{"id":55657,"date":"2025-11-16T12:22:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T12:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/55657\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T12:22:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T12:22:09","slug":"column-why-is-trump-so-desperate-to-distract-the-country-from-the-epstein-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/55657\/","title":{"rendered":"Column: Why is Trump so desperate to distract the country from the Epstein files?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Watching our national political dumpster fires \u2014 the longest government shutdown<\/a> in history, the nearly eight-week shuttering<\/a> of the House of Representatives \u2014 one really has to wonder: What the hell was that?<\/p>\n

The shutdown occurred because Democratic senators withheld their votes on a resolution that would continue to fund the government. Why? They wanted to reverse Medicaid cuts and extend the tax credits<\/a> that make health insurance possible for millions of low-income Americans. Republicans, who would rather give tax cuts <\/a>to millionaires and billionaires, insisted they would deal with the health insurance issue separately, at a later date. (Insert eye roll here.) For 43 painful days, Democrats held firm. And then they caved.<\/p>\n

Six Democrats<\/a> and one Independent<\/a> joined every Republican in a vote to end the shutdown. I\u2019m hard pressed to see what Americans got in return.<\/p>\n

House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a bizarre effort to prevent a vote on the measure that could lead to the government\u2019s release of the Epstein files, sent his colleagues home for two months, and refused to swear in <\/a>a newly elected Democratic representative, all to forestall such a vote. And then he caved.<\/p>\n

Johnson finally swore in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, whereupon she immediately became the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition<\/a> that will force the House to vote on whether to release the Justice Department\u2019s files on the country\u2019s most notorious sex trafficker. The bill is expected to pass, and will probably then die in the Senate or on President Trump\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n

So, what, exactly, was the point of shuttering the House? Was Johnson trying to protect Trump from \u201cincriminating\u201d information in the Epstein files? Or simply currying favor with an increasingly erratic president by doing his bidding?<\/p>\n

Trying to protect Trump from the stench of Epstein, who was found dead in his jail cell in 2019, makes as much sense as believing that Republicans will offer a good faith solution to skyrocketing health insurance premiums. The GOP has utterly failed for 15 years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare. With that kind of track record, they simply cannot be trusted to address health insurance in any meaningful way. And Trump cannot be protected from Epstein because we already know so much about their relationship. Epstein did, after all, describe himself on tape as \u201cDonald\u2019s closest friend for 10 years.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

Trump can call the Epstein scandal a \u201choax\u201d <\/a>all he wants now. But while campaigning in 2024, Trump said he would release the files, pleasing his conspiracy-minded MAGA supporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that they care about Epstein personally,\u201d explained Jack Posobiec<\/a>, the right-wing agitator who promoted a conspiracy theory about a Hillary Clinton-led child sex ring in the nonexistent basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor that led to an actual shooting in 2016<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s that they care that there\u2019s this optic that Epstein was somehow involved with a shadowy system that actually has control over our government, control over our institutions, control of our lives, and really is a ruling power over us.\u201d <\/p>\n

Posobiec was half right.<\/p>\n

The \u201cshadowy system\u201d turns out to be the elite and billionaire class that flies on private jets to private islands, abuses underage girls, and gets away with it. The high-ranking officials, techies, scientists, academics and other men who availed themselves of Epstein\u2019s revolving door of sexual gratification never thought they\u2019d be caught. And so far, with the glaring exception <\/a>of one member of the British royal family, none of the accused has paid a price. <\/p>\n

In death, the sleazy Epstein left many receipts, now coming to light with this week\u2019s release of 23,000 pages of documents,<\/a> obtained by the House from his estate.<\/p>\n

Epstein mused with the journalist and Trump nemesis Michael Wolff about how he could damage the president\u2019s political career. \u201cI am the one able to take him down,\u201d Epstein wrote to a friend in 2018.<\/a> And while he coached former Harvard President Larry Summers<\/a> on how to approach a woman he was pursuing in 2017, Epstein told Summers<\/a>, \u201cI have met some very bad people ,, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.. so yes- dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly, Trump is a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser<\/a> who has boasted of grabbing women\u2019s genitals<\/a> and falsified business records to pay hush money to a porn star<\/a> with whom he was accused of having sex while his wife was home with a newborn. But the Epstein emails don\u2019t implicate him in the criminal sexual abuse of minors.<\/p>\n

And yes, Epstein had a low opinion <\/a>of his onetime pal, comparing Trump in emails to a mafia don, and variously referring to him as \u201cdirty,\u201d \u201cF\u2014ing crazy,\u201d \u201cborderline insane\u201d and \u201cdangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

But while Epstein wrote that Trump \u201cknew about the girls,\u201d he also wrote that Trump \u201cnever got a massage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why, then, is Trump so desperate to change the subject from Epstein?<\/p>\n

Maybe the simplest explanation is the best.<\/p>\n

As the political commentator Bakari Sellers put it the other day on CNN<\/a>, \u201cEverybody knows that Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody tried to hide that, and so you have to wear around your neck that you were friends with one of the most notorious pedophiles in the history of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bluesky: @rabcarian<\/a>
Threads: @rabcarian<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Watching our national political dumpster fires \u2014 the longest government shutdown in history, the nearly eight-week shuttering of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[13573,34574,19222,7363,34576,34573,405,1900,9172,48,52,51,47,50,49,34575,17900,3020,5274,4486,1557],"class_list":["post-55657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-billionaire","tag-close-friend","tag-control","tag-country","tag-epstein-email","tag-epstein-file","tag-government","tag-health-insurance","tag-house","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-low-income-americans","tag-none","tag-president-trump","tag-release","tag-vote","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}