Is it possible? Has a decade of Trumpism been enough? Or is this just more wishful thinking?
We won’t pretend to be neutral observers. In fact, we’d like to see Elon Mush-for-Brains herd the administration, nine out of ten Republicans in Congress, and two thirds of the Supreme Court into one of his big rockets—indulge us, Elon, and name it Steely Dan*—and send them all to Mars. Or towards Mars, anyway. Tomorrow… if today’s not good for you.
Why such haste? Because the Republican Party, having fallen victim to the Trump brain virus, is shoving the last vestiges of the government which actually help ordinary people right into the woodchipper, like Steve Buscemi in Fargo.
To take one example out of, roughly, infinity, the nation’s excellent public radio system is under attack. The reason why is obvious. NPR reports objectively on what the White House, the Congress, and the courts have been doing.
To a neutral observer, the accumulated reportage may makes it sound as if the Republican party was, in fact, taking its cues from the Coen brothers: the national budget has been reduced to funding the Pentagon, the prison system, and border enforcement; scientific research is being shut down and a national brain drain has begun; masked goons are grabbing people off the streets and making them disappear; tons of food intended to feed the starving are instead being incinerated. Seriously—WT Actual F?
To a certain brand of person, though, reporting that same information—which, let us reiterate, is objectively true, and represents just a tiny random sample, out of an appallingly vast number of other possibilities—apparently sounds like a biased and unjustified attack. And not just an attack on a policy. Among a certain subset of the faithful, telling the truth about what’s going on amounts to an attack on a demi-god.
Let us step back, though, from the brink of this hallucinatory rabbit hole, and venture into the sausage factory, because we’re finally getting some real entertainment value out of these jamokes. We may even be seeing a glimmer of hope shining through a couple of cracks in what has up ’til now been a MAGA monolith.
Early last week, Representative Thomas Massie introduced the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), which, he said in a press release, “would force the House of Representatives to vote on the complete release of the government’s files related to Jeffrey Epstein.” Escalating quickly, Massie’s press release upped the ante: “If EFTA is not considered by the House within seven legislative days, a discharge petition will be circulated.” If 218 other representatives went along, then Massie could blow past the Rules Committee and put his bill up for a vote before the whole chamber.
A few days later the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2003, Donald Trump sent a “bawdy” birthday note to his friend and neighbor, Jeffrey Epstein. It featured about eight lines of banal innuendo which might have been lifted from a Monty Python “wink, wink, nudge nudge” sketch, along with a drawn outline of a nude woman, with Trump’s familiar signature in a strategic location. This would have been two years before Palm Beach police began investigating Epstein for child rape.
The President of the United States was mightily displeased. The next day he sued the paper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch—one of the men who made him—for 10 buh-buh-billion dollars. Trump claims that the note does not exist. He and his son Don Jr. have both stated that he does not draw. This will come as news to people who have purchased his purported drawings at charity auctions.
On Monday evening, the chair of the House Rules Committee was in a bind. The President acts as if the Epstein files were Kyptonite. To many Republican members, though, they smell like catnip. Rather than risk the Wrath of Donald, he abruptly recessed the committee without passing rules for the coming week. The next day House Speaker Mike Johnson, having no rules to follow and nothing to vote on, shut down the U.S. House of Representatives until September. Considering the average Republican’s deep and abiding interest in the sex lives of other people, Johnson’s Leslie Neilsen impression—“Nothing to see here.”—is unlikely to satisfy them.
Enter Deputy AG Todd Blanche, who, as Trump’s personal lawyer, saw his client convicted of 34 felonies. Anxious for MAGA cultists to leave their pitchforks and torches in the shed, Blanche has vowed to venture to FCI Tallahassee and seek out the truth.
Ghislaine Maxwell, who lived in luxury as Epstein’s procuress, is a woman of few words, and none of them true. The Department of Justice says her present abode is rundown, leaky, and infested with rodents and insects.
Three words—“Trump is innocent”—would probably get her a pardon. But surely, under the circumstances, she’ll tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
* We’re talking William Burroughs and Naked Lunch here, not the musical group. If you know, you know.