Jeff Epstein and I shared a room at the University of Missouri for several months when I was a sophomore and he was a junior. Jeff came from ‘Lonk Islant, New Yawk’. I guessed he only left his New Yawk nirvana and came to hillbilly country because he’d flunked out of the college he’d attended his first two years. As us hillbillies say, Jeff was a few bricks shy of a load, although he strutted around like Mr Marvelous. “I’m da webel”, he would tell one and all. (The Crystals had just hit top of the pops with He’s a Rebel.)
Jeff ‘Da Webel’ has no link to Jeffrey Epstein, other than a shared name and proximity of birth. Jeffrey the rich sex offender was born and raised in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn. A few years later I shared a house with a fellow named Martin, born and raised in Sea Gate. Does this place me two degrees of separation from Jeffrey Epstein?
On 5 June, Elon Musk posted this message on X:
Has Trump run out of excuses?
Whoa! Musk didn’t lie about the impact. This was the equivalent of a bunker buster for Trump’s MAGA cult. The Epstein files have dominated the news these last few weeks. The latest revelation as of 23 July is that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump two months ago, in May, that his name appears in the Epstein files… multiple times.
Trump has tried and tried again to change the subject. He, who has peddled one conspiracy or another since 2011, when he claimed President Obama was not really an American citizen, can’t seem to squirm out of this one. Hoisted on his own canard. The pundits, the bloggers, the influencers are frothing at the mouth about these files. Is there really a client list? Who’s on it? Could Trump be an Epstein client?
If you haven’t followed the Epstein saga, and there’s no reason why you should, you can find more informationthan you’ll want to know via Wikipedia.
Or is this just one more diversionary tactic?
This could also be just another shiny object to divert everyone’s attention from the many Trump administration attempts to tear down American democracy. Trump’s name in a file, in and of itself, doesn’t prove anything.
But let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a video of Trump at an Epstein orgy. Disgusting, perhaps, but does it constitute a high crime and misdemeanour? Let’s go further and suppose the missing three minutes of CCTV show a Trump ninja going into Epstein’s cell, strangling him with a rope, then hanging him, making it appear to be suicide. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump has total immunity while he occupies the White House.
These possibilities probably bother Trump not the slightest bit. He’s already a convicted felon. He has been found by a jury to have sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll. None of Trump’s many offences have prevented him from returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to continue pursuing his #1 goal in life of always having the spotlight focused on him.
The art of the misdirection
What bothers Trump now is the focus being on Epstein and his files. He’s tried to distract the media and the public with several stunts. He ordered the release of 240,000 pages from the FBI’s Martin Luther King files. That might keep folks busy for a while.
And, in case you didn’t know, the BBC reports: “Donald Trump has accused Barack Obama of ‘treason’, claiming he plotted to sabotage his first presidency by linking him to alleged Russian election meddling.”
My favorite distraction concerns the Washington DC football team. It used to be called the Redskins. After years of protest from Native Americans, the team renamed itself the Washington Commanders in 2022. Now, all of a sudden, Trump wants the team owners to revert to Redskins. If they refuse, he won’t let them build a new stadium in DC.
Meanwhile, as Jerry Lee Lewis sang, there’s “a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on”.
While we’re talking about the Epstein files, the cuts go on
The Environmental Protection Agency is closing its office of research and development, reports NPR. More than 3,700 staff will lose their jobs. The office analyses dangers to humans posed by hazards like toxic chemicals, climate change, wildfires, drinking water pollutants and all sorts of other nasty things we’ve done to the planet.
Trump has had Congress take back $9bn already approved for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS and NPR) and for the State Department, which just laid off 1,353 staff. Kiddies may have to say bye-bye to Big Bird and Sesame Street which have been on PBS since 1969.
The only good news is that at the last-minute Congress did not cut $400mn for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is estimated to have saved 26mn lives since 2003. The bad news is that Trump-Musk closed down USAID, the agency that used to implement the PEPFAR program.
And we know how all Americans love their national parks – think Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Now Trump has slashed national parks staff by 24%. Great idea!
Yet, of all Trump’s grotesqueries, the detentions and deportations are the most ugly, even immoral. According to CNN, ICE had detained around 57,000 as of the end of June. And where all around them are cuts, ICE just got a major budget boost.
USAID closures leading to extravagant waste
And as long as we’re looking at the really ridiculous, the Trump administration has ordered 496 tonnes of emergency food aid destroyed, enough to feed 1.5 million children for a week, according to Reuters. To incinerate these high energy biscuits, worth $793,000, the government will spend an estimated $125,000. That’s $918,000 Trump has wasted.
First place as ‘Travesty of the Week’ comes from The Guardian with the headline: “Trump administration to destroy nearly $10m of contraceptives for women overseas.” The cost to the American public purse – $167,000. Even more waste.
Still ignoring the evidence on tariffs
Then there’s Trump’s obsession with tariffs, which no amount of evidence can convince him is a sales tax paid by Americans. The Tax Foundation has done a detailed analysis and Trump’s tariffs would amount to an average tax increase for US households of $1,296 in 2025, and $1,683 in 2026.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: “General Motors’ second-quarter core profit fell 32% to $3 billion on Tuesday [22 July], as the automaker continued to confront challenging tariff policies, which it said sapped $1.1 billion from the results.”
The MAGA victim-warriors will not be so easily distracted
But these real issues aren’t getting too much attention now. Pundits, bloggers and influencers need clicks. These days Jeffrey Epstein has the MAGA cult and conspiracy nuts click-click-clicking.
Professor Joseph Uscinski, editor of Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them writes: “Many of the people most prone to believing conspiracy theories see themselves as victim-warriors fighting against corrupt and powerful forces. They share a hatred of mainstream elites.”
The MAGA ‘victim-warriors’ won’t stop until they can zoom into the Epstein files to expose those ‘corrupt and powerful’ elite pedophiles that Jeffrey accommodated. Carry on, regardless.
