TBPR Editor Asks:Is there anything Trump can do to take headlines from imminent news about his part in Epstein’s crimes?SeeAnswer Below:
CNN.Com/By Kevin Liptak, Zachary Cohen and Jim Sciutto/November 14, 202
President Donald Trump was briefed this week on options for military operations inside Venezuela as he continues to mull a path forward in the country, four sources told CNN.
Trump has yet to decide on how to proceed, and he continues to weigh the risks and benefits of launching a scaled-up campaign. The president has previously voiced reservations about taking military action meant to oust Nicolas Maduro, concerned about whether it would prove effective.
While Wednesday’s briefing included an updated set of options for the president to consider, it did not indicate that he’s closer to making a decision, one of the people said. Another source familiar with the briefing said the options were similar to those that have been discussed within the Pentagon, and some publicly reported, in recent weeks.
President Donald Trump was briefed this week on options for military operations inside Venezuela as he continues to mull a path forward in the country, four sources told CNN.
Trump has yet to decide on how to proceed, and he continues to weigh the risks and benefits of launching a scaled-up campaign. The president has previously voiced reservations about taking military action meant to oust Nicolas Maduro, concerned about whether it would prove effective.
While Wednesday’s briefing included an updated set of options for the president to consider, it did not indicate that he’s closer to making a decision, one of the people said. Another source familiar with the briefing said the options were similar to those that have been discussed within the Pentagon, and some publicly reported, in recent weeks.
Democrats swept the off-year elections, Trump’s popularity is sliding. The Democratic Party seems on the rise. It makes no sense to stop the momentum and give the Republicans a way out of their mess. The Democratic Party needs new leadership and a better strategy to regain approval from voters. This is not the way to do it. –The TBPR Editor
Before I get into today’s story, last night was an absolute effing disaster. Eight Democratic-caucus senators sold us out by voting with the Republicans:
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Angus King (I-ME), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Tim Kaine (D-VA).
And you know none of this could’ve happened without Chuck Schumer agreeing to it. The Vice-Chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressman Ro Khanna (a regular on my program) was blunt, saying Schumer “is no longer effective and should be replaced.”
I agree.
None of the eight are up for reelection next year (two are retiring), so Schumer and they figure over the course of the next several years we’ll forget what they did to us last night.
I, for one, have no intention of forgetting.
Trump will say that now “even the Democrats agree” with him and he was “right all along.” Over a month of brutal pain was inflicted on the American people, and now he’ll claim it was “all the Democrats’ fault” and “they finally came to their senses.”
They’re already crowing across rightwing media. Look at the damage those heartless Democrats did to our food, healthcare premiums, and air travel! Remember this next November: if they regain the House or Senate they’ll stick it to the American people again just like they did over the past month! See how dangerous it is to vote for Democrats? They just can’t be trusted.
If you want to call any of these fools and cowards, the number for the Senate switchboard is 202-224-3121. Bernie Sanders, who called this “a policy and political disaster,” added:
“There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight. And my fear is that Trump gets stronger, not weaker, because of this acquiescence. I’m angry – like you. But I choose to keep fighting.“
California governor Newsome called it “pathetic”; Illinois governor JB Pritzker said: “This is not a deal — it’s an empty promise.”
I don’t know who is paid off (Fetterman?) or simply wimped out (Durbin/Schumer?), but this is right up there with Sinema and Manchin stabbing America in the back three years ago on the legislation to kill Citizens United and pass the John Lewis Voting RightAct to make voting a right rather than a privilege.
Both pieces of good legislation died because two corrupt on-the-take Democrats joined the Republicans. And here we are again.
Meanwhile, is Donald Trump also trying to buy the 2026 or the 2028 elections with a $2,000 check?
He’s extremely pissed off that voters (and the media and even the Federal Reserve) noticed that his tariffs are driving up inflation.
He’s also raging that the Democrats are getting credit for fighting for the little guy by wanting to extend/renew the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare) subsidies in exchange for voting with Republicans to reopen the government, although it looks like he might’ve just won that one.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS! … A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
Forget the inflation, the serially-bankrupt con-man says it’s a “con job” when Democrats talk about “affordability”:
“What the Democrats do is, they lie. We are the ones that have done great on affordability. They’ve done horribly on affordability. We just lost an election, they said, based on affordability. It’s a con job by the Democrats.”
