HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sure has a way with words. During an appearance on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend yesterday, Kennedy described why he had been determined to keep going to in-person addiction-recovery meetings during the COVID pandemic: “I’m not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.” Happy Friday.
A Moderately Frabjous Day
by William Kristol
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
In Alice’s through-the-looking-glass world, it was a truly frabjous day when an unnamed but “beamish” boy killed the fearsome and villainous monster, the Jabberwock.
In the through-the-looking-glass world of America in 2026, yesterday was a good day. It wasn’t so great as to cause joyful chortling. But it was moderately frabjous, enough so as to justify some hope for the future.
On Thursday morning, Trump White House aide Tom Homan announced the end of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol assault against the intrepid residents of Minneapolis. Mayor Jacob Frey remarked that the Trump administration had launched its “catastrophic” operation with the belief that it “could break us,” but that Minnesotans had shown that “a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation.” This was a real, if limited, victory in the fight against Trump’s mass-deportation and mass-intimidation regime.
Then yesterday afternoon, Senate Democrats successfully blocked the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. For now, ICE and the Border Patrol—Trump’s paramilitary forces—will at least be deprived of additional funds on top of the huge amounts they unfortunately succeeded in securing last year. And over in the House, enough Republicans joined Democrats to succeed in reclaiming some congressional power over setting tariffs.
Also yesterday, a federal judge ordered Trump’s Defense Department to halt disciplinary proceedings against Sen. Mark Kelly. In a blistering ruling, District Judge Richard J. Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, found that the administration was engaged in an attack on the retired Navy captain’s right to free speech: “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.” This decision came two days after a federal grand jury declined to indict Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers over a video that Donald Trump disliked.
Meanwhile, aftershocks of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appearance before Congress Wednesday continued to reverberate—especially her contemptuous dismissal of the suggestion that Trump’s Justice Department should apologize to Jeffrey Epstein survivors for its failures to even try to provide either justice or the truth.
And every day it’s become ever more undeniable that Trump’s Justice Department was in clear violation of the law passed and signed just two months ago, calling for the comprehensive release of unredacted Epstein documents (with the only redactions supposed to be of information about the victims). For example, as the New York Times noted today, the Justice Department redacted the name of an Epstein correspondent from a 2014 email that said, “Thank you for a fun night . . . your littlest girl was a little naughty.” And though his identity later became public, the name of the correspondent to whom Epstein wrote in 2009, “where are you? are you ok, I loved the torture video,” was also redacted.1
Why these redactions? And where, many well-informed experts asked, are all the other emails and documents from the FBI and Justice Department investigations that we know exist but that we haven’t seen?
The Trump administration’s coverup has been exposed if not yet overcome. So the “wall of protection” that existed around “the Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends” hasn’t yet been demolished. But we’re closer than we were a couple of months ago to a real understanding of, and reckoning with, the Epstein scandal and coverup.
Meanwhile, yesterday Trump’s approval rating hit a new low of 40 percent in the polling average compiled daily by the New York Times. His disapproval is at 56 percent. These numbers are comparable to George W. Bush’s numbers on election day in 2006, when Gallup found 38 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval. Republicans lost both Houses of Congress in that midterm election.
So things are looking up a bit. But we’re living in the real world, not Lewis Carroll’s make-believe one. At the end of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice awakens from what seems to have been a dream. The Trump years have been and remain all too real, and we’re not going suddenly to wake up and discover that all is back to normal. But yesterday offered some promise that a hard-earned awakening could lie ahead.
What caused Trump’s bad week—luck, or something else? And how do we keep the momentum going? Share your thoughts with us.
The Epstein Feeding Frenzy
by Cathy Young
In the flood of revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s friends and their activities, warnings not to get caught up in a feeding frenzy can easily slide into contrarian attempts to minimize both the crimes and the sleaze—the behavior of people who knowingly associated with a rich and famous child sex abuser. But there’s a vast middle ground between contrarianism and sensationalism—between whitewash and witch-hunt.
