Major League Baseball inducted its latest class of Hall of Famers this weekend, and among them was one of the true all-time greats: Ichiro. His acceptance speech will go down as an all-time great, too. “People often measure me by my records,” the legendary hitter and outfielder said. “3,000 hits, 10 Gold Gloves, 10 seasons of 200 hits. Not bad, huh? But the truth is that without baseball, you would say, ‘This guy is such a dumbass.’” Happy Monday.
The Stonewall Will Not Hold
by William Kristol
Good news from the Washington Post this morning: A long feature article with the headline, “Trump fumes as Epstein scandal dominates headlines.” I like the postmodern touch of having a headline about Trump fuming about headlines. But I like even more the fact that, as the Post reports, Trump is “increasingly frustrated” and is expressing “exasperation” at his administration’s handling of the Epstein matter.
It’s good to start the day with a cup of coffee and a report of Trump being unhappy. Maybe the arc of the moral universe really does bend to justice? Isn’t justice served by the unhappiness of the unjust?
But let me put these metaphysical matters aside, and make a more mundane and practical point: People tend not to make good decisions when fuming and frustrated and exasperated. They tend to make mistakes.
And Trump and his minions are making mistakes.
It’s pretty clear that once the Trump administration decided on a strategy of stonewalling and coverup, presumably motivated by a determination not to let the world see whatever the Epstein files contain about Trump, they should have stuck to it. They would have had a rough few weeks. But by simply repeating over and over again the mantra of the July 6 statement that after reviewing the files, “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” they would most likely have ridden out the storm without too much damage.
It’s pretty simple: If you’re going to stonewall, stonewall. Especially if you don’t face the threat of a special counsel or investigation by congressional committees because you’ve succeeded in staffing your administration with shameless loyalists and the party you dominate holds majorities in both houses of Congress. But Trump lacked the discipline to do what most likely would have been to his advantage.
And so the administration scrambled to distract its own supporters by releasing other files, such as those about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and announcing other investigations of Obama administration figures. But that just raised the question: Why not release the Epstein files as well and investigate what’s hidden there?
Other attempts to quell the furor by providing more information have only, as the Post put it, “spurred more questions.” The one piece of information released with the July 6 statement, billed as the “full raw” video from outside Epstein’s prison cell, had a three-minute gap. Trump’s subsequent order to the Justice Department to petition courts in Florida and New York to release grand jury transcripts was a kind of acknowledgment that in fact more information could be provided and might be informative for the public. And Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s trip to Florida to meet privately with Ghislaine Maxwell not only brought a renewed focus to Maxwell’s horrific role in the crimes she and Epstein committed, but also left questions unanswered and matters unsettled and unresolved. In fact after his meeting, Blanche even seemed to promise that there would be new disclosures: “The Department of Justice will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.”
The key to a successful stonewall is not to have any gaps. (Otherwise they’d call it a “picket fence” strategy.) The key to a successful coverup is to bring down the curtain and ignore grumbling from the audience. The Trump administration has instead suggested there will be more information revealed, that there will be further acts to the drama. In such circumstances, people look forward—partly out of a desire for justice, partly out of simple curiosity—to finding out what’s going to happen next.
The awful nature of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, Trump’s proximity to them, the fact that the victims haven’t gotten justice and co-conspirators haven’t been held to account, along with Bondi’s and others’ promises to bring the truth to light—all of this may have doomed even a well-executed coverup. We don’t know.
What we do know is that we’re in a situation where unnerved Republican members of Congress are heading back to their districts, Democrats are energized (as my colleague Lauren Egan details in her newsletter last night), reporters are getting leaks from dissatisfied sources, and the joint issue of Epstein’s crimes and Trump’s coverup is alive and well.
Can Trump stitch the coverup back together? Perhaps. That depends on what he does. But it also depends on what the rest of us do.
Reflecting on his failed coverup, Richard Nixon said, “I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in.”
Trump has given us a sword. Can we wield it effectively in the service of justice?
