Back during the Great Recession of 2007-09, it became common for economists to talk about “financial plumbing” as part of the problem. The metaphor of pipes and drains and valves was meant to suggest that a relatively small blockage or capacity limitation in one part of the financial plumbing could lead to much bigger systemic effects. In other words, the financial plumbing might work just fine in ordinary day-to-day use, but if one part of the financial system came under stress, problems could back up unexpectedly.

With that general concept in mind, consider the total amount of US Treasury debt held by the public. Back in 2001, it was about $3.5 trillion. By 2009, it had doubled again to $7 trillion. By 2016, it had doubled again to $14 trillion. By 2024, it had doubled one more time to $28 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts suggest that by 2035, based on current law (that is, before the passage of this year’s budget and tax bills, which in their current form would increase the debt further), total US debt could nearly double one more time to $52 trillion.

So here’s the question: How confident should we be that the financial plumbing which handled the trading of US Treasury debt when the market was one-eighth of its current size, back in 2001, is equally capable of handling the much larger volume–especially when the market comes under stress? Darrell Duffie rings some warning bells in “How US Treasuries Can Remain the World’s Safe Haven” (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2025). (Full disclosure: I am the Managing Editor of JEP, and thus predisposed to find the articles of interest.)

If it seems far-fetched that the US Treasury market should come under stress, then it’s worth noting that it happened in March 2020. Duffie explains:

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 12, 2020, … the dealers who make markets for Treasuries were unable to handle the flood of demands by investors around the world to buy their Treasury securities. Bond dealers were asked at the same time to buy enormous quantities of mortgage-
backed securities and corporate bonds, among other demands for liquidity. Total customer-to-dealer bond-market trade volumes suddenly jumped to over ten times their respective 2017–2022 sample medians (Duffie et al. 2023). The bond market reached the limits of its intermediation capacity and became effectively dysfunctional. Yields for Treasury securities lurched higher, while dealer-to-customer bid-offer spreads and dealer-to-dealer market depth worsened by factors of over ten (Duffie 2020). Among other steps to support the market, the Federal Reserve purchased almost $1 trillion dollars of Treasury securities from primary dealers in the first three weeks after March 12, freeing dealer balance-sheet space to handle more sales from customers. Weak market functionality persisted for several additional weeks (Duffie et al. 2023). Although liquidity in Treasury markets gradually returned to normal, many Treasuries investors presumably noticed that in the heart of the March 2020 crisis, they had not benefited from the safe-haven requirement of a liquid and deep market. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, the vaunted liquidity of the market for trading Treasuries had been showing cracks under stress.

Potential difficulties in the market for US Treasury bonds have large implications. As Duffie notes, many financial institutions and investors around the world view US Treasuries as their “safe” asset. Pretty much by definition, a safe asset holds its value and can be sold when desired. The ability of the US government to market its debt at favorable interest rates depends on this widespread perception. But if the market for Treasury debt can become illiquid in a crisis, as happened in March 2020, then Treasury debt is less safe than it previously appeared. The higher risk means that the US government would need to pay higher interest rates when it borrows.

As Duffie explains the plumbing in the market for Treasury debt, about $1 trillion is traded every day, and most of that flows through 25 firms that are designated as “primary dealers.” Essentially, this means that when there is a surge of sellers of Treasury debt, these primary dealers need to be financially able to act as immediate buyers–although of course they will be planning to re-sell most of that Treasury debt later. But the total amount of Treasury debt is rising fast, much faster than the financial size of the primary dealers. In 2007, before the Great Recession, the ratio of total Treasury debt to the assets of the primary dealers was less than 0.2; by 2023, the ratio was above 0.7. In short, the financial plumbing for the US Treasury market is running much closer to its capacity, and it has already gotten clogged once.