In the witch-hunt column: recent attacks on neuroscientist, author, and podcaster Sam Harris for his supposed Epstein connection. To wit: In 2015, after meeting Epstein at a TED event, Harris rejected an invitation to a dinner with Epstein, Noam Chomsky, and Woody Allen—and Harris blew off a couple of follow-up overtures. That’s enough for a Verge writer to brand Harris an “Epstein correspondent”—technically accurate but extremely misleading.
The Free Press’s Nellie Bowles has been assailed for her brief contacts with Epstein in 2018, after his sex-offender past had blown up in the media post-#MeToo—contacts about which, she noted, she had written in two 2019 New York Times pieces. Bowles was briefly interested in writing a feature on Epstein (but decided not to); he was clearly hoping to charm her. She sent two amicable replies to his emails—as journalists will do even with very unsympathetic potential subjects—but ignored his later efforts to draw her into his orbit.
Not surprisingly, the attacks are often about politics: in Harris’s case, his critiques of left-wing progressivism and Islamic fundamentalism; in Bowles’s case, her association with the controversial Free Press and her marriage to its founder, Bari Weiss. The innuendo-laden Verge article seeks to tie Epstein to “the ‘anti-woke’ movement.” And some leftists have taken to collectively slamming moderate and centrist Democrats—or Israel supporters—as “the Epstein class.”
The damage from all this mudslinging isn’t limited to the targets of these smears. It extends to the good-faith effort to demand accountability for the real “Epstein class”—the people who regularly hobnobbed with a convicted and unrepentant child molester, and particularly those who helped him launder his reputation and stay a persona grata in academic and intellectual institutions.
Likewise, the rush to sensationalism, such as speculation that Epstein bought sulfuric acid to dissolve the bodies of murder victims (nope, it was for desalinizing water on his island) can only hurt the effort to establish the facts of Epstein’s crimes. Still-unproven allegations that he trafficked young women—and possibly children—to other men are being far too readily dismissed by skeptics and contrarians. But embracing Pizzagate- or QAnon-level tales of baby cannibalism and buried bodies certainly won’t help get to the truth.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Love Advice from the First President… Since this long weekend brings us both Valentine’s Day and George Washington’s Birthday (observed), historian DAVID HEAD offers some wisdom and warnings on matters of the heart from the man who was “first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
The El Paso Balloon Incident Could Have Been a Disaster... Shooting experimental lasers next to a major airport without telling anyone—what could go wrong? A valuable explainer from Mark Hertling.
Crime 101... the new Chris Hemsworth movie is trying a little too hard to be Heat, reviews SONNY BUNCH. And on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, listen to SONNY and BRIAN RAFTERY discuss his new book Hannibal Lecter: A Life, which is both the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for the love consuming your heart and a fascinating portrait of a bizarre creation from a reclusive writer.
In the Epstein Releases, Victims Came Last… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to explain why Pam Bondi’s bizarre hearing betokens deep problems at the Justice Department.
Quick Hits
A STAR IS BORN: Even in an administration with ferocious competition for the title of “most unhinged cabinet secretary,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is starting to pull away from the pack. For over a year now, she has steadily staffed DHS with sycophants who answer solely to her and her quasi-legal shadow chief of staff (and alleged boy toy) Corey Lewandowski, while running her department like a combination production shop for cutting MAGA jackboot porn and a staging ground for her own future presidential campaign, all while crucial-but-boring work like FEMA disaster-fund approvals piles up ignored on her desk. A remarkable new Wall Street Journal profile heaps up scandal after scandal to the point of absurdity: How on earth does this woman still have her job?
There are so many jaw-dropping anecdotes here it’s hard to know which to highlight, but let’s go with this one, starring Lewandowski:
In an incident last year that rankled some senior staff at the agency, Lewandowski made it known to top ICE officials that he wanted to be issued a law-enforcement badge and a federally issued gun, according to people familiar with his push. Officials are typically only issued a badge and a gun after undergoing law-enforcement training.
