Gas prices for Dummies

Two year's later, it's still Biden's fault

Trumpflation is here

He broke it, he bought it.

Tom Schaller

“Bidenflation.”

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump, his supporters, and the national punditry invoked that term to indict President Biden’s economic policies. Although Biden actually reduced covid-induced inflation in the United States from 7.2 percent in 2022 to 2.4 percent by 2024, Trump won a second presidential term by capitalizing on consumer angst about high prices.

Put me, a genius businessman, back into office and I will solve America’s inflation woes, he promised.

Trump’s problem now is all three of his major second-term policies are raising prices across a range of commodities, but especially housing, food, and gas. Reducing the immigrant labor pool, imposing tariffs on imports, and the Iran War are costing consumers billions in higher out-of-pocket costs.

Americans are finally starting to realize the great business “genius” is an economic imbecile.

Clueless

Let’s start with Trump’s signature policy: xenophobic, ICE-led attacks on immigrants.

Nobody believes the United States should have open borders and zero restrictions for immigrants seeking either full citizenship or temporary work visas. But the ineluctable fact is that immigrant workers are good for the economy because their labor lowers domestic production costs and keeps inflation down.

That fact is especially true for the construction and food industries. Almost no commercial or residential work site operates without immigrant labor, and few agriculture products are harvested, picked, shipped, processed, cooked, or served without immigrant labor.

Immigrants comprise roughly 30 percent of the construction trade workers who build America’s commercial and residential properties. The construction industry confirms that 92 percent of member firms report production delays as a result of labor shortages caused by the “chilling effect” of Trump’s brutal ICE policies. An untold number of workers not already removed from the country by the government are no-showing for work. Trump has worsened America’s housing affordability crisis.

As for groceries — a term Trump, who has probably never food-shopped in his life, infamously marveled at — almost every calorie of food Americans consume that is not harvested from private gardens is cooked at home from fresh or processed foods purchased at markets, or are restaurant meals prepared from similar food sources.

Secretary of Homeland Security declares Joe Biden is STILL President. If only...

The Trump EPA Is a Toothless Friend of Polluting Industries, Analysis Shows

Lasting damage to public health

By Peter Aldhous

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

By its own account, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is doing a fantastic job. In a March report on its performance in the last fiscal year, the agency boasted that it had concluded 2,127 civil enforcement cases, “the highest in nine years.”

That number wasn’t wrong, but it was very misleading, an Inside Climate News analysis of EPA data reveals. 

For starters, the 2025 fiscal year included the last three-and-a-half months of Joe Biden’s presidency. Comparing years beginning on Jan. 20 casts the current EPA’s record in a much less forgiving light. New lawsuits filed against the most egregious polluters—one of the strongest weapons in the EPA’s enforcement arsenal—have fallen off a cliff under the second Trump administration. 

Meanwhile, the EPA has shifted how it approaches the administrative orders that comprise the vast bulk of its enforcement. It’s imposing fewer monetary penalties in favor of orders that merely require offenders to clean up their act.

Those compliance orders are now dominated by small-scale actions against public water systems, slapping officials on the wrist for failing to file inventories of and inform customers about water service lines made of lead. 

While it’s important to address potential contamination of drinking water with a potent neurotoxin, these orders represent an administrative checkpoint in a much longer process of pipe replacement mandated by the Biden administration. They are a far cry from tough action against violators in the oil and gas industry and other major polluters and have allowed Donald Trump’s EPA to pad its numbers with activities that impose little cost on offenders.

Where is Trump's tariff-free beef coming from?

Cattle farmers are latest Trump allies to get shafted

By kos

The agricultural sector has been struggling ever since it helped Donald Trump win a second term.

His tariffs have constrained key overseas markets, with China shifting major soybean and other commodity purchases toward countries like Argentina and Brazil. 

Immigration raids have created labor shortages and driven up the cost of harvesting crops, some of which have been left rotting in the fields.

But there was one corner of agriculture that was thriving: cattle farmers.

A shortage of cattle combined with strong domestic demand meant high prices. Cattle producers also argue that near-monopoly conditions in the processing industry have pushed prices even higher. Since the 1990s, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef have controlled upward of 80% of purchases of cattle, squeezing cattle farmers on one end while consumers pay more on the other.