Of course, one way to make it easier for the primary dealers to guarantee that they will buy Treasury debt when needed would be to have less government borrowing and less Treasury debt. Now that we’ve all had a good giggle over the implausibility of that happening, what are the serious options? Ultimately, the goal might be to move beyond having the Treasury debt market flow through these 25 firms, and instead create an “all-to-all” market, more like the stock market, where buyers and sellers of Treasury debt can interact directly. But setting up such a market is nontrivial, and it still would raise the question of what happens in world financial markets if a wave of sellers of Treasury debt start driving down the price.

Duffie reviews a number of policy options, some of which are being implemented. You can read his article for details, but to give a sense of the possibilities:

• Require that trades for Treasury debt be carried out through a central clearinghouse, rather than as trades between two separate parties: “The clearinghouse offers a guarantee: if one of the original counterparties fails to perform at settlement, then the clearinghouse will complete the settlement.”
• “Regulators are slowly moving toward a plan for improving post-trade price transparency in the market for US Treasury securities by publishing trade price and quantities shortly after each trade (Liang 2022). Post-trade price transparency will likely improve competition and allocative efficiency. … The efficiency with which dealers are matched to trades will improve, likely expanding the intermediation capacity of the market. Eventually, greater post-trade price transparency will also speed up the emergence of all- to-all trade.”
• The Federal Reserve could set up arrangements to guarantee in advance that if/when US Treasury debt markets are melting down, they will extend short-term credit to key market players as needed. Experience has taught that when such backstop arrangements are known to be available in advance, they are less likely to become necessary!
• The US Treasury could buy back US Treasury debt issued in the distant past, which is harder to trade in the market, and replace it with newly-issued debt which is easier to trade in the market.
• Re-consider the specific bank supervision rules that try to make sure banks have sufficient capital to face crises, and make sure that these rules are not having the effect of discouraging banks from holding Treasury debt in a financial crisis situation.

Duffie says it bluntly: “The market for Treasury securities is simply growing too large to rely exclusively on dealers to intermediate investor trades.” Ultimately, the choice is whether financial regulators will proceed with all deliberate speed to implement the necessary changes before the next crisis hits the Treasury debt market, or whether the regulators will be improvising less-considered schemes when the next crisis hits the Treasury debt market.

The post Can the Financial Plumbing Handle Growing Treasury Debt? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Democrats should rejoice! Not in schadenfreude over Trump’s travails with the Epstein story, but a real celebration about our own disparate but, yes, inclusive coalition that comprises the Democratic Party.

Let’s have a look at what’s going on in MAGA world. There have been about 10 headlines over the last 24 hours about the crack-up within Trump’s MAGA movement over Epstein. CNN alone featured two today: “Epstein fallout poses a loyalty test: Trump — or MAGA?” and “MAGA media’s conspiracy theories put Trump in power — and now they’re coming back to bite him.” David French in the Times op-ed page put it this way: “MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein.” Dan Rather weighed in with “MAGA Turns on Trump” on Substack, writing about the “revolt of voters who elected him.”

The Epstein conspiracy theory that the QAnon-adjacent fringe of the Republican Party has been pushing for years has come back to bite them in the ass. It’s a delicious irony that Trump’s problem with the Epstein story is the same one he’s facing in court as his Department of Justice has tried to defend what he’s doing with his scheme of mass deportation of immigrants. Trump’s lawyers have faced questions from judges to which they don’t have answers, because what they’re working with are Stephen Miller’s lies. All the migrants on the planes were Venezuelan gang members and MS-13, the DOJ lawyers said. Well, it turns out some of them were, but a lot of them weren’t. You can’t go into court with sound-bites on Fox News and use them as evidence.

The problem Trump faces with his MAGA base is that he and his minions infected them for years with lies about Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to Democratic Party officials and power brokers. People like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino went on Fox and right-wing podcasts and flapped their lips about secret leftist cabals that were using the basements of pizza joints to traffic children for sex – even to kill them and drink their blood in some of the most extreme paranoid lies from the Right. Trump promised that as soon as he got in office, he would release all the files on Epstein and the big leftist conspiracy.