The administration was preparing to bring on Tom Feeley, a former top ICE official in New York, as its new director when Lewandowski asked Feeley if he would be willing to issue him and several other political officials badges and guns. Feeley declined, and he was subsequently passed over for the top job at ICE.
Lewandowski next turned to ICE’s legal office for help writing him a legal justification to be issued the badge and gun. A top ICE lawyer, Ken Padilla, also declined to sign off, and days later he was placed on administrative leave. He was later demoted and moved to FEMA, the people said. Padilla declined to comment.
Lewandowski eventually persuaded other lawyers to sign off. The ICE director’s autopen was used to sign the paperwork, the people said.
We really mean it: Read the whole thing.
THIS JUST IN—TARIFFS HAVE COSTS: Donald Trump is starting to feel some heat over affordability, and he’s decided to do something about it—reversing some of his own policies that were actively making the situation worse. The Financial Times reports that Trump is planning to scrap some of his steel and aluminum tariffs in the days ahead:
The US president hit steel and aluminium imports with tariffs of up to 50 per cent last summer, and has expanded the taxes to a range of goods made from those metals including washing machines and ovens.
But his administration is now reviewing the list of products affected by the levies and plans to exempt some items, halt the expansion of the lists and instead launch more targeted national security probes into specific goods, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The people said trade officials in the commerce department and US trade representative’s office believed the tariffs were hurting consumers by raising prices for goods such as pie tins and food and drink cans.
Wait, are you telling us that raising the costs of raw inputs is having ripple effects throughout the consumer-goods industry with economic harms that substantially outweigh the narrow benefits that have accrued to a small slice of domestic industry? Who—besides every economist on the planet—could have seen this coming?
DEATH OF A CLAREMONSTER: Until yesterday, the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl—Donald Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary of state for international organizations—looked like just one more guy with a history of wildly inflammatory posting online who was destined to sail through Senate confirmation en route to a high-level post. But after his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl got a shock: GOP Sen. John Curtis of Utah announced he would oppose Carl’s nomination, effectively dooming his chances of making it out of committee.
“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing,” Curtis said in a statement, “I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums, and I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated.”
Last year, CNN reported on Carl’s history of incendiary (since-deleted) Twitter posts, which included calls for the Trump White House to ignore “illegal” court rulings, accusations that Nancy Pelosi had attempted a “military coup” on January 6th for which she should be prosecuted, and open yearning for the imprisonment of plenty of other prominent Democrats. Most common of all was Carl’s obsession with race; or, more specifically, how white people were losing a race war.
“If you’re a white person celebrating Juneteenth, you’ve already surrendered,” he wrote in 2021. “The great replacement is real,” he wrote the same year, “and they’re going to try to make you pay for it.” In this vein, there was a fair bit of performative eye-rolling about the deaths of black men killed by police: “I didn’t think I could care less about a death than I did about that of violent drug addicted felon #GeorgeFloyd but gangster #DaunteWright may change my mind,” he wrote.
In light of all this, it’s a little odd that Curtis fixated on Carl’s supposed anti-Israel rhetoric, which was comparatively tame. During his questioning, Curtis seemed most concerned about a past remark from Carl that the United States focuses too much on Israel “often to the detriment of our own national interest.” Maybe that’s false or misguided, but it’s not on quite the same level of Carl’s other posts. But hey, whatever: They got Al Capone for tax evasion.
Cheap Shots
These possibly illegal redactions are made all the more odious by the Justice Department’s failure to redact the names and even the images of the victims. It’s almost as if the country’s premier law-enforcement body thinks the perpetrators are the victims and the victims are the perpetrators.
Before I bring out the hats and horns as to the thugs leaving Minneapolis...my concern: where are they going to be redeployed? They ain't shedding the cosplay duds to return to being scofflaw hunters, bailbondsmen, truckers and bodybuilders.
RFK Jr is not afraid of germs because he doesn't believe in germ theory. (seriously) And this is the guy in charge of our health system. (seriously)