Please ignore, in other words, that his tariffs are openly unconstitutional (the Founders explicitly wrote that only Congress can impose tariffs). And, they’re driving inflation sky-high.
And don’t even mention that Trump’s been using them to strong-arm foreign governments and their leaders into giving his sons billions for their crypto businesses and putting up Trump-branded hotels and golf courses where he risks nothing whatsoever but takes a continuous slice of the revenues as “licensing fees.”
Not to mention how they’re throwing the nation into recession at the same time they’re driving up the cost of everything, a pain that’s going to get really visible as we hit the holiday gift-buying season.
And forget about the fact that your health insurance premiums are exploding in your face, as he also ranted:
“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over.”
In other words, let’s also get rid of the protections of the ACA — for example, the requirement that they must cover payment for chronic or preexisting conditions — and force every American to buy insurance (if they can afford it) from those same insurance companies he’s pretending to rage against. It’ll be a huge boon for the companies and their morbidly rich executives.
In exchange for screwing Americans on tariff-caused inflation and healthcare, he wants to send us a check just like he did with the Covid stimulus checks back in 2020, thinking putting his signature on them would help him win the upcoming election.
His promise of a “dividend” to every citizen isn’t economic policy, it’s a proposed payoff. After five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized the practice of billionaires buying politicians and judges, Trump’s now cutting out the middlemen and proposing to buy the voters himself.
The tariffs (and his assaults on democracy) were hurting him with the voters enough to affect the election this month, driving a Democratic sweep across the nation. And now he’s also freaked out because his Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill gutted the ACA subsidies that made health insurance affordable for at least 24 million Americans and Democrats dared (until last night) stand up against it.
Trump voters are experiencing buyer’s remorse and Americans more generally are furious that he and his billionaire buddies are screwing us while they live the Great Gatsby life.
Thus, he’s now waving cash in our faces, believing we’re stupid enough to trade our democracy, economy, and healthcare for a quick hit of cash.
But this isn’t generosity; it’s corruption in broad daylight, a desperate, cynical attempt to turn the American vote into a cash transaction.
The only question left is: how many Americans will take the bait?
America has always been proud of its ingenuity: our capacity to invent, to innovate, to solve. But among our most consistent inventions is one we never admit to but the Trump administration is now proudly highlighting: the machinery of cruelty.
Generation after generation, we refine it, disguise it, and call it something noble: “law and order,” “family values,” “national security.” Each era congratulates itself for its moral progress while quietly perfecting the tools of human suffering.
From the actuarial tables that justified the deaths of Black people a hundred years ago, to the silence that let gay men die in the 1980s, to the unmarked vans prowling our streets today, the design remains the same. The faces change; the purpose — upholding straight white male supremacy — never does.
While many Americans are shocked by the cruelty and brutality of Trump’s/Miller’s/Vance’s ICE and CPB thugs against Hispanics in the United States, such attempts to “purify” the country are really nothing new. Hopefully, though, our response to them will be different this time.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the vice president of Prudential Insurance, Frederick L. Hoffman, published a widely cited “scientific” book claiming that Black people were so biologically inferior that they would “eventually die out.” He argued that if white society simply refused to extend medical care, social support, or public health infrastructure to them, their extinction would “occur naturally.”
It was an extraordinary act of pseudoscientific cruelty: a man with corporate and political power using the language of statistics and medicine to rationalize genocide by neglect. Hoffman’s 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro — one of the best-selling books of the early 1900s — became the actuarial and intellectual foundation for denying healthcare to Black Americans to this day, giving white policymakers cover to block public health investment while claiming to be guided by “data.”
Hoffman’s claim is why there’s a 20% hole in traditional Medicare: it was created at the demand of white racist southern senators so elderly Black people — who couldn’t afford the 20% co-pay — wouldn’t show up in then-whites-only hospitals and doctors’ offices.
That same brutal logic — intentional genocide by state action or inaction — reappeared when the AIDS crisis erupted in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s response to the disease was defined by silence and contempt. As tens of thousands of mostly gay men got sick and died (several of them close friends of ours), America’s bigoted President Reagan refused even to utter the word “AIDS” throughout his presidency.