Then he got elected and told his Attorney General to have a look at the Epstein files and do what he’s been promising: release them! Let everybody know all about the Democrat sex cabals and flights on Epstein’s jets!

We don’t know what Pam Bondi found when she looked into the Epstein files, or if in fact she even looked at them, but we do know what the result was. She said, on behalf of President Trump, that there was no there there.

Now his coalition of rabid freaks looking for major Democrats to be brought down are not just dissatisfied, they’re pissed. Why? It’s dawning on at least some of them that they were lied to by Dear Leader, when they’ve been trained to believe that only Democrats lie.

That’s the problem with basing a political movement on conspiracy-mongering and lies. When Trump got in the position where he could prove all the crap he’s been feeding them was true, he couldn’t. The reason could have been, as Elon Musk said, that his own name was in the files. But that doesn’t really matter at this point. What matters is that a big part of the glue that’s been holding his MAGA coalition together has dried up and cracked.

It's fun to watch the whole MAGA house of cards come crashing down, but that’s not why Democrats should be happy. We should rejoice in the simple fact that our coalition wasn’t built on lies. It’s based on empathy and equality and fairness. You don’t have to gin up a bunch of conspiracy theories if what you stand for is feeding school breakfasts and lunches to children who are hungry. It doesn’t take lies to support poor people having access to adequate health care. We don’t have to spin conspiracy theories and promise to jail our opponents and round-up migrants trying to escape persecution and poverty and do away with the history of slavery and women’s rights to get people to vote for Democrats.

We’ve got a candidate for Mayor who just won his primary by telling people he wants to make living in New York City more affordable, that he wants to lower rents and provide access to cheaper food. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s talking about food and a roof over your head and health care as a human right.

The MAGA movement is kept alive with a steady diet of lies and grievance and conspiracies that feed their need to believe that God is on their side and everyone who doesn’t believe as they do is evil. In fact, Trump has taken to using that word, evil, more and more often. The problem with keeping the good-vs-evil thing going is this: people are aware that the person in line ahead of them at Target or Walmart, the family who lives down the street, the person who serves them in a restaurant or fixes the brakes on their car or takes a deposit at the bank is not an agent of the Devil, even if some of them are Democrats.

Crying “Wolf!” doesn’t get you anywhere unless people see actual wolves marauding in their neighborhoods. What they’re seeing instead are masked men wearing camo costumes and brandishing guns and arresting people without warrants, and polls are beginning to show that they don’t like it.

The Epstein files were a distraction, and now even the MAGA movement is catching on. People are tired of being depressed by bad news and anger and hate. Democrats don’t offer distractions. They offer solutions to people’s problems and hope.

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This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face?

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The Atlantic had a hilarious article last week about how ICE agents are “miserable.” The gist of it is that there are two kinds of ICE agents: The ones that actually want to do the job for real and the ones that salute Nazi flags. They’re overwhelmingly unhappy.

Boo fucking hoo.

OK, let’s take a look at the life of an ICE agent:

The reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”

Well, you can always quit. No one is forcing you to be a monster and make America less safe. No one is forcing you to commit literal crimes and violate your oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.

That’s a choice you’re making and if you continue to make it, well, that’s on you. Don’t be all shocked and horrified when you find yourself in front of a tribunal to answer for what you’ve done.

But like I said, there are two kinds of ICE agents. Some of them are there, or they were, for the right reasons.

Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe. At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”

I know we don’t like to admit it, but there are, in fact, some people who come here illegally who should be removed. Not every undocumented migrant is a decent person trying to live the American dream or someone fleeing poverty or violence. People are people, and that means some of them are going to be awful. That’s just the way people are. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have Republicans.

Now, does that mean we shouldn’t fix the extremely broken immigration system Republicans have nuked over and over again for decades to keep people from finding a pathway to citizenship? Of course not. But we also shouldn’t pretend we don’t need to toss out legitimate criminals.

