He’s Acting Pretty Damn Guilty
Trump usually acts like a guy with something to hide. But his Epstein behavior is on another level.
Just like that, the shutdown is over. Six Democrats crossed the aisle to help House Republicans get a stopgap bill funding the government over the finish line yesterday evening, and Trump signed it at once last night. “This was an easy extension, but they didn’t want to do it the easy way,” the president grumped at Democrats as he signed it. “They wanted to do it the hard way.”
Democrats didn’t get the concession they wanted to renew expiring Obamacare subsidies, but the Senate will hold a standalone vote on that issue next month. Meanwhile, Congress now has two and a half months until we’re back in the same place of shutdown danger again. Happy Thursday.
Where There’s Smoke…
by Andrew Egger
All through this year’s resurgence of the Epstein saga, I’ve repeated one mantra: Trump acting guilty is not necessarily proof of guilt.
Ordinarily, a person who responds to serious accusations by telling colossal, ridiculous lies, trying frantically to change the subject, demanding an end to all inquiries, and trying to obstruct all investigation into the matter is all but telling you that those accusations are true. But that’s less helpful with Trump. He does that sort of thing all the time. Lying and obstructing are as easy and routine to him as breathing. You’ve got to watch out for false positives.
But I have to admit: My resolve in this department is starting to crack. Because as astonishing revelations about Trump’s relationship with Epstein keep piling up, a few simple facts keep getting clearer. Trump has never given and still cannot give a satisfactory account of his friendship with the late sexual predator, about which he continues to tell the most brazen lies. His behavior toward the investigation, about which he has dropped all pretense of impartiality, has grown steadily more frantic. And he is now openly trying to bully individual Republican lawmakers into dropping their support for further Epstein file disclosures.
Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released thousands of pages of Epstein’s partially redacted correspondence, subpoenaed from his estate. The emails are an embarrassment to a number of prominent people with whom Epstein rubbed elbows during his time in high society.1
But the most remarkable correspondence concerns Trump. In a 2011 email, Epstein muses to his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell about how Trump has oddly not turned up as a figure in the sex-abuse investigations into him, calling the future president a “dog that hasn’t barked” despite the fact that one of Epstein’s victims “spent hours at my house with him.” And as Trump’s political career took off and his past ties to Epstein started to draw scrutiny, Epstein and writer Michael Wolff discussed by email the leverage Epstein might have over Trump as a result.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff emailed Epstein of Trump in late 2015—in other words, lie about the extent of his and Epstein’s relationship. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”2
The White House response to these latest revelations was both unsurprising and remarkable in its audacity. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to the briefing room to do her best Bagdhad Bob impression: “These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.”
Meanwhile, with the swearing-in of Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva just hours away and her pivotal 218th signature on the House’s Epstein discharge petition imminent, Trump pulled out all the stops to try to get one of the Republican signatories to back down. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert was summoned to the White House, where she met with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel (in the situation room, no less!). In a Truth Social post, Trump fumed about the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” said it was a political deflection by Democrats, and warned that “only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.” Boebert nevertheless declined to take her name off the discharge petition, which Grijalva signed last night. The House is expected to vote on it—at long last—next week.
This is no guarantee that the full Epstein files will ever see the light of day. The Senate could refuse to take the petition up or vote it down, and of course Trump could still veto it. But this remains a remarkable step forward. Every House Republican will soon be forced to go on record on a simple question: Which is more important to you, obeying Trump or achieving transparency about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes? The more frantic Trump’s attempts to stonewall the investigation become, the less plausible the controlled-release files strategy pushed by his allies like Speaker Mike Johnson becomes. Only four Republicans signed the discharge petition. But quite a few more are expected to vote “yes” once the measure calling for the Epstein files to be released in full comes to a floor vote. How high that wave can crest will be illuminating.
And we shouldn’t lose sight of one more thing: Trump, at least, seems very much to believe there are still more damaging revelations to come. He wouldn’t have cranked up the pressure on Boebert and company yesterday if he thought the stuff we’d already seen was the worst of it. Whatever the high-water mark of this scandal is, we likely haven’t hit it yet.
The Elites Matter
by William Kristol
First things first. In the spirit of Orwell’s admonition that at certain moments our first duty is the “restatement of the obvious”: The Trumpist authoritarianism threat is a clear and present danger to our republic. It endangers our civil liberties and the rule of law, our civic decency and our democratic elections. It is the political fact of this moment.
The Trump administration is committed to advancing that authoritarian agenda along several key fronts. And in this effort it has many allies, witting and unwitting. The witting allies are the acquiescers and accommodators and collaborators. The unwitting allies are those eager, for whatever reasons, to wish or explain the danger away. They are today’s useful idiots.
So that’s the first thing. But second things matter too. And it’s an important secondary fact that Trump and Trumpism has been steadily and significantly losing public support.
Donald Trump started his second term with an average approval rating of 51.6 percent, a bit above his 49.8 percent of the vote in November 2024. He’s now at a 41.4 percent average approval rating. So Trump has lost about a point a month in 2025. That’s frustratingly slow for many of us. But a percentage point a month adds up.
Is Trump’s decline in public approval—if not quite at that rate—likely to continue? I think so. More Epstein revelations, rising health care and electricity costs, a slowing economy, Trump’s prosecution of an unpopular mass deportation agenda, his increasingly Mad King George persona—all of this makes me very doubtful we’ll see much of a Trump rally in near future. There will be zigs and zags, some Democratic stumbles and occasional Trump upticks, but the trend for Trump is more likely than not to continue down, and last week’s election results are more likely than not a harbinger of next year’s midterms.