— His press secretary laughed, from the official White House podium, about gay men dying .
— Conservative pundits like Pat Buchanan called the disease “nature’s retribution” for “immoral” homosexuality, and Senator Jesse Helms successfully banned federal funding for educational materials about safe sex and AIDS that he said might “promote homosexual activity.”
— William F. Buckley Jr. (who also wrote about the supposed genetic inferiority of Black people) proposed tattooing people who had AIDS so they could be identified, discriminated against, and segregated from the rest of us.
The message from Republicans in power was unmistakable: the queer victims of HIV were morally defective, they deserved their excruciatingly painful deaths, and government had no duty to save them.
It was Hoffman’s calculus all over again, dressed up in the language of religion and “family values” instead of racial eugenics.
Now that same monstrous pattern is repeating itself both along our border and border towns, as well as across the interior of the United States. The logic of white racial and cultural superiority reflected by Republican rhetoric has today metastasized into open brutality.
The so-called Kavanaugh stops — made possible by a morally evil shadow-docket ruling written by Brett Kavanaugh for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — have effectively given Trump’s agents permission to seize and detain people based solely on the color of their skin or the way they speak, just like the Klan could do in the Old South.
Under this blatantly unconstitutional decree, masked federal goons can snatch anyone they choose, hold them without due process, and claim they’re “immigration suspects.” There are already reports of U.S. citizens, including fathers and mothers driving their kids to school, being pulled from their cars, cuffed, and dragged away by men in black or camo tactical gear with no badges and no warrants.
One video shows a terrified child screaming as her father — a US citizen, brutalized in broad daylight — is shoved into an unmarked van, because he looked Hispanic. They then kidnapped the terrorized child and held her for much of the day.
This is not law enforcement. It’s state terror. As Adam Serwer famously wrote, “The cruelty is the point.” Stephen Miller and his colleagues in the Trump White House appear to have designed these policies precisely to maximize fear and suffering.
During Trump’s first term he bragged to colleagues that family separation worked as “deterrence.” Children were warehoused in cages, parents deported without them, and about a thousand have vanished to this day through a shadowy network of pop-up “Christian” foster homes that vanished after they got the kids from the Trump administration.
The trauma was — and is — intentional, an explicit message to would-be brown-skinned migrants that America would destroy their families if they came here. Now Trump, et al, are expanding that same logic nationwide, empowered by corrupt white Republicans on a Supreme Court that has abandoned the Constitution in favor of hateful, bigoted ideology and obedience to the party that appointed them.
What we’re witnessing right now is the third great chapter in a grim American tradition: define a population as “lesser,” withhold or weaponize care, legalize and expand harassment, and watch the consequences unfold — people brutalized, children traumatized, citizens terrified — while pretending they’re inevitable and the cause is noble.
Hoffman’s statistical analyses justified abandoning Black Americans to early death by refusing them healthcare. Reagan’s silence and cuts to government funds allowed a generation of gay men to die untreated. And Trump’s immigration machine now turns suffering into policy.
In each case, the people inflicting the harm claim moral superiority — that they’re protecting the “real” America from impurity or invasion — while what they’re really doing is institutionalizing cruelty and brutality as governance while being cheered on by their bigoted white supremacist base.
This is not hyperbole. When a Supreme Court packed with rightwing ideologues uses an unsigned opinion to strip away constitutional rights and green-light racial profiling, we’re no longer operating under a system that respects equal protection under the law.
When federal agents are masked, unmarked, unaccountable, and armed, snatching US citizens and peaceful protestors off the street, we’re living in a police state. And when our national conversation treats all that as normal, we’re back in Hoffman’s world; the world where suffering isn’t an error to be corrected but a strategy for how the powerful maintain straight white male supremacy.
We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations.
They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice” for straight white men and a society that claims they should exclusively be in charge.
The outrage of the Kavanaugh stops isn’t just about immigration or policing. It’s about whether the United States still recognizes limits on government power.
It’s immoral. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic evil that once hid behind actuarial tables and “family values.” Rightwing leaders in past fascist regimes have used it to justify the wholesale destruction of a people.