So do I feel a little bad for the ICE agents that want to pursue drug dealers and human traffickers, etc.? Sure. But it can be measured in subatomic units. They know who Trump is. More importantly, they know who Stephen Miller is and they know who the Republican Party is. They know that the GOP is a white nationalist cesspool whose only interest is terrorizing Latino communities.

And that’s the problem with Miller’s “Burn It All Down” demands. By insisting on numbers instead of doing a proper job, he’s forcing ICE to use a shotgun instead of a scalpel. Great for instilling fear, less great for finding the people you really want gone.

But ICE agents know that. They learned that during Trump’s first time in office, when they terrorized Latino communities and deported far fewer people than both Obama and Biden. They knew it was going to be even worse this time. My lack of empathy for their suffering is profound.

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Then there are these guys:

“Morale is in the crapper,” another former investigative agent told me. “Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”

A common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically exhausting.

Translation: The scumbags in ICE are mad because Stephen Miller is making them do Nazi shit the wrong way. He doesn’t want some brown people thrown out of the country. He wants them ALL. Right NOW or he’ll throw a temper tantrum!!!

Some ICE agents have left the agency to work in other areas of federal law enforcement. A story the legacy press is curiously not talking about. And you’d think they’d be making more of a story over ICE agents having qualms about being turned into a secret police force being used to silence dissent and attack legal residents.

But either not enough of them are speaking up or the press is assuming it won’t matter as the regime fast-tracks hiring 10,000 white nationalists to bolster the ranks of ICE. Because as I’ve mentioned before, the regime is not going to be looking for sober professionals who care about the rule of law. They’re going to want more of these guys:

Some ICE officers have been thrilled by Trump’s changes and what they describe as newfound free rein. They chafed at rules set under the Biden administration, which prioritized the deportation of serious offenders but generally took a hands-off approach to those who hadn’t committed crimes. Officers said they used to worry about getting in trouble for making a mistake and wrongly arresting someone; now the risk is not being aggressive enough.

Yeah, how DARE those non-criminals be allowed to exist in the United States while we focus on law-breakers!!! Now we can arrest *checks notes* 75-year-old grandmas with unpaid parking tickets while letting drug dealers roam free because we don’t have the resources to find both! That’s making America much safer!!! But it really scares brown people so it’s worth it! ‘Murika!!!

These will be the guards at the concentration camps and they will be thrilled at the opportunity to rape and murder the people they hate.

Hope it’s worth the thrill, guys. Enjoy the life sentence or hangman’s noose in your future. You’re all getting Nuremberged. I have my bucket of popcorn ready to enjoy watching you swing.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that Stephen Miller is driving ICE to the brink of collapse and that’s awesome. By the time he fills its ranks with 10,000 Nazis, the previous 20,000 are going to be burnt out and useless. Hard to terrorize a country into submission when your Gestapo is exhausted and overworked. Keep up the good work, Miller! The best weapon we have in our fight against fascism is the stupidity and arrogance of the fascists themselves.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 112 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Donald Trump spent part of Friday visiting the site of the Guadalupe River flood in Texas and meeting with Governor Greg Abbott and families stricken by the disaster.

On the tarmac before he left Texas, Trump faced questions about whether he was going to rehire weather scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. who were by fired under his orders by Elon Musk’s DOGE. “I would think not,” Trump answered. “This was a thing that happens in seconds, nobody expected it. Very talented people there, and they didn’t see it. This is a once in a hundred years, they’ve never seen anything like this. You look at that water situation…that was really the Biden set up, that was not our set up.”

Coming up with the idea of blaming Biden for the “water situation” in Kerrville was Trump’s limit when it came to the tragic floods in Texas. There was something else on Trump’s mind: blaming someone else for Jeffrey Epstein.

Less than a day after Trump returned to his Bedminster golf club, he posted this on Truth Social:

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY. The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Trump’s insane, disjointed, neuron-destroying blather proves that there is only one question in Trump’s mind right now: how much is going to end up coming out about his relationship with his close friend, child-rapist-in-chief Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was a member of Trump’s private club, Mar a Lago, and some of their major partying went on in Palm Beach, where Epstein also had a home on the beach.

