Trump is old and sick (in mind and body). Economy not so good. Groceries prices rising. His self-aggrandizement (ballrooms, lavish dinners, etc.) is expensive and annoying. Epstein ghost haunting him notwithstanding his desperation to cover it up. His MAGA followers may have, so far, forgiven his past criminality but he has not delivered on many promises he made and instead he has switched to policies "they didn't vote for", including his bitterness, cruelty and anger and his persecuting anyone and everyone, even his most ardent supporters. His inciting wars in Latin America under fake pretexts, and his incapacity at making peace in Ukraine (in 24 hours he had promised) and in the Levant where his family's billion dollar deals reek of corruption and oily Arab ass licking but without a solution to the Palestine heartache.
All of this is beginning to turn away the few moderate normal people (independents, Hispanics and Latinos, African Americans, Arab Americans....) who were fooled and voted for him and carried him over to victory. Back then, they heard the words and the fake promises, it is only now that they see the criminal madman behind them.
Newly eligible young voters have seen with their own eyes the duplicity, the lies, the fake patriotism, and the damage he is causing to the republic, except for the desperate Turning-Point-USA racist bigoted dumb toddlers, desperately and incompetently trying to remain relevant with a younger generation drifting away from stupid juvenile ultra-religiosity and into sanity, maturity and sober reflection.
If Trump has managed to alienate the most rabid among his supporters (e.g. Taylor-Greene), imagine what the rest of the MAGA herd must be thinking but dare not say.
Worse yet: Trump made MAGA. Without his insanity and criminality, MAGA wouldn't exist. When a political movement is subsumed under the person of its leader, it dies when the leader dies. As they begin to see the end of the Trump phenomenon, his MAGA herd of morons know they will be left without the shepherd who led them astray into an obsolete wilderness deadend completely out of touch with modern America and the world. When the King is dead, is there anyone out there in the MAGA universe of morons to replace him? Yes, many would want to, but none has the Messiah annointment they have bestowed on Donald Dumb. He is unique in hybridizing stupidity with criminality.
And last but not least, people are truly terrified at the calamities this insufferable demented narcissist old man can inflict on our country as he contemplates his own demise. If you are wondering why he is having all his scheming meetings in the Situation Room....there's your answer.
Here is what one diehard MAGA said:
"All the talk about clearing the swamp didn’t work, now we have a cesspool. I feel Trump is a sociopath. I believe it’s clear as day. The Christian right are followers by nature and he leads them on with his act of piousness. I feel our country cannot survive another 3 years of this."
"If he’s innocent then
release all the files, but just by association between those two [Trump and Epstein] says he’s not [innocent]. And I’m sure there’s some well known wealthy men that are
guilty of it as well. Maybe even prior presidents. Trump is in the
spotlight now though, the curtain is wearing thin, the clock is ticking,
it’s just a matter of time." — Anonymous, 70, OH
==============================================
As Epstein consumes the White House, Republicans are starting to think twice about absolute loyalty to Trump
John Bowden
Fri, November 14, 2025
Does MAGA have a future that isn’t controlled by Donald Trump?
If this week was any indication, the answer is “yes”. And Trump himself risks the possibility of those voters moving on.
Since practically the first day he took office in 2017, Donald Trump owned the Republican Party. There was little room for dissent against a man who’d won office on the premise that he was the lone Republican who meant what he said and who promised to shake up a political establishment which, in his depictions, was hopelessly corrupt and on top of that: deeply, profoundly inept.
But the times, they are a changin’.
As Capitol Hill prepared to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history this week, the House Oversight Committee was quietly building a bomb. On Wednesday, as Donald Trump eagerly awaited the end of a minor political saga he’d blamed for his party’s crushing defeat in off-year elections, that bomb detonated.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has skewered Donald Trump on rising food prices as the president says he doesn't 'wanna hear about the affordability' (Getty Images)
“I know how dirty donald is,” wrote Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile and sex trafficker of underaged girls, in an email released by the committee. In others: “i want you to realise that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump...[VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him...he has never once been mentioned.”
“[O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine [sic] to stop.”
Membership of the House Oversight Committee includes both Republicans and Democrats. It’s chaired by James Comer, the blustery Republican congressman who led the GOP’s ill-fated efforts to impeach former President Joe Biden.
