shambaugh offers this useful figure. The US level in 2022 and in August 2025 are shown in yellow. The green bars show higher income developed economies, while the blue bars show lower-income deveoping countries. Low-income countries tend to have higher tariff revenues as a share of GDP for several reasons. One is that trade is often a higher share of their total economy, so a given level of tariffs brings in more money: this can be especially true for small island economies. Also, developing countries often have a larger part of their economy in the “informal” sector, which is administratively difficult to tax. By contrast, taxing what comes over the border is comparatively easy. Shambaugh writes: “At 1.2 percent of GDP, the U.S. would be joining countries like Zambia and Tunisia, and closing in on Sierra Leone (though well below the small island states like Vanuatu).”

Much of Shambaugh’s essay explains why tariffs are bad for consumers, bad for multinationals, and bad for economic growth, and for those who are not already bored and exhausted by my own attempts to explain these reasons, I commend his explanation to you. I’ll just add that if this particular federal tax increase is the only political acceptable one for the current configuration of US politics, then it would probably be prudent to commit the additional revenue to lower budget deficits over time (and to offset part of the reduction in federal revenues from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” signed into law in July 2025), rather than treating it as “free” for the spending.

The post US Tariff Revenues in Perspective first appeared on Conversable Economist.

He’s going to lose the Epstein file vote in the House tomorrow. He knows it. Everybody knows it. That’s why he “flipped” last night, as the mainstream media is reporting it, telling House Republicans that they can essentially vote their conscience.

I know…I know…the idea of “Trump” and “Republicans” and “conscience” in the same sentence is so foreign and out of whack, it feels like we’re having some kind of slimy bad dream.

Nevertheless, there it is: evidence that for the first time since he lost the vote in the election of 2020, Trump is weak. When it comes to his connection to the Abominable Pedophile Man, Jeffrey Epstein, none of his tricks are working. Marjorie Taylor Greene went off the reservation, and Trump issued a lengthy excommunication from MAGA on Truth Social, withdrawing his endorsement and giving her a new nickname, “Wacky Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown (Remember, Green turns to Brown where there is ROT involved!).” Trump has always been the master of the snappy put-down nickname, so it’s even more evidence of weakness when he feels the need to explain the genesis of what he says he’s going to call Greene from now on.

Trump’s weakness popped out of the closet last week when he lost the vote on the discharge petition. He had threatened the four Republicans who said they would vote for the petition, beginning with Kentucky Congressman Tom Massie, who along with Ro Khanna of California authored the discharge. He called for Massie’s ouster from Congress, threatened to run a primary challenger against him, and even attacked him for his remarriage last week after the death of his wife in June of 2024. “Boy, that was quick!” wrote the thrice-married and multi-philandering Trump on Truth Social, opening the door for Massie’s quick retort on “This Week with Jonathan Karl” yesterday: “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars and we are winning. I am not tired of winning yet,” Massie said Sunday.

Trump and Republicans lost bigly on November 4 in Virginia and New Jersey and in the California vote to allow redistricting. That was another blow to his power. He looked weak. He was weak. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was still refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva, the 218^th vote for discharge, when the drop of the Epstein emails hit last week. As reporters worked their way through nearly 23,000 emails to and from Epstein, Trump’s name popped up more than anyone had expected. I haven’t seen the latest count, but the last time I checked, CBC was reporting that Trump’s name appears more than 1,500 times in the emails, more than the name of any other person, and there are a lot of names of powerful people in there.

By the end of last week, it was clear. Not only had Trump and Epstein been “best friends” for some 15 years, they stayed in touch even after Epstein was convicted on state charges of soliciting prostitution in Florida, where they lived down the street from each other in Palm Beach.

Rumors and supposition were confirmed in black and white text. Trump was very, very close to a known pedophile. MAGA has been obsessed with pedophile conspiracies for years now. It was inevitable that the email evidence would make Trump look even weaker, and he did.

Now we’re told that perhaps as many as 100 House Republicans will vote tomorrow to force release of the Epstein files by the DOJ. Majority Leader Thune has promised a vote in the Senate, and there are reports that Republican Senators will join their House colleagues and vote for the files to be released. By day’s end, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he would sign the bill to release the files, adding a classic Trumpian caveat: “Sure I would. Let the Senate look at it. Let anyone look at it, but don’t talk about it too much.” He couldn’t stop himself: Epstein is “a Democrat problem. The Democrats were Epstein’s friends, all of them. And it’s a hoax. The whole thing is a hoax.”