We must not let history repeat itself again. We know where this road leads: to children in cages, to communities terrorized, to hospitals turning patients away, to families burying their dead while officials shrug.
Hoffman — a Republican who openly celebrated the death of FDR — thought Black extinction would come naturally if white men in power simply withheld care. Reagan thought the gay community would vanish if government refused to help. And Trump’s America First ideologues continue to argue that nonwhite people will “self-deport” if the state makes life unbearable enough as they welcome white South Africans.
In every case, the goal is erasure of “undesirable people” through pain.
We have the power to stop it, but only if we refuse to normalize it. Every senator, every judge, every journalist, every citizen must confront the reality that the machinery of cruelty is running again in our names.
Once a nation accepts pain as governance, democracy becomes performance and compassion becomes treason. Republicans have perfected the unthinkable. The only question left is whether America will finally refuse to justify it.
Silence is complicity. Outrage is the only moral response, and action the only cure. Tag, you’re it!
Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she is being attacked by Republican men for appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher and The View.
Greene, a Georgia Republican Representative, wrote on X on Thursday: “There are pathetic Republican men (mostly paid social media influencers) attacking me for going on Bill Maher’s show and The View.
“Here is my voting card and nothing has changed about me, I’m 1,000,000% America ONLY.
“Sorry I’m not sorry I don’t obey Republican men’s demands that I, as a woman, don’t remain seen but not heard.”
Why It Matters
This is another example of Greene, known for her previous unwavering support of President Donald Trump and the America First agenda, generating controversy within her party.
She has broken away from the party line, disagreeing with her colleagues on a range of issues including the Jeffrey Epstein files, health care subsidies and the Israel-Hamas war.
Greene told podcaster Tucker Carlson last week: “Americans got to the point where electing Donald Trump was a referendum on the Republican Party. And I very much feel that, because many times I hate my own party, and I blame Republicans for many of the problems that we have today.”
Greene’s response to the latest controversy not only highlights ongoing divisions within the Republican Party but also raises questions about the role of women and independent voices in conservative circles, with potential implications for the party’s messaging and unity ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Marjorie Taylor Greene at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington D.C. in September. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP)
What To Know
Greene announced that she would be appearing on The View on Tuesday, in a post on X that also shared a clip of the commentators telling her audience the same thing.
“People in Washington are starting to say ‘my constituents’—they’re starting to remember why they’re there,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said. “Because you don’t get there without people putting you there and remembering that those same people can pull you out of there.”
“And that’s why I’m happy to say that (Greene) is going to be here on Tuesday,” she added.
Numerous conservatives on X have spoken out against this, including the Red Eagle Politics account, followed by Vice President JD Vance, who said: “MTG trashes Trump, and gets to be the first conservative to be allowed on The View in years. Are people not paying attention to the psyop here?
“But ‘muh aipac’ as if that’s the only thing that matters—these people are so dense and their narrative falls apart by their own logic.”
Xaviaer DuRousseau, a social media influencer known for his transition from progressive to Gen Z conservative, shared the announcement and said: “This may cost us the midterms and I’m not even kidding.”
A MAGA-supporting account called Pino Americano, with more than 98,000 followers, said: “I can’t think of any reason for Marjorie Taylor Greene to go on The View unless she wanted to go there to bash Trump.”
What Happens Next
Given Greene’s prominence and the reactive nature of political discourse within the GOP, further divisions could shape Republican dynamics ahead of the next election cycle. How party leadership and conservative media figures respond to Greene’s criticisms of so-called “America last” Republicans and her push for women’s voices will likely influence broader Republican strategy and unity in the coming year.
Hartmann is writing what I’ve been thinking. As Trump’s psychosis worsens, his approval rating declines. Little by little, Independents, MAGA diehards and ordinary Americans can see Trump’s bizarre behavior and overreaching policies (like tariffs) hurting more and more of our fellow citizens, while economic progress, inflation, and lost jobs become more evident. Yes, Trump can’t always win, and is likely starting to lose support. Indications are that this madman has lost his momentum. But until that comes to pass, patience is necessary.–TBPR Editor
The strongman act is cracking, but as the cops, the crowds, and even the cult start to walk away, is this finally the moment his empire begins to fall?