Still, despite challenges like the New World screwworm outbreak, likely boosted by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, cattle farmers were riding high, their faith in Trump apparently rewarded.

That is, until Friday, when Trump announced that he would temporarily allow a massive influx of tariff-free foreign beef into the United States, explicitly intended to undercut domestic beef prices by 25%.

“Today, I concluded a deal to substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “[F]or the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.”

Weirdly, Trump is refusing to say which countries will supply all this mystery meat—an omission that becomes particularly notable amid concerns about the spread of New World screwworm.

On its face, Trump’s announcement is an extraordinary admission that even he knows his economic policies aren’t working.

First, he’s temporarily lifting tariffs to lower consumer prices. That’s a pretty remarkable concession from a president who has spent years insisting that foreign countries pay his tariffs rather than American importers and, ultimately, American consumers.

Biden Family Grift vs. Trump Family Grift: Let’s Do the Numbers

It's not even close

Dean Baker in Beat the Press   

Most people recognize that Donald Trump and his kids are stealing from us with both hands every day. But they are not as outraged as they should be because most have the view that everyone does it. While I will never defend the Democrats as paragons of honesty (what the hell are those crypto contributions?), they are not in the same ballpark as Trump and his crew.

Part of the confusion stems from the media’s refusal to ever put big numbers in context. They all know that the vast majority of their audience is not clear on the distinction between millions, billions, and trillions, and have no idea how large the federal budget is, but they refuse to take the ten seconds and ten words that would be needed to give readers a clearer sense of what is at stake.

The other source of confusion is that the Republicans spent four years endlessly hyping the “Biden crime family.” They used Congressional hearings, as well as thousands of appearances on TV news, shows to yell (often literally) about Biden family corruption.

And it’s clear it was not zero. Hunter Biden, while struggling with drug addiction, openly traded on his family name to land a well-paying perch with a Ukrainian energy company. He also managed to sell his artwork, which is not obviously of great value, for $50K a painting.

Joe’s younger brother James also seems to have traded on the family name, but the sums involved appear to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and mostly during the years 2017-2019, when Joe Biden was not even in public office.

It is a bad practice for family members to profit from their ties to a vice-president or president, but there is zero evidence that Joe Biden ever did anything to directly benefit his son or brothers in their business dealings. We can be pretty certain of this fact because Republicans in Congress and the White House, both in Trump’s first term and his current term, have left no stone unturned in trying to show Biden’s corruption. (Trump’s first impeachment was over his effort to extort Ukraine’s president to lie about Biden’s corruption.)

While it is difficult to get clear numbers on the extent of the corruption of Trump and his family in his current term, since they disclose as little as possible, and no one can accept what they do disclose at face value, we can try to put some numbers on it. At the very least, it should be totally clear that Trump’s corruption, by any measure, is in a totally different universe from even the worst imaginable story that can be told about Joe Biden and his family.

The list below is far from exhaustive. We will probably not know all the ways that Trump put money into his and his family’s pockets until long after his presidency, and maybe not even then. But this should be a good start.

A masterclass in incompetence at home and abroad

Stupid at all levels in all things great or small

Sabrina Haake 

My neighbors’ mail. Note the date.

Last week my neighbors brought me an envelope with a “MAGA priorities survey” enclosed. A solicitation for money disguised as a survey, it opened with a four-page cover letter from Trump.

The survey drills down on ‘Biden’s sky-high mortgage rates,’ and ‘reckless spending binge’ even though we’re now 1.5 years into Trump 2.0. 

It blames Biden for ‘today’s affordability squeeze,’ despite Trump’s economically unhinged tariffs and $94 billion war in Iran. Trump, who still thinks exporters pay tariffs, single handedly turbo-charged the price of energy, and tanked consumer confidence at the same time, all while demanding that Americans disbelieve their lyin’ eyes.

Trump’s cover letter begins, “Dear America First Patriot, I put THREE LIVE POSTAGE STAMPS (all caps) on the enclosed Rush Return Envelope because I had to get your immediate attention… And because I need you to respond to me right away!” Four pages later, Trump urges True Patriots to make a True Patriotic donation of $2,026…. Or even just $47, by rushing back the MAGA survey using the enclosed TRIPLE-STAMPED Rush Return Envelope TODAY. (Combining all caps with bold, a triple-dog-dare-you maneuver that conveys urgency.)