It seems to have occurred to almost no one that the most threatening source of material on Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has to be Ghislaine Maxwell, the so-called socialite and daughter of British media-mogul Robert Maxwell. She had a 25-year relationship with the convicted sex offender. Maxwell was said to have had a romantic relationship with Epstein for several years after they met in the early 1990s. Maxwell was described by Epstein’s household employees in a lawsuit deposition as “the lady of the house” and Epstein’s “main girlfriend,” who had the power to hire and fire Epstein’s employees. During the time she worked for Epstein, Maxwell was rumored to procure underage girls for him, whom he sexually abused.

Maxwell’s relationship with Epstein became an issue in his 2008 Florida trial and conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Maxwell and Epstein were not seen together in public between Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prosecution in 2008 and his death in 2019.

Interestingly, the circumstances of Epstein’s death had a Maxwell connection. Virginia Giuffre accused Maxwell and Epstein of trafficking her as a minor for sexual abuse by Epstein and his friends, including Britain’s Prince Andrew. Maxwell called Giuffre a liar, and Giuffre sued her for defamation in federal court in 2015. The lawsuit was settled in 2017. The details of the settlement were not made public, but it was said to be in Giuffre’s favor, with Maxwell paying her “millions.”

On July 2, 2019, in response to a lawsuit from the media, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the release of documents and evidence from the defamation lawsuit filed in 2015 by Virginia Giuffre. By 2019, it was well known that Giuffre, when she was 17, had been trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell and had sex with Prince Andrew. They had even appeared together in a photo that was heavily publicized, so anything touching Giuffre was hot news. Four days later, on July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy. He was jailed in the Manhattan Correctional Center pending arraignment and trial. On the 17^th of July, Maxwell requested a hearing in federal court to appeal the ruling to release the Giuffre lawsuit records.

On August 9, 2019, the first batch of records from the Giuffre defamation lawsuit against Maxwell was released. The very next day, on August 10, 2019, Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell.

On July 2, 2020, Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire at the estate of Scott G. Borgerson, a former hedge fund owner and fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, who turned out to be her husband. Maxwell was charged with six federal crimes, including sex trafficking of minors, enticement of children for the purposes of sex, and perjury. In 2021, Maxwell was tried and convicted of five charges of transporting a minor for the purpose of sex and conspiracy. In June of 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years. She lost an appeal of her conviction in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and is serving her sentence in the Florida Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida.

Ghislaine Maxwell knows a lot. She was named in Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew. She was named in multiple lawsuits against the estate of Jeffrey Epstein as having procured teenage girls for sex for Epstein and others. In one lawsuit, filed in 2019, Maxwell was charged by “Priscilla Doe” for recruiting her for sex with Epstein. Maxwell was described as giving the teenage girl “step by step” instructions for how to sexually service Epstein.

If there is one person on this earth who has inside information about Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with Donald Trump and what they got up to together, it is Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein told journalist and biographer Michael Wolff that he and Trump “hunted women together” during the time of their 15-year friendship, and that the two men were each other’s closest friends. Maxwell was there for all of it.

Every time Trump hears Epstein’s name he freaks out. What’s going to happen if all the cable shows, especially those on Fox News, dump the name of Ghislaine Maxwell into the news cycle? Stay tuned for a dark wind blowing from Tallahassee.

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This has been a particularly ugly week for America. The fascists forgot to be subtle about their plans to kill millions of Latinos. The New York Times found new ways to debase itself. And Marjorie Taylor Greene was so awful, she actually crossed over into making sense (I feel filthy even typing the sentence).

A lot to catch up on? Oh yeah! But that’s what you have me for! So put your cape on and let’s fly!

Monday: This is how the monsters pave the way for atrocity.

Tuesday: It’s sooooo weird! Since when does the NYT not love third parties?!

Wednesday: The NYT really humiliated itself this week simping for Trump.

