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Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!
Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.
Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.
Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?
This is like when Russia had Trump’s pee tapes. Or when Stormy Daniels had Trump’s blackmail. Or when the courts would finally prove Trump raped that woman in a shopping plaza thirty years ago and she forgot about it until just now.
There is no pedophile network running Washington DC, Donald Trump is neither a child rapist nor a sex trafficker, Trump’s connections to such are extremely thin and the emails being discussed don’t even show what people claim they do.
No one will remember this in a few years because the evidence is so embarrassing it expires and becomes unappetizing like refrigerated fast food. Cold French fries. Hopefully sooner.
While I get the impression you’d say this no matter what was in these files, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I don't think this is the right analogy here. I'm not sure if there's a comparable platitude, but the stopped clock one implies a 1% success rate that happened to get lucky, while I think this is more of a 99% success rate that we should expect to generally be right.
The vast majority of people are not child rapists or sex traffickers. Even if we restrict ourselves to wealthy powerful people, the vast majority of them are still not child rapists or sex traffickers. Even if we restrict ourselves to wealthy powerful people who are kind of sleazy like Trump, which probably have a much higher rate of child raping or sex trafficking, the rate is still much much much lower than 50%. The only reason Trump was ever suspected at all was because of wolf crying: his political opponents really really want it to be true, so they preemptively say it's true. That's not actual evidence, it should do nothing to shift our priors.
A broken un-watch that always tells you the time is NOT 6:30 is not very useful, but it's more truthful and less annoying than a broken watch always telling you the time is 6:30 and letting off a constant alarm that won't turn off.
For the 99%, the Stormy Daniels scandal puts him far, far closer to the ethics of someone who'd have sex with a minor. Now, not pre-pubescent, and not personally involved in trafficking or grooming, but a recipient willing to look the other way or even believe nothing (else) criminal preceded the encounter.
"Well, if you were as rich and connected as him, you'd try to bang a porn star too! All men think about it and want to go through with it but not all have the means."
I actually don't think that's true.
There is a sufficient sample size of well connected and extremely wealthy celebrities to say that most of them don't cheat on their pregnant wives with porn stars.
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Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon. The narrative among the conspiracy-minded for the better part of the past five years was that the Biden Administration was concealing the Epstein Files to protect prominent Democrats, and that Trump would release them so these people could face the music. Or at the very least everyone would learn how depraved they all were. The only comments about this I ever heard from IRL friends on the left was that the logic behind this was ridiculous because Trump was close with Epstein and it would take a lot of faith to believe in the conspiracy yet not any involvement from Trump. And it wasn't a topic that came up that frequently. I didn't hear Democrats talking about this much at all until Trump went out of his way to say there was no conspiracy and prominent Republicans started echoing that sentiment. People like Charlie Kirk reversed course on the whole thing. Now my friends on the left started saying that they weren't suspicious before but were now because otherwise why would Trump be so adamant about keeping these confidential?
The Epstein-Trump stuff is recent, but I'm talking about more broadly. Trump has been accused of being a racist, nazi, rapist, pedo, Russian plant, etc, since he announced his candidacy for President in 2015. This is one more thing in an unending series of accusations that's been happening for a decade. If you had told me ten years ago that there would be a list of people who were somehow vaguely connected to a pedophile but the exact nature of these connections was ambiguous, and Trump might or might not be somewhere on that list, I would predict exactly this response from the left. Scott made a post in 2016 called You are still crying wolf.
I am admittedly more suspicious of Trump than I was before, because if he wasn't on the lists at all he would have pushed super hard to get them released. But "Trump friendly with Epstein in a way that looks bad but no real proof of wrongdoing because he didn't actually commit any crimes here" is exactly in line with my priors, and consistent with Trump being hesitant to release them but not freaking out or abusing his power to suppress them either.
You are Still Crying Wolf is specifically about claims that Trump is racist/white supremacist, and arguably about the even more specific claim that Trump is openly racist (which Scott correctly points out he isn't). The Rightful Caliph considered Trump utterly unsuitable for the position of Grand Vizier in almost every other respect on grounds of character.
Trump is certainly unsuited for Grand Vizier. The Grand Vizier is the one who stays in the background, whispering things into the sultan's ear and manipulating the visible actors from behind the scenes. Like all administrations, Trump's is full of aspirants to that position, but Trump never seems to listen to any of them for long.
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I was referring to the Epstein stuff specifically and make no comment on anything else that may have happened. I've written about this extensively in the past; suffice it to say that I don't think there are going to be any bombshells, and I doubt that there are any "lists" at all. I don't like Trump but I'm more suspicious of him than I was previously for the simple reason that he leaned into this whole conspiracy until it was time to release the files. There's obviously something in there he'd rather not make public, or, alternatively, he hasn't seen the files and there's something in his past that he's worried may come up. I don't think it would be criminal. My first guess was going to be that he stayed in contact with Epstein well after any decent person would have cut ties, but the recent emails seem to undercut that theory; in the "dog that didn't bark" email he talks about Trump in a manner that suggests they aren't in regular contact.
The thing that's weird to me about the whole thing is that anyone who has studied this closely and isn't a total hack like Daryl Cooper would be of the opinion that it's highly unlikely that anyone other than Epstein and a few select people were involved in the wrongdoing. Nothing about Trump came up in the civil lawsuits, and the 2020 report about the original prosecution made it clear that no one in the Justice Department even knew that Epstein had famous friends until his attorneys told them. To be clear, the "Epstein Files" as it pertains to this case only involve the files from the Federal Investigation, and the only investigation that could have possibly revealed anything spicy would have been the 2019 investigation.
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About him being a paedophile and child sex trafficker, maybe. They were crying wolf about his genocidal ambitions, alleged Hitler parallels, aspirations to transform the US into Gilead etc. throughout the 2016 election and the entirety of his first term.
No, "Trump went to Epstein's island" and "Trump was on Epstein's plane" and "Trump was in the files" have all been said before. As far as I know the latter two are technically true and the first is outright false.
Theyve been said before but theyre one of the few things still being said. Turns out "Trump is a racist nazi who wants to deport all brown people!" turns out to be the reason why he was voted in, so the attack angle must be retired. Maybe a few months later the progs will examine why that statement didn't work, but the priority is to find something that sticks.
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