The kicker is that the “triple stamped rush envelope” was the pre-marked, pre-paid, “No postage necessary if mailed in the United States” kind. Adding extra postage stamps to a prepaid postage envelope, according to the USPS, means Trump just wasted money (USPS bold, not mine). Trump, in one mailing, spent extra on an agency he accuses of waste, demonstrated his fiscal illiteracy, and declared his donors stupid. Another masterclass in Trump’s trifecta of incompetence.

For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal

This is despite Trump's push for more coal use and his war on green energy

Tik Root, Senior Staff Writer

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

Solar energy just provided more electricity in the United States than coal for the first time on record — marking a milestone for the rise of renewables in America. 

While gas and nuclear plants still lead the country’s energy mix, solar contributed 12.8 percent of the nation’s electrons in May, according to an analysis of government data by Ember, an energy think tank. Coal, meanwhile, provided just 12.2 percent. Just five years ago, solar was less than half of its current levels and coal was at 20 percent. 

Why does the media ignore Trump’s madness?

His Truth Social posts show he's better suited in a mental institution than at a negotiating table.

Stephen Robinson

Donald Trump frequently demonstrates a level of malignancy that still manages to shock. He doesn’t try to hide it, but unfortunately, the mainstream media covers his disordered thinking as a colorful “quirk” — Trump being Trump — rather than a serious, escalating threat to the nation.

This past weekend, Trump’s social media feed was a wellspring of lunacy. He posted more than 50 times on Saturday alone, hurling personal attacks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rosie O’Donnell — one of whom was never actually president. 

He shared an absurd AI-generated image of himself as a New York Knicks player dunking on Gov. Kathy Hochul. He boasted about defeating “disloyal” Republicans in their primaries. He continued picking fights with the Pope. He attacked the judge who ruled that he couldn’t illegally deface the Kennedy Center with his name.

After even half of Milli Vanilli refused to perform at his America 250 event, Trump posted this gaping wound of narcissistic injury:

I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President.

Until an appearance before cameras yesterday in which he seemed extremely tired and nearly comatose, Trump hadn’t been seen in public since May 27 — the day after his most recent trip to Walter Reed — so while these posts were technically “proof of life,” they were hardly a reassuring statement of mental stability.

Yet Trump’s unhinged posts last weekend weren’t the stuff of front-page coverage at the New York Times or Washington Post, even though there’s a direct line between them and the administration’s ongoing disaster in Iran. After all, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to determine, based on the president’s online crash out, that the Trump administration is no closer to a resolution of the war.

What ever happening to the Green New Deal (besides Donald Trump)?

The Green New Deal has evolved. Now it’s all about ‘affordability.’

Kate Yoder, Senior Staff Writer

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Eight years ago, three little words took hold of the environmental movement: Green New Deal. Part popular slogan, part political philosophy, the phrase described a sweeping agenda to create jobs, advance social justice, and combat climate change through major public investment inspired by the New Deal of the 1930s. 

The term made its way from hats and protest signs to the halls of power, where it shaped local and national policy. Progressives even pressured future president Joe Biden to adopt plans to address the crisis in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

Congress eventually whittled his ambitions down to the Inflation Reduction Act, a package of green tax credits and incentives that became the nation’s first comprehensive climate policy. That is, until Republicans dismantled the law last year. 

Under Donald Trump, the national policy wins Democrats had scored by leveraging the Green New Deal’s momentum all but vanished. The party was left soul-searching, wondering how it should talk about climate change, or if those calling for solutions should even talk about it at all.

Progressives seem to have settled on an answer: Make everything about affordability. A new climate agenda released by the Climate and Community Institute, a left-leaning think tank, aims to lower costs for everyday people through home insurance rate caps, bans on utility shutoffs, and other measures. 

It promotes “green economic populism,” a framework to provide relief for the working class through policies that also happen to cut carbon emissions (such as free transit or a moratorium on data centers), while regulating the corporations contributing to climate change and the cost-of-living crisis. 