Kids and cops got tear-gassed in Chicago, a judge is holding ICE/CPB officials to account, Americans are horrified by the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and even UFC fighters are starting to turn away from Trump.
What’s going on? Is he really as strong as he appears to think?
In 1999, I was working in a remote part of rural Russia for a German-based international relief agency; we were building housing and trying to teach peasant agricultural methods to people who’d only ever known massive, collective factory farms. I was staying in the home of a family of four with two young children; Dad was Russian and Mom — her name was Olga — was from East Germany, although she’d grown up watching West German TV.
The night before the first open and fair election in Russia’s entire history, we were watching Russian TV news and eating dinner in the midst of a huge snowstorm when a wild-eyed fellow came on the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with a kaleidoscope of extreme emotions. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again.
He was followed by a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary with a solemn expression. Olga suddenly broke out in laughter, although her husband’s face was serious, if not confused.
“What’s that about?” I asked Olga. (My German is pretty good, but not my Russian.)
“Vladimir Zhirinovsy [the extreme right-wing candidate],” she said in German. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he says that everybody who votes for him will get a liter of vodka and a turkey after the election. The news lady is wondering where he’ll get all the turkeys.”
“People fall for that?” I said.
She nodded. “Remember, Russia has been here nearly a thousand years. And this is the first democratic election ever. Ever! People have no idea what to do, how to do it, or what to believe. And he doesn’t really care what he promises; if he gets elected he’ll do whatever he pleases.”
Donald Trump seems to be bringing Zhirinovsky’s political strategy to America.
He made a simple, straightforward deal with his supporters. It included elected Republicans and his base voters, and was elegant in its simplicity.
He promised that he’d make life miserable for Blacks, Hispanics, women, queer people, academics, and people living in big cities. The deal was first offered when he came down the infamous escalator in 2015, and repeated in rally after rally, campaign commercial after campaign commercial, for the past decade.
He also promised to make life better for his white male base, saying he’d “end inflation on day one,” “make America affordable again,” “slash energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months,” “unleash American energy,” and “get prices down” on “groceries, cars, everything.”
In exchange, he asked them to let him steal as much as he could from the public treasury, get away with past and present crimes, ignore his marital infidelities, and look away from his associations with child rapists, his Miss Teen USA Pageant, and Jeffrey Epstein.
His loyal followers did their part. They ignored his payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy bunny, his bragging about sexually assaulting women, his adjudication as a rapist, his 34 convictions for stealing the 2016 presidential election by fraud, his hustling made-in-China campaign swag, and even the hundreds of millions he and his third wifemade selling them nearly worthless digital tokens.
Loyal preachers and even business leaders groveled before him, basking in the glow of his base’s love. Apple’s Tim Cook embarrassed himself and his company by slobbering over Trump as he handed him a chunk of 24 karat gold. Thirteen billionaires in his cabinet simpered when the cameras came on, repeatedly and pathetically reassuring Donald of his brilliance and nobility.
Mike Johnson engineered a coverup of Trump’s association with Jeffery Epstein, and Republicans averted their eyes as Ghislaine Maxwell was moved from a real prison to a Club Fed where she lives in an unlocked dormitory and can entertain herself with tennis and puppy-training.
They disregarded his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his placing his own personal lawyers in charge of justice in America, and his subsequent weaponization of the Justice Department against their own former lifelong Republican peers.
Now they’re defending his defilement of the White House, his depraved sons taking billions from foreign governments, and his betrayal of Ukraine in his never-ending deference to Vladimir Putin.
Republican politicians who for years warned about “jackbooted thugs” as they waved “Don’t Tread On Me” flags are suddenly fine with masked secret police openly and brutally beating American citizens as they build a massive network of concentration camps across the country.
It’s been a good run and a great grift. But scams like this — even well-engineered ones with the power of a corrupted government behind them — usually don’t last.
Nixon went down in flames, and his attorney general went to prison. Warren Harding’s health was destroyed, many biographers claim, by his association with Teapot Dome. Bill Clinton lost his law license and was impeached for his lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Now, it appears, it’s Donald Trump’s turn to pay the price for his cozenage. Although all but a small handful of elected Republicans don’t yet seem to realize it, Trump is losing his grip.
