Epstein Stole WHAT?
The Epstein story isn't going away - especially when Trump keeps opening his yap about it.
Donald Trump’s usual bag of tricks isn’t working. This week, he flew to Scotland to play golf negotiate a trade deal with the European Union, but the only thing the reporters want to ask him about is Jeffrey Epstein. And every time Trump answers, he makes his predicament worse.
The Scotland junket ended with the announcement of a trade deal, where US consumers pay a new 15% tariff on their goods, and the EU promises to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the US, including the purchase of our fossil fuels. The problem - as Paul Krugman points out - is that the European Union doesn’t have the authority to follow through on that pledge. But all this president cares about is making the announcement. He knows that the lapdog media will simply go along.
Of course, all of this is happening against the backdrop of the kind of authoritarian breakthrough most of us were taught could not happen in the United States of America. This week, the Senate confirmed Emil Bove to the Court of Appeals - even after we learned that he instructed DOJ attorneys to ignore court rulings on the government’s trafficking of Venezuelan immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador.
And because of the unpopularity of this regime’s actions (DOGE, mass deportations, the Big Ugly Bill, etc.), Trump is expecting a GOP shellacking in the 2026 midterms. So he is doing what he does best: ordering red state governors to cheat. And Texas governor Greg Abbott is only too happy to comply.
That’s why the Texas legislature is busy in a special session, gerrymandering the state it already gerrymandered after the 2020 census. And there’s talk that other red states could follow suit. This could - and should - trigger an absolute festival of gerrymandering in the blue states, too.
Karoli, Aliza, and I talked about it all in this week’s MOMochat podcast.