On Wednesday, the same day Trump and his Republican allies were to celebrate the collapse of Democratic resistance in the Senate over the shutdown, that committee released 20,000 pages of documents obtained from Epstein’s estate. The batch included personal emails sent and received by Epstein in the years before and after his 2008 conviction for soliciting an underage girl as a prostitute.
And the White House treated it like a bomb had hit the building. Trump summoned his advisers to the Situation Room, where his predecessor watched the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, to discuss how to respond to the fallout.
James Comer, the Republican Oversight chair who led the Biden impeachment effort, has done the opposite of giving Trump political cover amid the Epstein investigation fallout (Getty Images)
There’s a short list of Republicans in the House who’ve publicly defied the president by signing on to a Democratic discharge petition to release the full breadth of the Epstein files, following the DOJ and FBI’s announcement that the agencies would not do so: Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace.
Apart from Massie, the remaining three have embraced loyalty to the MAGA brand as their raison d'etre for public service, and have all sought Trump’s endorsement in their various campaigns for office.
But there appears to be a much longer list of Republicans who are willing to tactfully use this issue to shore up their own credibility with MAGA Republicans, possibly at the president’s expense.
Comer and the House Oversight Committee are the clearest examples. But there’s more: Speaker Mike Johnson, who owes his job as GOP leader to the president and his ability to be Trump’s mouthpiece in the lower chamber, says he’s not willing to give the administration any more cover after keeping the House out of session during the shutdown, delaying a vote on the bipartisan Epstein discharge petition for weeks.
In short, the Republican House caucus has largely made up its mind. Most assume that they can’t afford to appear uninterested on this topic, or dismiss it as a Democratic hoax (as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and her boss have both done).
Donald Trump summoned advisers to the White House situation room on Wednesday as the House announced that the 218th member had signed on to a discharge petition aimed at forcing the release of the Epstein files, triggering a vote (Getty Images)
“House Republicans are eager to put the Epstein controversy in the rear-view mirror,” Politico reported this week.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the speaker praised Comer’s efforts at Oversight to pursue releases of documents from the investigation, while giving no mention to the White Houes and DOJ’s efforts to keep further information from coming out.
“That’s been a treasure trove,” Johnson said of the documents from Epstein’s estate — a batch which included the first direct implication, from Epstein, that Trump had knowledge of his illicit affairs.
“So that’s going to continue,” the Speaker said of his caucus’s efforts to push for more releases. “The subpoenas are being ... complied with, and more are on the way.”
Meanwhile, the rebel GOP representatives signed on to the discharge petition tread a fine line: avoiding outright disloyalty to Trump, but making it clear at the same time that the president’s pressure on the House GOP was irrelevant.
“It's unfortunate that not more Republicans were actually on the initial discharge. But I know in talking to many of them, that many of them are going to vote yes [to release the files],” one of those Republicans, Rep. Nancy Mace, told The Independent.
Reports indicate that Trump reached out to both Mace and Boebert before the vote this week. He failed to sway either one, though Mace insisted that the president wasn’t reaching out to them to intimidate them.
Rep. Nancy Mace is one of four House Republicans who publicly bucked the White House over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation (Getty Images)
“No one has threatened me,” she told The Independent. “The president hasn't threatened me, and the President didn't ask me get off the discharge petition.”
So where does that leave Trump?
Largely speaking, the Epstein issue is unique in its salience with such a massive swath of the American public — that’s where these lawmakers are finding the strength to buck the party.
But the story clearly threatens to sap any remaining political capital Trump has on the Hill, at least until the 2026 midterms. Will further releases detract from that strength even further?
Either way, this is happening at the worst possible time for Trump: before the end of the first year of his four-year term, right as Republican members of Congress are looking at their potential re-election fights, and gauging how to protect their seats after a brutal Democratic sweep of 2025’s off-year statewide elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, Pennsylvania and New York.
At the same time, the White House is battling perceptions from voters who accuse them of not making inflation and cost-of-living expenses a higher priority while the president galavants around the world in a bid to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize.
If he’s unlucky, this could be the defining issue of his second term — a term which isn’t even one-quarter completed.
No comments:
Post a Comment