Four Republicans in the House of Representatives are demanding to know the details of his association with child rapists. Five Republican senators yesterday voted to blockhis illegal and unconstitutional tariffs against Brazil.
Several Republican senators have voiced concerns about his illegal murder of “drug traffickers” in the Caribbean. The public is aghast at his destruction of the historic “people’s” White House.
His approval in every category is underwater. Seven million or more people poured into the streets two weeks ago to defy him. His ICE and CPB thugs are pursued by citizens with whistles and apps to identify their locations.
Instead of fixing inflation, his tariffs have caused it to take off again. Instead of increasing employment, jobs are increasingly hard to find.
Instead of making groceries and housing more affordable, Trump’s policies have made things worse.
Instead of cutting energy prices, his killing off Biden’s green energy projects in exchange for fossil fuel campaign money is jacking electricity prices sky-high nationwide.
About the only thing holding up so far is the stock market, and most of that is being driven by an AI boom (which may be a bubble) that started under Biden; 21 states are in or near full-blown recession now as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
Republican politicians openly worry about the 2026 elections as they desperately try to rig them with outrageous and transparently corrupt gerrymanders and widespread voter suppression, mostly by voter roll purges in Red states.
Meanwhile, America’s allies around the world are recoiling from Trump’s embrace of Putin and Netanyahu, his betrayal of Ukraine, and his saber-rattling against Venezuela. His misguided tariff policies have devastated our relations with our nearest neighbors and traditional partners, while China and Russia play him for a sucker.
Most importantly, the racist, homophobic, misogynistic base Trump made his original deal with — the deal that put him into office twice — is turning away from him, disillusioned.
His “get the brown people” deportation scheme is wreaking havoc with the economy, devastating farmers and low-wage industries, and causing even the most hateful racists to admit he’s shooting America in the foot.
The LA Times, owned by a Trump-humping billionaire, is even pointing out that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and podcasters like Andrew Schultz have “caught the scent of blood in the water” and are turning against him.
Even MAGA Republicans in the US Senate turned against Trump’s most recent nominee, Paul Ingrassia, because of his pro-Nazi postings.
How long can Trump hold things together?
That’ll mostly depend on what happens with the larger economy. If prices continue to rise, employment stays paralyzed, and Republicans do nothing about healthcare and housing costs, there’ll be a huge reckoning in November, 2026.
Similarly, if the media continues to desert him over corruption and foreign policy, and even deals like Don Jr.’s spiffing Fox’s primetime host Laura Ingraham fail to hang onto network loyalty, his fall could be spectacular. No matter how many networks David Ellison buys, he and Rupert/Lachlan won’t be able to cover up the wreckage.
America is not Russia or Hungary; both were ruled by dictators for millennia while we’ve practiced democracy for 250 years. Most of us believe in it. We want it to continue.
Sophocles famously said, “Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” Trump thought he could invert that, but three thousand years of history taught us that the truth generally triumphs over lies and corruption.
When Emmett Till’s mother lifted the veil from her son’s mutilated body in 1955, she forced America to face itself. She knew that if the nation could see what had been done to her child, it could no longer pretend innocence. That open casket was a moral explosion: it turned private grief into a public reckoning.
The same courage is needed now.
Amy Wallace, the co-writer of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, has said she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein.
She says the FBI — and, presumably, its director Kash Patel — knows the names of those men.
She says the Department of Justice — and, presumably, it’s director AG Pam Bondi (who turned a blind eye to Epstein’s crimes during the 8 years she was Florida’s Attorney General while he was raping children under her nose) — knows the names of those men.
The only ones kept in the dark are the American people.
“Yes, I know who the names are. Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”
Yet the files remain sealed, and the truth sits buried under bullshit excuses about “ongoing investigations” and “legal process” that are obviously designed to protect one person: Donald Trump. Was he also raping children? Was the Miss Teen USA Pageant he owned back then also part of Epstein’s network, feeding teenage girls to predators?
Is that what Mike Johnson is working so hard to cover up? Are they haunted by the Newsweek headline: “Epstein Victim Was Contestant in Donald Trump’s Teen Beauty Pageant”? Is that why Johnson is refusing to swear Adelita Grijalva into office?