The architects of the so-called “working-class climate agenda” say they’ve learned lessons from the Green New Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act: One lacked political will, while the other failed to deliver tangible results to working-class voters quickly enough. 

Earth-Destroying Trump and the Threat of World War III

The nightmare that is Donald Trump

Tom Engelhardt in the TomDispatch

Unlike every other column of mine, this one won’t be broken up with section titles for a simple reason. It’s all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break.

In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Donald J. Trump. 

I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too soon become the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

And let me tell you something else: these days it’s hard enough to keep the website I still run, TomDispatch, in some kind of reasonable shape, while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world. 

But keeping track of things nationally and globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at the — whoops, sorry, I can’t help it! — seams? I simply can’t imagine that. Of course, I couldn’t imagine it for Joe Biden either, and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering 82 years and 61 days old and will still have been younger than Trump if he truly makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, Gordian I, who at 81 only lasted a few weeks in power.)

It’s hardly news that Donald Trump is now the oldest president ever to take the oath of office (twice!) and, in that sense, he’s been both record-setting and, in his own strange way, remarkable. 

But in case you hadn’t noticed, while he’s always had his odd moments, they are indeed getting ever odder and more frequent. After all, how many times has this country had a president who mistook himself for (or do I mean confused himself with) Jesus Christ? Oh, wait, how could I be so confused? That image wasn’t of Jesus but (as “our” president insisted) of a lookalike medical doctor. (“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Trump said. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”)

And meanwhile, of course, in his own ever stranger fashion, “our” president took out after Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable youth at 70 years old, calling him of all things, “WEAK on crime” and, of course, “catering to the Radical Left.” Oh, and while he was at it, Trump also posted an image of himself being hugged by (yes, of course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president’s abuse by all too accurately deploring a world being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” (including, of course, You Know Exactly Whom).

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as an imperial power (even, historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its height to control quite so much of the planet in one fashion or another), this country, too, is growing ever older and (again) in its own strange fashion going down (as, of course, all great imperial powers do sooner or later). Phew! That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can’t get too long and complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Donald J. Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, 49.8% of American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a startling new meaning.

Trump's polling is terrible and getting worse

Looking behind Trump's cratering polls

Tom Schaller

The irony is profound: Donald Trump, a man who craves adulation and perhaps deification, is the least-liked American president ever.

Trump’s approval ratings have reached historic lows. He’s polling lower than he did at the same point in his first term, and he suffers net-negative approval ratings in all but nine states. Americans overwhelmingly reject him, his policies, and his job performance as president. 

In fact, if the third of Americans who comprise his bedrock base of red-hatted MAGAs are held aside, the rest of the nation is now nearly unified in deeming Trump’s second term a failure, if not a disaster.

No matter the pollster or topic, no matter how questions are phrased nor the subgroup of Americans tracked, Trump and his policies are disfavored, even despised. His numbers were bad before he started his reckless Iran war and they have fallen further since. And most recent approval ratings came before Trump began circulating images that likened him to Jesus. (More on that at the end.)

Per pollster G. Elliott Morris, comparing Trump to other recent presidents 15 months into their terms confirms how badly the public rates him. At -21.6 net negative approval, Trump lags behind Joe Biden (-10.8), Barack Obama (+2.3), and a post-9/11 George W. Bush (+57.0) at comparable points of their terms. In fact, Trump already lags more than 8 points behind the 15-month mark of his own first term (-13.3).

Even if his current term is treated as a second term — when presidents tend to experience declining approval — the comparisons are still grim.

At the end of the first year of their second terms, only the Watergate-addled Nixon had a lower net approval number, -29.6, than the -16.2 net disapproval Trump had at the end of his fifth combined year in office. And that low rating came three months ago, before the ICE/CBP shootings in Minneapolis and the Iran war eroded Trump’s support by another five points and counting.

Trump STEALS credit for retirement savings plan from 2022 Biden proposal passed by Congress. Classic Trump

Trump pulls the US out of the World Health Organization jeopardizing global health initiatives

He says it's about "America First," but HOW does this help America?

Stephanie Soucheray, MA

The United States officially withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), one year after the Trump administration shared its intention to leave the global agency. 

