When The Leopards Come For Your Face

So… it’s been a little bit of time. You may have heard about the news, and you may be going, “Wow, you worked there! I bet you have a lot to say!”

And… I do not. At least not in terms of at the emotional resonance of “a blog.” Maybe someday soon behind the paywall, but I am generally not interested in talking about a thing that so closely materially impacts my friends and emotionally impacts myself.

So I’ll just say: if after seeing 10 years of Donald Trump and his cronies, you believe him when he says he loves that someone he had leverage over did what he asked but he had nothing to do with it… you have a level of credulity that will not keep you safe as you progress through life on this planet.

Also, if you believe and run with anonymously dropped numbers that happen to conveniently help a company look like their decision wasn’t poorly motivated… you must have been in a coma during the writers’ strike.

<end of comments on That Thing>

Next Thing: Look, you know I’ve been gone, I know I’ve been gone. Had quite a bit going on (see: That Thing above). But working on it.

NEXT Next Thing: Jeffrey Epstein — my least favorite Jeffrey — is dominating the headlines. My favorite Jeffrey is obviously Wright, and my favorite Geoffrey is the butler from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Trump cannot shake this Epstein thing, for a lot of reasons (the biggest one being that to a regular man on the street, he seems like he’s acting really weird about it). The President is one or two more details from becoming the old Chappelle bit:

Look, none of us know exactly what happened… but over 70% of Americans think the government is hiding facts about the case. I think that’s because this should be pretty simple. Epstein was the worst kind of criminal, his accomplice is in jail for doing those things, and now people want to see the… what do you call them… customers? Crime purchasers? Monstrous rich people? Whatever they’re called, people want to see them go to jail too. You don’t just arrest Jabba, you take down the whole skiff.

What is befuddling some reporters is that so much Epstein stuff has been out publicly for years. So why is it all hitting now? What changed?

What changed was that the Trump administration started trying to hide it, and that always makes it worse. If you have one of those weird, flat to the ground, creepy doors to your basement, that’s one thing — I’m not bringing my kids to trick and treat at your house. But if you cover that door with signs saying “ACTUALLY IT’S VERY COOL DOWN HERE, NO CRIMES NO HORRORS, EVERYTHING PAST THESE DOORS IS SUPER NICE AND OBEYING THE LAWS OF GOD AND MAN!!!” then I need one of the half-dozen NCIS casts to bust down some doors and solve some mysteries.

You cannot be the conspiracy people and then suddenly get squirrely. It’s like running a zombie army and cutting your leg on a broken piece of glass in a windowframe. Blood’s out, and the dynamic has changed. And that doesn’t mean every one of the 77 million 2024 Trump voters are going to abandon ship…. but that election was the closest Presidential election since 2000. If you weren’t alive in 2000, that election was tied, and then basically SCOTUS flipped a coin and George W Bush told the coin he called whatever it landed on.

And if you squeak out an election like that, and you’re already underwater on approval rating and every single policy issue you ran on, you really cannot suddenly lose your ride-or-die crazies. You need them. People are asking if this hurts Trump with voters [no we are not doing the whole “is he running again” conversation again] but it doesn’t have to hurt him with that many voters to be crippling. What has kept him politically alive so many times, and kept the GOP from every dreaming of leaving him, is that 35-40% who as of now are an unshakeable floor. He is now at 37%, his career low is 34%.

Nixon resigned at 24%. Yeah, even when Tricky Dick was bailing out of a failed presidency, one in four Americans was still with him.

This thing is not gonna go away. One, because the coverup is completely incompetent. And two, because somehow there is always new stuff to find, and it always looks bad.

Wednesday night, CBS dropped this incredible piece of investigative reporting (I guess Skydance’s memos didn’t get to them yet) that pulls apart the government’s explanation of the tape from outside Epstein’s cell the night he died. If you like conspiracies, if you like deep dives… you are welcome. They rebuild a full map of the jail floor and explain exactly how you could sneak by without showing up on camera.

Which… Trump didn’t shake down CBS News for this! They’re supposed to be on his side now! When your girlfriend is mad she can’t look through your phone, your boy doesn’t pop up with a cloned copy on a laptop for her to peruse! That’s violation of bro and/or authoritarian code! Don’t dig up new video… just let him think!