Thursday: Podcast!

Also Thursday: I need a shower. A long hot shower. With acid.

Friday: Spent the day watching anime and writing the script for Sunday’s D&D with the girls. No article for you!

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week:

1. Why I'm Absolutely Convinced We Will Win Our Country Back Without Violence - Authoritarianism has taken root before and it always collapses under its own weight by Walter Rhein at I’d Rather Be Writing

2. Negligence and Trump's cuts made the Texas Flood a tragedy - It was a near decade of bad decisions coming to roost by The Fascism Heckler at A mocking a day, keeps the Fascism away

3. Is the Most Shocking #MeToo Scandal in Silicon Valley History About to Explode in Thielworld? - The horrifying rumors that just won't die... by Jonathan Cioran at Postscript 1794

4. Why MAGA Hates Superman - He stands for truth, justice, and an American way that Trump is tearing down by Nicholas Grossman at Arc Digital

5. What Does "The Dignity of Work" Really Mean? - Hint: It's White Christian Nationalist dogma being used to bludgeon and enslave Americans on public assistance by Andra Watkins at For Such A Time As This

Over the last three days, I have tried to steer myself away from the Jeffrey Epstein story. I thought that I had my say on Tuesday, that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the “client list” story should really be about the victims, the underage girls – up to a thousand of them, according to one story I read – who were sexually assaulted and abused by adult men, many of them, it was said, powerful and prominent.

But here we are on Friday, and the story has blown up as big as anything I’ve seen about Trump and his administration this time around. A lot of the coverage has been about what they’re calling the “MAGA war,” the dispute between right-wing supporters of Trump, many angry with what appears to be a coverup, others going along with Trump and Bondi and following the party line that it’s over, there was no “client list,” and Epstein killed himself.

Yes, the MAGA war is happening, but it’s not the crux of the story, which is that Trump has lost control of the narrative. Trump made a pathetic attempt at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday to castigate the press for wasting time on Epstein: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years," Trump said. "Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.” His statement was interpreted by the press as an attempt to save Pam Bondi, who was facing questions about her previous remark that she had the client list “on my desk for review.”

Nope. He wasn’t saving Bondi. He was trying to save himself.

Today, things got worse when it leaked that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino blew up at Attorney General Pam Bondi during a White House meeting about her handling of the Epstein case and “stormed” out and went home instead of back to his office. Later stories said that Bongino is so angry that he is considering resigning from his job. At least one story noted that FBI Director Kash Patel – I can’t believe I’m typing that name and title – was also angry with Bondi during the meeting.

Laura Loomer jumped at the opportunity to take another Trump administration scalp: “Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are LIVID with Pam Bondi over her DOJ memo and the lack of transparency from her office regarding the Jeffery Epstein files,” she wrote on X, confirming the rumor that Bongino had gone home from the White House and was taking the day off to consider his options. Then she dropped this bomb: “Kash Patel and Dan Bongino should call for Bondi’s public resignation today to save themselves and to also push for full transparency into the Epstein files. This is an issue the American people care deeply about. Someone needs to be fired for this. Giving Blondi courtesy to resign is more than she deserves. Trump should just FIRE her.”

Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office earlier this year, and afterwards, a half dozen staffers were fired from the National Security Council, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz was let go and later landed a nomination to be U.N. Ambassador. Having Loomer, whom the press took to calling one of Trump’s “enforcers,” on your case is not good for your career, to put it mildly.

The White House attempted to spoon pablum over the whole thing, responding to questions about whether Trump still has faith in Bondi with a statement from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “President Trump is proud of Attorney General Bondi’s efforts to execute his Make America Safe Again agenda, restore the integrity of the Department of Justice, and bring justice to victims of crime.”

The Jeffrey Epstein story is blowing up right there in the White House, and that is what they think will put a lid on it?