At that time, the United States was said to provide about 20% of the WHO’s operational budget, but this week WHO officials said the United States has failed to pay membership dues for both 2024 and 2025, leaving the global alliance with a $278 million debt. 

The WHO says withdrawal is not complete until the United States pays its debts. 

“The United States will not be making any payments to the WHO before our withdrawal,” the State Department told NPR in a statement earlier this week. "The cost born by the U.S. taxpayer and U.S. economy after the WHO's failure during the Covid pandemic—and since—has been too high as it is."

The United States is the only country to have withdrawn from the WHO since its founding 1948. During his inauguration last year, Trump said the WHO had gouged the United States, and he blamed the agency for covering up China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Trump had also tried to leave the WHO during his first presidential term, after the pandemic began, but President Joe Biden reversed that plan on his first day of office in 2020. 

WHO bylaws require nations to give a one-year advance notice of withdrawal and to settle all debts before the exit is complete. 

Tough Road Ahead as R.I. Prepares to Update its Climate Action Strategy

Trump is wiping out funding and programs to fight climate change

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

When state environmental officials dug into working on the state’s climate roadmap in 2024, they were feeling pretty optimistic about Rhode Island’s climate goals, for good reason.

The Biden administration was dolling out billions and billions in federal dollars, via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) for environmental and other sustainable projects they had never done before, and the previous year’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory revealed Rhode Island cleared its 2020 carbon reduction goal without breaking a sweat.

But in the 12 months since state officials began work on Rhode Island’s 2025 climate action strategy, the world looks much different. Since the second Trump administration took power last year, the federal government has rescinded or withdrawn much of the money it was handing out to Rhode Island’s government, nonprofits, and other entities, and rolled back many environmental protections or powers given to the states.

Some powerful Christmas messages

Holiday greetings from alternate universes

And then, there's this

Trump Reveals Biden Lurks in White House, Raising Grocery Prices

Yes, Biden did it

Mitchell Zimmerman

At the end of his address to the nation on the economy, while fact-checkers were taking a break to avoid carpal-tunnel syndrome, President Trump revealed the real cause of the nation’s economic problems: Joe Biden never actually left the White House, and as the enemy within, has stealthily made the decisions that have caused prices to rise during Trump’s first year back in office.

“Biden is a master of disguises,” Trump explained. “Some days he pretended to be Steve Miller, countermanding my orders to deport only the worst of the worse and directing Kristi Noem to deport every farm worker she could find in order to raise the prices of groceries. Then he was Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent, urging the Fed to lower interest rates in order to overheat the economy.

“Then he was Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, an old fossil fuel guy, undermining renewable energy in order to cause electricity shortages to raise energy prices.

“One day he even snuck into the oval office while I was taking a much-needed nap. He removed the sharpie from my hand and used it to increase tariffs on everything Americans buy from overseas. He even raised coffee and banana tariffs.”

In a giant security failure, the Secret Service had failed to check whether Biden was actually on the departing helicopter when he supposedly left the White House last January. And FBI head Kash Patel admitted he still could not locate former and now-de-facto-acting President Biden. But officials concluded he had to be hiding somewhere in the East Wing, hence the desperate effort to root him out with bulldozers.

“We had to destroy the White House in order to save it,” observed President Trump during a waking moment. “Just wait until next year. Prices on everything are going to come down, and they’ll go down fast, starting on day three hundred and sixty-six.”

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.

Subscriptions to Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman are free at this time. If you find my writing of value, please like, subscribe and recommend Reasoning Together to your friends. Thank you.

You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.

MAGA's Epstein gaslighting is unsustainable

To believe anything Trump's MAGA defenders say requires a complete suspension of common sense.

Justin Glawe

Home of the Brave paid for this billboard in Times Square earlier this month. (Adam Gray/Getty)

After months of pushing conflicting and nonsensical talking points about the release of the Epstein files, Donald Trump is running out of time on his administration’s failing coverup of his longtime friendship with one of the world’s most notorious sex traffickers.

Trump, the White House, and congressional Republicans have spent nearly the entire first year of the president’s second term pushing an ever-expanding number of contradictory narratives about not just what’s in the files, but why Democrats and even staunch conservatives like Rep. Thomas Massie have been demanding their release.

There’s a very simple reason for this: Trump and Republicans have no idea how to cover for a president who is clearly all over the files.

