Trump can’t say, sure, he did it with some 14-year-olds. Nor can he say, “Hey folks, believe me, I looked. They said, ‘Sir, sir, you don’t, you can’t have access to files of this nature.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think I’m going to access them. Okay? I think I will.’ They said—” That is, Trump can’t say he checked things out personally and really there’s no scandal beyond the obvious. You’d think being a charismatic chieftain and thought leader would include being the one guy who could take a situation like this and tell the faithful to relax. But it turns out even Donald Trump isn’t that guy. Instead he has to yell at his public to stop paying attention.
MAGA told us the late Jeffrey Epstein taped men of the global elite having sex with underage girls, that he blackmailed these men, and that they had him silenced. Now MAGA has the Justice Department, and MAGA’s Justice Department says there’s no evidence Epstein blackmailed anyone, no evidence that Epstein’s death was homicide and not suicide, and no evidence that anyone further needs to be charged. Presumably the financial wizard and devotee of statutory rape kept his victims and his buddies separate. A bleak conclusion after years of lively guesswork. A reporter wanted to know what was up and asked MAGA’s god-king. Trump’s answer: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy?” To borrow an old line from Ring Lardner: “Shut up,” he explained.
Mossad, say disgruntled MAGAs pondering their master’s behavior. If they’re right, I say Epstein passed a tape of Trump to the agency. Or maybe the Mossad’s irrelevant and the files don’t show the nation’s leader with his pants off and a young girl at hand. Possibly Trump has run into a political obstacle.
For 10 years we wondered if there was anything Trump’s public wouldn’t let him say. Now here we are: no confessions to underage rape, no backtracking on Epstein. That’s the pair of third rails our 5th Ave. shooter must live with. The first is narrower than non-MAGA might think. Trump can communicate that he likes checking out a well-formed girl who’s aged 14 to 19 and doesn’t have her clothes on (see Trump, Miss Teen USA, “I sort of get away with things like that”). But if a girl’s under 18, he can’t say he had sex with her. The other rail’s a lot broader, and the further you get into MAGA the broader it gets.
A third rail usually involves an income stream, like Social Security. But Trump, a man whose voters tend to be rural and poor, is cutting Medicaid and getting away with it. A third rail could also involve a matter of decency, of fundamental principle. But Trump’s been proven in court to be a rapist, he’s bragged about committing rape, he sneered at a veteran for being a prisoner of war, and nothing could zap him. Now he’s worried about the zap in the Epstein case. No wall? The dopes put up with that. But take away their story and they’ll chop your head. This would seem to be the lesson followed by the planet’s top expert on MAGA. Yet take away their story he must (because of Mossad or stubborn facts or footage of his knees and thighs glowing white and a skinny-legged victim backing out of frame). The situation calls for skillful handling, a master’s touch. So Trump bellows.
Last weekend he spasmed out a 397-word Truth Social post yelling at the base to drop it. “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein,” he said in part. Trotskyite wreckers—sorry, no, Obama and Hillary and the people working for Biden—had engineered the Epstein files, which should now be forgotten, and anyway the files had nothing bad about MAGA. Trump’s post squirted out more story to cover up the loss of Epstein: “the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL’… investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020,” etc.
Perhaps the lies are all catching up and the house is about to fall. But Thatcher had her Westland affair and Reagan his Bitburg. Followers said faith had been broken. Then British Tories decided they didn’t want to lose Thatcher, and the American public decided it didn’t hate Reagan. Having worked themselves up, everyone de-worked themselves and life proceeded. That may be how it is for MAGA, once the tribe sizes up a life lived with Donald Trump thrown in the dumper. But some frenzied distractions will be needed to cover the downshift. Meanwhile, he’s getting singed because of a third rail based on a story.
The TV sets kept getting bigger and now Trump’s in the White House, star of the ongoing show that his followers prefer to regular politics. But the star can’t mess with the show, not without a lot of pain and unhappy noise. If this fix is the politics of spectacle, I expect it’s the most politics-of-spectacle thing anyone’s ever come across. Also, if there’s a list Trump’s on it.