Most recently we’ve been treated to the naked lies Patel and Bondi are apparently telling (or shrouding with legalese) about not having “Epstein’s list” at all, something both of them previously claimed existed. Did it simply vanish? Did they destroy it, after Bondi told the press that it was “sitting on my desk right now” back in February?
Virginia Giuffre fought to expose Epstein’s network of predators who were, and still are, protected both by their great wealth and the status that can confer and, now, by the Republican Party itself. Her courage cost her her life, and her death leaves behind both a tragedy and a moral demand.
Her story is not gossip. It’s unambiguous testimony about how men in power like Donald Trump shield themselves from justice. It’s the record of an old boy system that would rather bury the victims than confront the abusers.
Every institution involved in this cover-up is rotting from within. The Republican-controlled House and Senate. Trump’s Department of Justice. His toady-controlled FBI.
We’ve seen this sickness before.
The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests for decades. George W. Bush’s administration lied about torture and murder.
Corporations selling tobacco, asbestos, fossil fuels, and opioids hid reports on their deadly products and hired corrupt “scientists” and paid off mostly-Republican politicians to help them continue killing Americans and our planet for billions in profits. Trump’s administration even tried to bring back asbestos.
There’s not a family in America that wasn’t touched by this criminality and these men’s lies: the asbestos industry’s executives’ coverups killed my father, and the tobacco industry’s executives’ coverups killed my younger brother Stanley.
The formula never changes. When uncomfortable truths threaten people who hold great wealth and power, they use that power to hide the truth. The result is always the same: a deep moral infection that spreads — and often kills — until the public rises up to clean it out.
The Epstein case is not about one man. It’s about a culture of privilege that believes laws are for the poor and justice is for the powerless.
If a large group of men are named in the files as abusers of children, and if the FBI and DOJ know who they are as Virginia Giuffre alleges, then every day of silence is a crime against humanity.
Every Trump administration official who stays quiet is an accomplice. Every Republican representative or senator who hides behind “procedure” and cowers in fear of Trump joins the conspiracy.
America cannot heal by hiding its wounds. Just as Emmett Till’s mother forced the nation to look at the face of violent racism, we must now look at the faces of those men Trump and Epstein traveled with who used children as sex objects and hid behind the power their great wealth conferred.
It may be painful to see, but the truth is always painful before it’s redemptive. The cover-up must end. The files must be released. The names must be spoken.
Those who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein — including Donald Trump, if the evidence points in that direction — must face public exposure and legal punishment. They should not hold office, sit on boards, or enjoy the comforts of respectability. They should face justice.
And those who know and remain silent must be held to account as well. We can’t have one standard for the powerful and another for everyone else. A democracy that protects predators because they’re rich or politically powerful is no democracy at all.
The FBI, the Department of Justice, Republicans in Congress, and every public servant with knowledge of these crimes must decide which side of history they stand on. If they choose secrecy, they stand with the abusers. If they choose truth, they stand with the victims and with the conscience of the nation. There is no middle ground.
This is not about revenge. It’s about cleansing the moral fabric of our country. Evil thrives in silence. It feeds on secrecy. When sunlight hits corruption, it dies. The moment those names are made public, the reckoning begins. That’s how justice starts.
Let the people see what’s been done. Let them see who did it. Let them see the truth that Trump and those around him have tried so hard to bury.
Emmett Till’s mother showed us what courage looks like. Now that same courage is needed again. Until the truth is out, until the names are spoken, until justice is real, the stain will remain on us all.
How should the Democratic Party get voters to appreciate them? I joined Hal Ginsberg for our regular Tuesday Halitics videocast on YouTube.com. Hal and I agreed the party will get nowhere without persuading voters they will fight for Medicare for All, affordable housing, making student loans affordable, and other programs to help the working people of this country. Making the super wealthy pay their fair share of taxes would finance new programs that benefit the rest of us.
Among many other issues we discussed, I reported on my own participation in last weekend’s NO KINGS protest and how good it was that many millions of anti-Trump Americans could protest across the country without violence or problems. Especially after Trump loyalists warned that Hate America protesters, Hamas, Antifa, etc would be stirring up violence.
