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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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