This whole story is dangerous to Trump on multiple levels because it brings up his unsavory past as a – how can I put this? – cocksman around town in New York and Palm Beach in the years before he even thought about running for president. This isn’t like the Access Hollywood tape. It isn’t even like the list of twenty-some women who came forward in 2016 and described incidents when Trump sexually assaulted or harassed them. It’s even worse than the case E. Jean Carroll filed and won against Trump for slander when he called her a liar for telling her story about being sexually assaulted by Trump in a department store dressing room.

Trump claimed that anything he may have done with adult women who were not his wife was “consensual,” but in the Epstein case, there can be no consent given by a minor.

Some commentators have made the point that Trump’s immunity to attacks on his character is so absolute, he could weather any revelation that might emerge about him from the Epstein files, and that is probably true. He did say, way back when, that he wouldn’t lose a single vote if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and we have long since seen the accuracy of that claim in action.

But the Epstein case isn’t about his vulnerability to criminal prosecution or even about the damage his reputation might suffer if something were to come out linking the names “Trump” and “Epstein” in an even more repugnant manner than already exists.

It is becoming clear that there is only one reason that Bondi issued her lid-shutting memo attempting to put the Epstein story to rest: Trump’s name is in the files, and it’s in there repeatedly. I saw an image today of a flight record from Epstein’s private jet, and there were several redactions – black blanks – in between some recognizable names such as Alan Dershowitz and others. What reason would there be to black out any other name than Trump’s?

The Epstein files themselves would fill a room, according to Julie Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter, who was interviewed by former TV news reporter Jim Acosta, who now writes a Substack, “The Jim Acosta Show.” Brown wrote the stories that reopened the federal investigation of Epstein in 2018 that led to his indictment and imprisonment in Manhattan pending trial. Brown found the names of as many as 80 underage victims of Epstein and exposed the corruption behind Epstein’s plea in 2008 to state-level prostitution charges, which led to his confinement on a work-release basis that let him out of jail all day. Epstein had been under federal investigation for sex trafficking underage girls. That investigation was shut down as part of the state plea deal with Epstein. Brown established that the original investigation of Epstein in 2008 had granted immunity to multiple co-conspirators who were also never charged and reportedly included the names of powerful men.

Stories I read today referred to a “rabbit hole” involving the Epstein suicide because Wired magazine reported that metadata from the prison surveillance tape released by Bondi that was said to be “raw footage” from the Manhattan jail had been tampered with and was not from one source but two, meaning that the so-called “missing minute” might end up containing evidence that Epstein was murdered.

The Epstein story may be filled with rabbit holes, but it has turned into a rat’s nest for the White House. Trump went to Texas today to tour the terrible damage done by the Guadalupe River flood, hoping the Epstein story would go away, but back in Washington D.C., the Epstein story was still very much alive with the news of Bongino’s angry exit from the White House after his fight with Bondi over what? The Epstein files.

It seems reasonable to conclude that the Epstein “files” may include box after box of evidence and testimony from the original federal investigation in Florida in 2008, as well as the 2018 investigation of Epstein that led to his indictment and pre-trial confinement and suicide, if that is what actually happened.

The problem Trump has is that he got himself elected president with the assistance of years of agitating by right-wing podcasters and pundits and activists who screamed bloody murder about Epstein on the theory that the files would end up proving what “Pizza-gate” had alleged, that Democratic Party politicians and celebrities were the ones who buddied-up with Epstein and partook in his illegal doings with underage girls.

Trump’s MAGA supporters kept agitating for the release of the dirt on Democrats in the Epstein files, so Bondi took the bait and opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box and had a look at what was inside and slammed it shut with a thud that is still reverberating. The Epstein story is going to get worse before it gets better. Trump can’t kill it. All those days and nights of fun Trump had with his pal Jeffrey in New York and Palm Beach are going to be gnawing at his ankles and keeping him up at night for months. Every time he walks across the South Lawn of the White House heading for his chopper and a trip to go golfing in Bedminster, reporters are going to be yelling questions at him about Jeffrey Epstein. It’s going to be delicious.

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