PAUL INGRASSIA has described “straight White men” as an intellectually superior group that should be prioritized in education.[28] In October 2025, Politico published text messages from a group chat with Republican “operatives and influencers” in which Ingrassia made numerous racist statements. In the messages, which were verified by Politico, Ingrassia wrote that Martin Luther King Jr. “was the 1960s George Floyd” and that his holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of Hell”. He used an Italian slur for Black people while calling for the discontinuation of all US holidays related to Black culture and history, adding that “Blacks behave that way because that’s their natural state” and that “all of Africa is a shithole”. In reference to Vivek Ramaswamy, Ingrassia wrote, “Never trust a Chinaman or Indian”; he also stated that “We need competent white men in positions of leadership” while rejecting the notion that “all men are created equal”. When another participant in the chat compared him to the Hitler Youth, Ingrassia responded, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”
**Paul Ingrassia (born May 13, 1995) is an American attorney who has served as the White House liaison to the United States Department of Homeland Security since February 2025. Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel.
J.D. VANCE: “Kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.
**J.D. Vance is the Vice-President of the United States
With No Kings rallies occurring across America tomorrow, and the Trump administration’s unhinged reaction to them on full display, it’s never been more important for Congress to reform the Insurrection
Donald Trump — the man who incited a violent insurrection against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and has pardoned those who attacked our democracy — is now calling peaceful protesters “insurrectionists” and threatening to use military force against them.
The Insurrection Act, a 200-year-old law, gives presidents near-limitless power to deploy troops on U.S. soil with almost no oversight. It was meant for true emergencies. But as written, it’s an open invitation for abuse — allowing any president to send armed forces into American cities under almost any pretext. I fear Trump is about to seize that power.
Nine months into his second term, he’s said he would invoke the Insurrection Act “if I had to” — but he has already said certain states are in “pure insurrection.” He’s sent Marines to Los Angeles and the National Guard to Chicago and Portland. His administration’s rhetoric paints blue states as battlefields and dissent as rebellion.
Trump’s goal isn’t public safety. It’s punishing those who speak out against his regime.
Twenty-four Democratic attorneys general have joined California and Oregon’s lawsuit opposing these deployments, asserting “there is no invasion to repel, no rebellion to suppress.” Calling in troops when state and local law enforcement are fully functional, they say, “sets a chilling precedent that puts the constitutional rights of all Americans at risk.”
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has called out Trump’s false claims that Chicago and Illinois are “war zones,” noting that neither ranks among the 10 most violent cities or states in the nation.
Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t reflect reality — it’s designed to justify repression.
NBC News reports that Trump’s advisers are already drafting orders to override governors and occupy more Democratic-led cities.
Deploying the U.S. military against civilians isn’t leadership; it’s tyranny. It creates violence where none existed and hurts communities rather than protecting them.
Congress must act now to prevent Trump, or any future president, from misusing the Insurrection Act. Lawmakers should:
Require Congress approve any domestic troop deployment of more than 14 days;
Empower federal courts to block illegal or unconstitutional uses of the act;
Ensure that peaceful protest can never be grounds for military action; and
Require transparency whenever the act is invoked.
What’s happening on American streets — armored vehicles, tear gas, and citizens beaten for exercising their rights — should never happen in a democracy.
Because the right to peacefully protest is not an act of insurrection — it’s the foundation of American democracy.
Peacefully protest tomorrow. It’s not just your right. It’s your duty.
So much news happening…On my weekly appearance on Halitics (a daily YouTube videocast) with Hal Ginsberg, we got into the ongoing government shutdown, We agree that the Democrats have the right idea, pushing for health care access only. As much as Republicans blame Chuck Schumer and the Dems for the shutdown, it won’t work. Voters are aware that the GOP controls the government and are responsible for all the problems the shutdown is causing.
Another topic had to do with our policy regarding energy. The Trump administration pushes for oil, gas and other high-polluting sources, at the same time disregarding and punishing solar, wind and other clean energies. We agree that the GOP is ignoring climate change, causing energy costs to increase, while blocking efforts to help our planet recover from pollution.
We also pointed out that Trump is getting rid of many blacks in high positions so he can hire white replacements. How will that play in future elections?
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