The White House and congressional Republicans have argued that if the Epstein files contain highly damaging information about Trump, former president Joe Biden would have released them while he was in office. Simultaneously, Republicans are arguing that Democrats are behind the push to release the Epstein files because they will be bad for Trump.

“If they had anything, they would’ve used it before the election,” Trump told reporters on November 14, before suggesting Democrats doctored the files. “I can’t tell you what they have put in since the election.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are “trying to manufacture some sort of hoax that the president had something to do with Epstein,” House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed the same day.

The Epstein files are all a “hoax,” Trump has said — a lie made up by Democrats to make him look bad. Yet somehow, at the same time, there’s nothing in the files that could make him look bad — because if there was, Biden would have released them.

So which is it? The White House and congressional Republicans can’t say. That’s because it’s difficult to cover up Trump’s ties to Epstein when they are so widely known and obviously incriminating.

Dig a little deeper into Republican talking points about the Epstein files and it gets even more confusing. When asked on November 13 by CNN’s John Berman why Trump won’t simply release the files, Rep. Pete Sessions claimed the president is just doing the same thing as Obama and Biden before him: not releasing context-free materials about those in Epstein’s orbit en masse.

“To simply take things that are emails and accusations that people make is not a legitimate way for us to approach this,” Sessions said following the release of emails by House Democrats showing even more ties between Trump and Epstein. To hear Sessions tell it, Trump is simply following the lead of Obama and Biden, who he suggested “concluded” the files should be released in a “different way.”

"Now, they did not ever really approach it,” Sessions said of Trump’s predecessors, “and we’re trying to do that now.”

While Republicans have argued that Democrats want the files released to hurt Trump — and that if there was damaging information therein Biden would have already released them — they’ve also said the 50,000 pages of documents and emails that have already been released by congressional committees exonerate Trump.

“The evidence we’ve gathered does not implicate President Trump in any way,” Rep. James Comer claimed on October 21.

None of this has worked, forcing Republicans in Congress to pass a bill ordering the release of at least some of the Justice Department’s materials on Epstein, which Trump has signed into law.

Now, Republicans are adjusting tactics slightly, saying that even if Trump is in the files, it’s not evidence of any wrongdoing.

“I need to see evidence at trial and people being convicted,” Rep. Warren Davidson said on November 21. “I don’t really need more rage bait in terms of public documents, I want to know when are the prosecutions underway.”

These confusing and completely contradictory arguments — Biden didn’t release the files so there’s nothing bad about Trump in them, but also Democrats want them released so they can score points against Trump, and simultaneously the files will exonerate the president — are all part of an attempted coverup of what has been obvious for a long time: Trump has deep ties to Epstein and at the very least is mentioned in materials collected as part of the DOJ’s investigation.

The DOJ now has 30 days to begin releasing records related to its investigation of Epstein. Almost surely, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel will continue to run cover for Trump on the materials they’re now bound by law to release — as they have already done for months now. In fact, Bondi is already claiming that an investigation into prominent Democrats in Epstein’s orbit — an investigation Trump himself publicly demanded — prevents her from discussing anything Epstein related.

Endless contradictions

Trump's hand-made birthday greeting
for Jeffrey Epstein

The lies and conflicting narratives about the Epstein files began almost from the moment of Trump’s second inauguration. After riling up his supporters for years about Epstein — stoking the MAGA base on the campaign trail and subsequently choosing two of the biggest Epstein conspiracists, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, to lead the FBI — Trump’s line suddenly changed once he returned to the White House.

A month into the second Trump administration, Bondi told Fox News that the list of Epstein’s clients was “sitting on my desk right now.” A week later, she announced the release of the “first phase” of the Epstein files, most of which had already been made publicly available during the Biden administration.

Bondi then invited MAGA influencers to the White House to receive these materials. They dutifully showed off their binders full of already-available documents as if they had just received damning evidence on a global cabal of sex predators — before some of them took to social media to complain that the files contained nothing new. (A second “phase” of Epstein files was never released.)