When the man opens his mouth, and croaks the word “hoax,” you know he’s in trouble. Repeated meetings between his campaign and Russia in 2016 were a “hoax.” The 2020 election he lost was a “hoax.” The Access Hollywood tape, on which he admitted to grabbing women “by the pussy” was a “hoax.” He even denied the voice on the tape was his. Remember?

What is Trump going to do when he loses the vote tomorrow? He can’t primary 100 House Republicans. He can’t primary however many Republicans vote to release the files in the Senate. There will just be too many of them. To use the word that defined Democrats only a week ago, Trump “caved.” He is now for the thing he said he was against, and of course, as President, he could order their release at any moment, even tonight, before he loses the vote.

Ever since Trump won election last November, the conventional wisdom has been that he “rules” the Republican Party. He has “remade the party in his image,” the pundits like to say. There are even commentators who say that the Republican Party has ceased to exist as we have known it. It’s now the Trump Party. Trump’s rule is so absolute that no Republican has dared to defy him.

Until they didn’t. Only four Republicans voted for the discharge petition. Four. That’s all it took for Trump’s grip on the party to break.

Deny, deny, deny. That’s what Trump is going to do now. First, he’ll have his DOJ come up with a zillion ways to deny the release of hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of Epstein files. Trump has already called for the DOJ to investigate Democrats he says were associates of Epstein. Bondi will say that they can’t release some of the documents “because of ongoing investigations.” Then they’ll come up with redactions of names and places and crimes because they have to “protect the victims.” These are victims who weren’t protected when Epstein was first charged with state crimes in 2007. They weren’t protected from adult men on the Epstein business jet flying to his island in the Caribbean. They weren’t protected by Donald Trump when Trump himself “knew about the girls,” as Epstein admitted in one of the emails. They weren’t protected when adult men were sexually assaulting them as teenagers.

Trump will deny all of it. He has denied that he wrote and drew the nude figure of a female body on his “Christmas card” to Epstein that was revealed a couple of months ago, even after the entire booklet was later produced. (Trump’s billion-dollar lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for its story about his drawing and “poem” is still active.) Trump has denied that he assaulted E. Jean Carroll, even after not one, but two civil juries found that he did, and a judge, from the bench, defined his assault as rape, even though in terms of New York State law, he did not penetrate her vagina with his penis. Trump has denied that he assaulted any of the twenty-five women who came forth in 2016 and told of his sexual harassment and assault over many years.

Deny, deny, deny. That was the lesson his mentor Roy Cohn taught him. Cohn, who spent his lifetime in the closet, denied that he was gay on his deathbed when he was dying of AIDS, even while requesting that hustlers be brought to him in the hospital. That’s the level of absolute denial Trump has always aspired to and has practiced every day of his natural born life.

No matter what the Epstein files say about Trump when they finally trickle out of the DOJ in reluctant dribs and drabs and leaks, Trump will deny that any of it is true. Girls? What girls? He didn’t do it. He didn’t know about it. Practically the only thing he won’t be able to deny is knowing Jeffrey Epstein because of the photographs of them together. I wouldn’t put that past him, though. He has denied ever knowing E. Jean Carroll, and there is at least one photograph of them together.

What Donald Trump will not be able to deny is losing the House vote tomorrow and the Senate vote when it occurs. He will lose those votes because his connection to Epstein has made him weak. He will deny that he is weak, but that’s the danger all autocrats face in the end. When you have to deny that you’re weak, everybody already knows it, and they will treat you accordingly.

He’s down, he’s not out, but man, is it going to be fun watching him squirm.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

Hey, pedo! Leave them kids alone!

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

Trigger warning: This article contains deeply misogynistic posts by a piece of shit pedophile.

There are two kinds of pedophiles. I’ve talked about this before. There is the kind who suffers from a sickness they cannot control. They are compelled to do what they do because of mental illness or deep trauma (or both) and, frequently, loathe themselves. I honestly feel bad for them because what could be worse than knowing you’re sick and still not being able to stop yourself from feeling impulses you’re fully aware are vile?

But then there’s the other kind of pedophile. The kind that doesn’t see what they’re doing as wrong. In fact, they think they’re the hero of the story, battling against evil forces conspiring against them.

In reality, they’re degenerates who just want to fuck little girls.

Are they compelled by mental illness or deep trauma? No. They’re motivated by something far more banal: Misogyny.

