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Notes -
What happened last week? I mean this literally, it's was such a deluge that I feel like I forgot significant things in it. Asking here to sanity-check.
Is that it? Was there some more israel/gaza stuff? Trump admin actions? Some other twitter culturewar flareup that seemed to matter?
Which as I remember was actually some of theirs mishandling a flare (I suspect fun substances were involved because come on, we know who we're dealing with here).
This hoax is much older than last week, Snopes reported on it in July: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/07/18/trump-epstein-birthday-card-drawing/ which is about when I remember it happening but maybe even earlier.
I saw this claim many times, linking the videos (there were 2-3) as if it were self evident. I literally could not see anything at all resembling that, watching them over closely several times. I think it was either a conscious bad-faith lie by many claimants, or else identifying the sparkling thing that fell out of the sky as obviously not a drone itself or a typical drone attack as we'd recognize it from frag-grenade-drop footage from Ukraine. But there was still no mishandling (or any handling at all) in evidence in the videos: a sparkling thing just relatively slowly fell out of the sky and exploded.
I saw some evidence it was an incendiary grenade but did not pursue it deeply. Moreover, evidence that it was a model of incendiary grenade in use by Israel, the US, and others (which I pursued even less deeply).
I also noted that its position, velocity and acceleration apparent in the videos really only seem consistent with having been dropped from not very high up and ignited only in the last moments of its descent (which wouldn't be consistent with a gun-fired flare).
On the balance of evidence I believe it was a drone attack
Yes I too remember that, and moreover I remember seeing it before. Perhaps it was a re-creation or a leak. What happened last week was official and mattered for that.
[take withdrawn for being insufficiently-considered]
You need to adjust your bearings then. It's clearly your feelings about Trump cloud your judgement. It sounds absolutely nothing like him, and Trump is one person who had a very peculiar style and is not changing it for anybody. Not to mention it is made explicitly so that it would be impossible to attribute. Even Dan Rather's Killian letter hoax was better made. It's separately hilarious how all the Left has switched on a dime from "all Epstein theories are Q-anon stupid inventions, shut up already about it" to "everything about Epstein is real and it's the most important thing ever and Trump is surely in the middle of it!". And then right in the middle of it this thing shows up. I mean, how gullible you must be? Of course, TDS makes people believe anything. I thought "hookers peeing on Obama's bed" or whatever it was was dumb enough to instantly be seen as ridiculous - and I was wrong. This one is even dumber.
That's a very silly reason to make conclusions. Trump's camp have seen dozens if not hundreds of hoaxes over the years, and this one is so ridiculous it's hardly worth attention. And "oh, you deny it not strongly enough so it must be true!" is extremely dumb way to decide if anything is true. And the worst of it - it's the ONLY reason. There's no evidence of Trump doing something similar ever to anybody, there's no evidence of Trump ever writing in this style, there's no evidence of Trump even writing any other notes to Epstein. It's completely out of character, out of pattern and unsupported by anything. It's like you said you have a gangsta rap track personally recorded by late Queen of England - and despite it not being in her voice, her never doing anything like that and having zero evidence it's hers - you believe it for the sole reason the British government is "not behaving convincingly enough" to deny it (they deny it all right, but it doesn't convince you because - wait for it! - it's "not convincing!"). Come on, man!
While I understand the inclination, the beliefs and motivation you've assigned to me here are not accurate. (do we even have a single Trump-deranged person on themotte? how would they not go crazy and burn out immediately?) I am neither a Trump obsessive nor an Epstein obsessive, and that "70%" is not a strongly held immovable belief.
My (again loosely-held and not deeply researched) model was that Trump knew or kinda knew about Epstein's proclivities during the 80s and 90s, he didn't really care (considered and treated it as within the jocular class of "cocaine and affairs"), he thought he should get credit for his later hostility to Epstein (hence his comfort attacking others for Epstein-connections, drawing massive attention to it, until like 2019 -- not the behavior of a man who fucked kids with Epstein), but did not fully appreciate that he would be held little less guilty even by his base for not immediately turning him in until more recent rounds.
I took another look at the card and found it would be more implicating if real than I'd remembered, which does not fit that model as well, so I withdraw my tossed-off small-questions-thread-grade take for further review.
That may be plausible, Trump is not exactly a saint himself, and being in business, you have to deal with all kinds of sleazy people, so until it didn't affect him personally, he might have at least heard the rumors and didn't care much while it stayed on the level of vague sleaziness. When Epstein started to mess with Trump's own grounds, he was promptly banned. It's unlikely Trump ever was involved in Epstein's shady business (as far as I understand, he didn't need anybody's help in that aspect of life anyway) but it's not unlikely he had some common dealings early on. But the note implies the level of intimacy that Trump has never demonstrated to anybody, and frankly is a harsh mismatch with anything he has ever done and how he behaved in public. It's something Hunter might do (I don't say he did, but his character - artistic pretense, etc. - would fit much better) but Trump wouldn't. If the allegation were he knew Epstein - nothing do deny, he did. Even that they for a while were friendly is true - so if somebody implied Trump sent a congratulatory note to Epstein on one of his birthdays, nothing to deny here either, he very well might have. But not this particular note, it's just not him.
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