Bondi and Patel subsequently claimed a “whistleblower” at the FBI field office in New York said agents there had withheld “thousands of pages of documents” related to Epstein. In a February 28 letter to Patel, Bondi ordered the FBI director to “conduct an immediate investigation” into why the files in New York were withheld from the DOJ and to file a “comprehensive report of your findings and proposed personnel action within 14 days.” There is no indication that any such report was ever filed.

In March, the FBI tasked its agents in New York with searching through an estimated 100,000 documents for references to Trump — and redacting any mention of the president. In May, Bondi reportedly informed Trump that he was in the massive trove of materials at the Justice Department. This was the point at which Trump switched gears from loudly proclaiming for years that he would release the files to attempting to dismiss them entirely.

“Are you still talking about Jeffery Epstein?” Trump asked a reporter incredulously on July 9. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.”

“I don’t understand why the Jeffery Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” Trump said the next week. “It’s pretty boring stuff.”

Bogus transparency claims

As Trump himself tried to dismiss the Epstein files at every opportunity, his underlings at the Justice Department launched a new plan to tamp down on the growing clamor for the files: “Interview” Ghislaine Maxwell in prison and ask courts to unseal transcripts of grand jury testimony from her trial.

Deputy AG Todd Blanche conducted the interview with Maxwell, who told Blanche that she never saw the president engage in any criminal or inappropriate conduct.

“I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said, according to transcripts of her conversation with Blanche that were released by the Justice Department. “The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Apparently as a reward for exonerating the president, Maxwell was sent to a low-security prison in Texas where she has enjoyed perks not afforded to other inmates. At the same time, the DOJ made a slapdash attempt to feign transparency by asking courts to unseal grand jury testimony from Maxwell’s trial.

Three federal judges denied the motions. Among them was US District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer, who excoriated the DOJ for its half-hearted effort at providing the public with new information about Epstein.

The DOJ’s “entire premise — that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them — is demonstrably false,” Engelmeyer wrote in a 31-page decision denying the government’s motion to unseal the transcripts of grand jury testimony. “The materials do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor. They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s. They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s.”

Engelmeyer’s denial of the motion to unseal provided a convenient — albeit temporary — talking point for the Trump administration: We tried to release more information but a judge stopped us.

After House Democrats released the trove of emails showing even more ties between Trump and Epstein than were previously known — and as it became clear that Congress would force the president and the DOJ to release the files — the Trump administration launched its latest attempt to make all of this go away.

First, Trump demanded that the DOJ investigate prominent Democrats tied to Epstein. Bondi ceded to the demand, tasking the Southern District of New York (SDNY) with launching Trump’s politically-motivated investigations based on findings the Justice Department has already said don’t warrant further investigation.

As expected, Bondi is saying that this new, ongoing investigation prevents the Justice Department from discussing Epstein matters. On November 19, Bondi was asked whether the SDNY investigation would expand beyond the prominent Democrats who Trump demanded be investigated for their ties to Epstein. She demurred.

“We’re not going to say anything else about that because it is a pending investigation,” Bondi said.

With Bondi so quick to use the “ongoing investigation” defense to avoid having to answer questions about the DOJ’s investigation into Epstein and others, it’s entirely possible that the agency could try to use the same defense to make significant redactions in releasing the files as ordered by the law passed by Congress.

Reviewing the meandering path of arguments that have been screen tested on the American people over the last 10 months reveals the desperation with which Republicans have attempted to make all this go away. First, Biden and Democrats didn’t care about the Epstein files because they implicated people like Bill Clinton. Then, those files didn’t contain anything damaging on Trump or else Biden would have released them. Now, Democrats want the files released because they do contain damaging information about Trump, but maybe that’s only the case because they tampered with them.

In July, the DOJ said no further investigations were warranted. Now, investigations into prominent Democrats based on the files are necessary. For years, Trump said the files should be released — until he found out he was in them. Then, the files became nothing but hearsay that could hurt innocent people. Now, they can’t be fully released under the ongoing investigations Trump himself demanded.

The story has become bewildering and insane. To believe anything about Epstein coming from Trump or Republicans requires a complete suspension of common sense, which is why it’s good to remember that the simplest explanation is often the correct one: Trump and Republicans are lying. Lie after desperate, confusing, and impossible lie, all aimed at an impossible goal: erasing history and the many deep and troubling ties between Epstein and Trump.