Allow me to introduce you to one such creature: Robert. He’s very impressed with himself.

He’s a very popular blogger and author, you see. Are you impressed by his 17 million visitors?

By way of comparison, in the two years my newsletter has been in existence, my articles have been read about 4.3 million times. That sounds impressive, but I will be the first to point out that it is not. When my girls point at the number of subscribers I have and tell me I’m famous, I laugh and tell them I barely rank as “mini-famous” and I’ve had an article of mine pop up on the Rachel Maddow Show for 5 seconds of screen time.1

This is not to humble-brag (ok, a teeny tiny bit), but to establish a baseline for how…not impressive Robert is despite his clear belief he is VERY impressive. Beyond highbrow, indeed.

So…why am I picking on Robert? One of my readers pointed him out to me, and in light of the ongoing national conversation about whether or not 15-year-old girls are fuckable or “barely legal,”2 he seems like a perfect example of everything wrong with these twisted assholes. Robert will, of course, disagree. But he wants to fuck children. His opinion is invalid.

Robert, for his part, fancies himself a “progressive.” He hates Trump. He’s pro-democracy! He hates Israel (I’m sure that won’t end up being an issue).3 He’s anti-fascism!

He also hates women. Like, really, truly deeply hates women. And he wants to fuck little girls.

One cannot shake the feeling that these two things are linked. Hmmmmmm…

Let’s start off with a softball. Let’s take a look at how Robert, the progressive, talks about the underage girl Matt Gaetz paid to have sex with. It’s…a lot:

I really need to remind you that Robert fancies himself a progressive. He’s a “good guy.” But women? They’re thieving whores and they’re everywhere! Why Robert felt the need to call this girl a whore/slut 5 different times in a single post escapes me, but I’m sure it was for very high-brow reasons. Beyond high-brow, even!

But hey, this was a marginal case, right? She was 17…she lied about her age…you can go either way here.4 Let’s take a look at Robert’s deep thoughts about child molestation and feminism:

Have you ever noticed according to feminists, females never do anything? All actions they experience are things that happen to them, in many cases against their will, although they cheerfully went along at them at the time. We hear words like Stockholming and grooming but ultimately your life and decisions are your own fault and responsibility. You can’t go around yelling that people are brainwashing you all the time, but this is the feminist position.

Oh boo hoo! I was groomed! I was Stockholmed! It’s not my fault I got myself into so many bad situations.

Sigh. Poor women. Always crying. Boo hoo.

That’s an odd take. I’ve spoken to plenty of feminists and read plenty of stuff they’ve written over the last 15 years and I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything remotely like this. It reads exactly, and I do mean EXACTLY, like the right’s caricature of feminism.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Join The Ogre Nation Conversation!

Here are more deep thoughts from a different article:

This very angry woman got molested at a very early age and is traumatized by it. But I think she enjoys wallowing in her trauma rather then getting better. I’ve noticed this with many women harmed from molestation. They seem to wear their trauma as some sort of a badge, and have no interest in getting better. This way they get to be victims and we know how much women love to be victims.

When one is dealing with a rampant misogynist who does not consider sexual assault to be “assault,” there are a few key tells to look for. They’re not subtle. One, women are always to blame. Two, men are the victims. Three, well, see if you can spot it:

Typically these women fly into wild rages if you tell them that many women were not harmed by getting molested or they liked it or they got over it with time.

“Were not harmed or they liked it or they got over it with time.”

Yeah…rapists and pedophiles will frequently justify their actions as not being harmful. After all, how can it be a crime if there is no victim? If no one was harmed? Hell, what is the slut-whore ENJOYED, huh?! Is it a crime if she liked it?! Well?! WELL?!

It gets worse:

I have met a lot of women and even a girl or two who got molested and told me that they liked it.

Narrator’s Voice: Robert did not, in fact, meet these women, and no girls ever told him they enjoyed being molested.

Somehow, this absolute piece of shit makes it EVEN WORSE. Same article. It’s like he just decided to go all in on “Is fondling children really that bad?!” with zero self-awareness:

Actually child molestation is not traumatizing when it happens. This is a myth. Trauma only occurs in 10% of the cases. The child mostly thinks it was weird and feels confused. This is because kids don’t know what sex is. And many of them regard it as so insignificant that they simply forget about it! That’s where all the recovered memories are coming from.

The trauma occurs later when they realize what happened and experience guilt and shame.