Grading on the Perverse Curve
by Andrew Egger
In the wake of the October 7th attack on Israel and for the rest of his presidency, Joe Biden struggled to meet two incompatible obligations as he directed America’s foreign policy toward the war in Gaza. First, he was resolved to allow Israel—a U.S. ally and a sovereign state—to prosecute its war against Hamas as it saw fit. But second, he intended to do what he could to protect the human rights of the Palestinian citizens hammered by the war. The obvious tension between these two goals meant Biden was often reduced to a bit part in the conflict, chiding Israel for its tactics while running oddball secondary operations, like the Gaza aid pier, that fizzled and failed. In the end, the strategy hurt Biden politically from both sides: Israel’s most vociferous defenders seethed at Biden’s mild rhetorical hectoring of the IDF (and his decision to hold back a single shipment of bombs), while the pro-Palestinian side cursed his broader unwillingness to hold Israel in check as Gaza’s living conditions grew hellish and civilian casualties piled up.
Today, Donald Trump is striking his own sort of balance on Israel and Gaza—one based not in countervailing principles of international relations, but in competing spasms within his own psyche. Yet even as conditions in Gaza have deteriorated to the breaking point, he has faced dramatically less scrutiny on this issue than Biden did one year ago.
Trump has not devoted much attention to the plight of the Palestinians, contenting himself with throwing $30 million into the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Israel’s controversial “solution” for the problem of starvation in Gaza. Asked yesterday about whether Israel should be doing more to aid the Palestinian victims of the war, Trump replied by asking whether we were all forgetting the biggest victim of the conflict: Trump himself. “You know, we gave $60 million1 two weeks ago and nobody even acknowledged it, for food,” he whined. “And you really want at least someone to say ‘thank you.’ No other country gave anything. It makes you feel a little bad when nobody talks about it.”
But it’s not as though Trump has taken particular care to respect Israel’s sovereignty either. (Trump sees Israel as a strong ally, but it’s not clear he sees any ally as fully autonomous and independent.) When war flared between Israel and Iran earlier this year, Trump put Jerusalem on blast, telling reporters that both countries “have been fighting for so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing” and publicly dressing Israel down as a client state in the middle of a military operation. “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” he posted on Truth Social. “IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” It seemed to work: Israel called off a retaliatory strike, and the conflict sputtered out.
If Biden had behaved like this—in either direction—the backlash would have been substantial. But Trump is continually graded on his own perverse curve. Israel’s most hawkish allies seem content to have a president who usually lets Israel do what it likes without much day-to-day fuss—and whose constant ridiculous antics help to keep the Gaza war off the front page of the news. Meanwhile, Trump’s callousness toward the agony of the Gazans is just a drop in the ocean of the White House’s indifference toward—or even approval of—international suffering. Trump’s cuts to foreign aid are already expected to lead to a staggering death toll in impoverished countries: A Lancet study this month estimated the likely carnage at more than 14 million otherwise avoidable deaths by 2030. Down at the lizard-brain level, Trump may reason: Compared to that, what’s a couple million Palestinians, more or less?
In another world, the perverse curve could have its perks. If he wanted to do so, Trump could turn the screws on Netanyahu far more aggressively than Biden ever did to demand humanitarian relief for the people of Gaza, just as he did when he demanded Israel turn its planes around. The idea that he would face any kind of domestic backlash is laughable. But then, there are a lot of ways the world would be better if the guy’s brain were a little less broken.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The MAGA Revolution Is Eating Its Own… MONA CHAREN observes: After years of stoking conspiracy theories, Trump and his allies now find themselves unable to dispel one.
Trump’s Decades With Epstein… On The Bulwark on Sunday, THOMAS JOSCELYN joins BILL KRISTOL to break down Trump’s long and unsettling ties to Jeffrey Epstein, what the evidence shows, and why the truth still matters.
A Massive Health Care Shock Is Coming… And there is little time—and maybe not enough will from Republicans—to avert it, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
He Said He Had Me on Video—Where’s the Transparency? Former model STACEY WILLIAMS speaks out about being assaulted by Donald Trump in his office and Epstein’s disturbing role in enabling abuse. On Bulwark+Takes, she shares her story with TIM MILLER.
Donald Trump’s Ides of August… The late summer curse has felled presidents before. Democrats have plans to trip up Trump and his fellow Republicans this year, LAUREN EGAN reports.