So the administration is moving, purposefully and energetically, toward implementing and securing Trumpist autocracy. The public is moving, consistently if a bit sluggishly, against Trumpist autocracy.
But there is more to America than an administration in power in Washington and a mass public spread across the country. There is a third layer to American life. It consists of other governmental institutions at various levels and, even more important, a medley of private institutions and civic associations. It’s what makes the American map not one flat and undifferentiated plane but a textured and complex social landscape. And on this varied landscape can be found many different individuals and groups who have influence and power. Call them elites.
These elites hold the balance of power between an autocratic administration and a resistant public. They’re swing voters with muscle. They can come down decisively on the side either of the administration or the public, on the side of autocracy or liberty. So far they have, to put it charitably, hedged their bets.
The Trump administration matters. The American public matters. But our elites also matter—a lot. Will they side with democracy or autocracy?
They will be weighed in the balance. Will they be found wanting?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Full-Time Criming and Corruption… On the flagship pod, Gov.-elect MIKIE SHERRILL and MICHAEL FANONE join TIM MILLER to discuss the politics of affordability, Trump’s global grift, the FBI’s indifference to threats and justice, and the insecurities driving today’s border politics.
The New Epstein Emails are Ugly… On The Next Level, the crew takes on the explosive Epstein emails tying Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the shutdown fight and ACA fallout, and the MAGA civil war erupting around Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes.
Meet the Most Hated Democrat in America… Believe it or not, no, it’s not Chuck Schumer, LAUREN EGAN reports in The Opposition.
No, Venezuela Is Not a ‘Small Latin American Country’... And talk of a quick invasion and easy ‘regime change’ is dangerously misleading, writes MARK HERTLING.
Quick Hits
THROWBACK THURSDAY: Has Donald Trump been sending troops into cities based on years-old footage of crime and unrest? ProPublica reports on the faulty cable news information diet that’s fueling the president’s snap policy decisions:
When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television. He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said. . . .
The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.” . . .
As The Guardian and The Oregonian/OregonLive have reported, Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025. We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests. Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.
Read the whole thing. And if you’re a cable news producer—specifically one at Fox News—please consider the awesome power you have as you choose the b-roll for your evening and morning segments.
LET THEM EAT… FOOD: As the government shutdown ends, SNAP recipients whose benefits slowed to a trickle won’t have to wait long for food stamp money to start flowing again. The USDA said in a statement Wednesday that most states should receive the funds they need to resume distributing benefits within 24 hours.
The abrupt end to the shutdown means the Supreme Court likely won’t rule on the legal standoff that had been brewing between a collection of states and the White House over whether the administration had the authority to stop sending full SNAP benefits while various, tangentially related contingency funds remained untapped. The justices may feel relieved. But you could argue it would be nice if the court could rule on this sort of thing since we could find ourselves right back here in February. As for the people who administer food assistance across the country, and those who depend on it, the impact of this just-completed shutdown will linger. The New York Times reports that the resolution “has done little to quell their doubt and anxiety, leaving their faith shaken in the food stamp program and in the reliability of the federal government to serve as a social safety net.”
“We have this expectation that the federal government will do everything it can to prevent Americans from going hungry, and that is not the case,” Sarah Saadian, the senior vice president for public policy and campaigns for the National Council of Nonprofits, told the paper.
SO LONG, ABE: It’s the end of an era: The U.S. Mint wound down production of the penny yesterday. The copper coins, which have been in circulation since 1793, have been headed for the dustbin of history for a while—nobody uses them, you couldn’t buy anything with less than a sackful of them even if you wanted to, and by the end it cost nearly four of them to make just one. But it was President Trump who this year finally pulled the plug on the penny—one of the rare unambiguously good things he’s done.
“God bless America, and we’re going to save the taxpayers $56 million,” U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said yesterday as he pushed a button to ceremoniously mint the final coin. That $56 million will no doubt be put to good use—say, by defraying 0.02 percent of the cost of those Argentine pesos that the U.S. Treasury bought the other month.
Abe Lincoln’s reputation should weather the loss of the penny just fine: He’s still on the $5 bill, after all. Thomas Jefferson, however, may be starting to sweat—the two pieces of currency emblazoned with his visage, the nickel and the $2 bill, may be next on the inflationary/cashless society chopping block.
Cheap Shots
Hey, who says the economy’s not working for regular people?
Former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers is there, swapping sexist jokes about women’s intelligence with Epstein. So is former White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, now a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs, who discussed the criminal case against Trump fixer Michael Cohen with Epstein and threw in some jokes about obese people on the New Jersey turnpike for good measure. So is former New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr., who tipped Epstein off that another reporter was digging into his past. There are others.
Other than Trump himself, it’s hard to think of anyone who comes out of these emails looking worse than Wolff, who appears to embrace a self-appointed role as spin doctor for a man whose sexual crimes were already by then a matter of public record.
This is the easiest call I'll make all day, and for once I don't need to overtalk it. If there is nothing to hide, don't hide it. And don't enable the hiding. All those in power who oppose the release should be held accountable for their choice and answer publicly, and directly, on camera and microphone, why that is the case. No secrets. No coverups. Just the facts.
Let. The. Truth. Be. Told.
Will elites do the right thing?
Thanks guys needed a chuckle today