I’m not a psychologist but this seems like the definition of trauma. You don’t have to understand what is happening or why for the damage to occur. Later, when you are old enough to process the events, you can heal but the damage is there whether you are aware of it or not. I do believe Robert might be a fucking imbecile or suffering from motivated reasoning.

“If I can convince myself that molesting underage girls doesn’t leave any damage, then is it really a crime? If teen girls kind of enjoy being sexually assaulted, then why is that bad? It’s not! And if it is, they’re a theiving whore, anyway! They’re everywhere, you know.”

Here’s the chef’s kiss:

Many adult woman victims of child molestation feel terrible and guilty because they liked it. Hey, sex feels good and little girls have a responsive clitoris and can have orgasms, oddly enough. So they liked it? So what? Who cares? All this woman’s attitude is doing is making victims worse. Way to go idiots.

Got that? Little girls enjoy sex and feel bad about it later. The victim blaming is impressive in its self-justification. Exactly how MANY little girls has this creepy fuck molested?

“If women didn’t get upset about me fucking them as children, it wouldn’t be a crime!”

That’s quite the hot take for a guy who swears he isn’t a pedophile. Oh wait, yes he fucking is:

One feels like that last line about statutory rape laws is more to keep the FBI from searching his computer for the inevitable 500 gigs of CSAM than because he actually believes in it. It’s not like 15-year-old girls having sex with men is inherently harmful, right? It’s historical!

I promise you, if I spent another 15 minutes preusing this creep’s page, I would find multiple references to how it’s biological, too. “Nature intended women to procreate at puberty bla bla fucking bla.”

OK, so we’ve established that Robert is a dangerous misogynist who should not be allowed within one hundred yards of a school. How does a man who fancies himself a “progressive” end up sounding identical to an incel on Reddit?

It’s not that complicated. Somewhere along the line, Robert was rejected by one too many women. Or he found himself and his vaunted intellect pushed aside and ignored by the dreaded feminists. He was a popular blogger once, you know! He could have been like this since high school and people got tired of it. Who knows?

It doesn’t matter what his lame villain origin story is. Like so much of the right, Robert is consumed by a hatred of women. They don’t respect him. They don’t revere him. They certainly don’t FEAR him and that is just intolerable. Those sluts should know their place! And that place is subordinate to Robert!

Now, it’s too late for adult women to be cowed into submission. They’ve been tainted by the evils of feminism. They can think for themselves. What a fucking nightmare! But teens? 15? 16? They’re far easier to subdue and control. I’ve been writing about this for quite some time:

If you can redefine who is a child, then you can redefine who is an adult and then you can trap little girls as sex slaves under your thumb for life. Because that’s really what this is about: Putting women in social and financial chains just like the good ol’ days. Back when they had to settle for any man with a pulse and a job to survive. Back before feminism demanded more than a life of servitude and male gratification. Back before men had to do anything other than show up to land a wife.

So let’s stop calling 14 and 15-year-olds “children” because that’s inconvenient. They’re women, darn it! And they should be allowed to be the sex slave, “life partner” of upstanding men just like Robert.

But they ARE children. I run a D&D campaign for five 15-year-old girls, one of whom is my daughter. We’ve been playing for two years, so I’ve spent hours upon hours with these girls since they were 13. They are completely comfortable around me, having conversations in front of me and with me that they would rather drink bleach before having with their parents.

I love these girls. They’re smart. They’re funny. They’re completely insane and do shit in D&D I never even contemplated when I was playing in high school, lo those many decades ago.

I am telling you this because I can say, definitively, they are not, in any universe, mature enough to date an adult. They are not adults. They are children. Even the ones who have dated/are currently dating are still children. To sit in a room with these girls and consider them as potential romantic partners for an adult, much less a sexual partner, is demented.

Robert asks, more than once, in his rantings, if feminists have ever spoken to a teen girl. It is clear from his creepy, fetishized writing that Robert has not spoken to a teen girl in decades, if ever. If he had, he would know that everything he is saying is not based in reality, but a warped sexual fantasy that exists only in his head.

Fortunately for all of us, Robert is about as well-known as the lecher standing on the corner, leering at little girls, and has about as much influence. He’s not even mini-famous. He’s just a good example of how a burning hatred of women can and will lead you to the darkest of places; a dynamic we are currently seeing played out on the American right as pedophilia consumes it, the natural endpoint of decades of rampant misogyny.

These are sick and broken people, and they need to be stuffed back into the dark hole they crawled out of.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-time tip? We got you!

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 350 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.