Quick Hits
THESE DONKEYS ARE ASSES: It’s turning into one of the most counterintuitive storylines of the second Trump term: The further the president’s popularity sags, the worse the Democratic party polls, too. A Wall Street Journal poll released this weekend finds Trump underwater, with 46 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving of his job performance. Meanwhile, the same poll finds Democrats in shambles with a mere 33 percent approving and 63 percent disapproving, their worst showing in a Wall Street Journal poll since 1990.
Democratic politicians’ utter inability to turn their party’s image around persists, despite other polls showing enormous motivation among Democratic voters. A CNN poll released earlier this month found Dem and Dem-leaning voters outstripping GOP voters in enthusiasm for the first time in years, and by a remarkable margin: 72 percent “extremely motivated” to vote with Team Blue compared to just 50 percent for Team Red.
On some level, these two findings go hand-in-hand: Democratic-leaning voters are appalled by what Trump has done this year, infuriated that their party haplessly handed him the power to do it, and hellbent on figuring out how to fight back harder.
But these polls also speak to the remarkable power vacuum that persists in the Democratic party today. Maybe by 2028 the party will have coalesced around Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, or Josh Shapiro. But this cycle for Democrats feels a bit like the 2016 cycle for Republicans—and at this point in that cycle it seemed like Scott Walker or Jeb Bush would be the obvious next guy up. A lot can happen when people are mad as hell.
BETTER TO CUT OFF YOUR FINGER THAN YOUR LEG: Looks like the White House has about finished hammering out a trade deal with the European Union, which, like so many of the other deals Trump has struck, will land in the tariff range of “painful, but at least not self-destructive and crippling.” Hooray? The Washington Post reports:
Trump said he would impose a 15 percent duty on most imports from the European Union, about half of his latest threat of 30 percent in levies. The White House did not immediately release specific details of the trade agreement, which are traditionally hundreds of pages long and take years to negotiate.
Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the outlines of the deal Sunday at Trump Turnberry, one of two golf courses that the president owns in Scotland.
Both sought to paint the accord as “the biggest deal ever made,” but it was unclear if they were on the same page about how steel and other critical products would be affected. The agreement is likely to become a road map for further, more detailed talks.
FUN WITH NUMBERS: Speaking of WaPo, Naftali Bendavid had a great item in those pages yesterday on Trump’s growing indulgence in totally invented statistical claims:
President Donald Trump made a promise at a reception last week for Republican lawmakers that was as impossible as it was specific: He would drive down drug prices by as much as 1,500 percent—“numbers that are not even thought to be achievable,” he said.
A price cannot drop by more than 100 percent, but Trump went on to make several other precise but clearly false numerical claims. The cost of gasoline had fallen to $1.99 a gallon in five states, he said; according to AAA, it was over $3 in every state. Businesses had invested $16 trillion in America in the past four months, he added; the entire U.S. economy last year was worth less than $30 trillion.
Trump even congratulated Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins for having an approval rating of 92 percent. In this polarized moment, it is unlikely any U.S. political figure enjoys a figure close to that, and the White House provided no source for the claim.
It’s just another side effect of our incredibly dumb age. Everyone’s hands are full processing Trump’s lies on subjects like whether Barack Obama is guilty of treason; who has time to keep him honest about Doug Collins’s approval rating?
Cheap Shots
Is it the biggest thing happening in the world right now? No, but we’re only flesh and blood. Here’s a video of Donald Trump flagrantly cheating at golf this weekend in Scotland:
It’s not the main outrage here, but we’ll note this number is double what the United States actually gave. We’ve got a bit more on Trump’s recent Fun with Numbers below.
Bill: "But I like even more the fact that, as the Post reports, Trump is “increasingly frustrated” and is expressing “exasperation” at his administration’s handling of the Epstein matter."
This is a periodic reminder that the members of Trump's administration were not chosen because of their skill and competence. They were chosen because they pledged fealty to Dear Leader. And this can work for a while so long as they're not expected to do anything but troll their enemies. But when the shit hits the fan, trouble always follows.
I watched Suzuki's speech on YouTube. While he did mention his successes of which he is proud, it was the very opposite of bragging. We need a president who does not need to brag - and more so we need one with real accomplishments.