A Liberal Dose
“Troubling Revelation
about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein”
Troy D. Smith
I’m pretty proud of myself, I haven’t mentioned Donald
Trump’s Epstein problem on here in three weeks. And yet. If anything, the
problem is bigger than ever. Despite everything the president has done to
distract his base from the issue, and despite Mike Johnson calling an early
vacation for the House of Representatives in hopes the whole thing would blow
over and Congress would not have to address it, the controversy is proving to
have legs with his base like nothing else Trump has been involved with.
And man, the things he has tried. Announcing plans to build
a (no doubt gold-plated) ballroom in the White House that is bigger than the
White House itself. Essentially announcing plans to impose martial law on
Washington, D.C., under the cover of controlling violent crime -which is
actually at a thirty-year low in that city. Accusing Barack Obama of treason. Yet
still a significant number of his base are outraged over his refusal to release
the Epstein files.
It didn’t help him that what he DID do was send the #2
person at the Justice Department to talk to Epstein’s still-living, and several
years incarcerated, former girlfriend and partner in underage sex trafficking
and statutory rape Gislaine Maxwell -the sort of thing that, despite Trump’s
claim that it is “perfectly normal” -is unprecedented. Heck, before Donald
Trump, a president acting like Justice Department officials were his own
personal lawyers (and in this case, the guy actually WAS one of his own personal
lawyers) was unprecedented -because the White House and the Justice Department
are supposed to be strictly separate. Remember several years ago when Bill
Clinton spoke briefly with a Justice Department official on the tarmac outside
a plane, and Fox News went insane for six straight months about how
inappropriate that was?
Now did it help him that said chat with Maxwell was clearly
to engineer a set-up – as evidenced by the fact that she was immediately
transferred to a minimum-security prison (near where her family lives)
-something that a convicted sex offender is not even permitted by the rules to
do.
Nor did it help that a quote surfaced from him saying that
he “wished her well”, or the fact he was friends with her and best friends with
her boyfriend Epstein for years. Nor did the video that has surfaced of him,
from a few years before he ran for president the first time, hanging on a
teenaged girl and talking about how he is “like an alcoholic” when it comes to
17-year-old girls. Nor did the fact that he said, just a couple of weeks ago,
that the REAL reason he had a falling-out with Epstein is that the guy kept
“stealing help” from Mar-A-Lago, admitting that the help in question included a
17-year-old girl. Nor does the fact that many of those girls, down through the
years, have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them along with Epstein. Nor
did the fact that Pam Bondi warned him that his name appeared many times in
those files, or that hundreds of FBI agents were tasked with going through
those records and redacting his name. All this at the same time that he
suddenly reversed course from literally years of campaign promises and refused
to release the files, and has been yelling at, belittling, and insulting his
own supporters for not dropping the whole thing just because he said so. It has
been enough for some of his ardent supporters -even the January 6th
shaman guy whom he pardoned! -to suspect that he might actually have something
to hide, and that all the accusations he, QANon, and MAGA have been making for
years -that liberal politicians and celebrities are part of some international
child sex trafficking pedophilia ring -might actually be true of HIM instead.
Here’s something that has been getting a lot of play on
podcasts and Youtube channels lately -but NOT, that I have seen, from regular
news media (who are terrified of being sued by the president, whether he has a
case or not, or having their licenses revoked, or being put in jail).
Michael Wolff, who wrote a biography of Trump and was
working on a biography of Epstein when the latter was arrested and mysteriously
died in jail -and who therefore interviewed both of them extensively -described
a conversation he had with Epstein before the man was arrested the last time.
It was shortly after Trump won the 2016 election. (Bear in mind, this is me
reporting on a statement made on video by Wolff on The Midas Touch Youtube
channel, which has recently overtaken Joe Rogan’s show in popularity, not some
assertion of my own). Epstein made a remark to the effect of the things he knew
about Trump, and went to his vault and retrieved several Polaroid pictures,
which seemed to be from the 1990s and which showed Trump with several very
young, naked teenaged girls. In one of the photos the front of Trump’s pants
were wet, and the girls were pointing at him and laughing.
Now, if what Wolff said was true… when the FBI raided
Epstein’s home they would have found those photos. And who knows what else. And
they are currently in the possession of Pam Bondi. Whatever she has, President
Trump has made it perfectly clear that he never, ever wants you to see it. And
will go to any lengths to make sure you don’t.
Does Donald Trump really seem like the kind of person who
would be concerned with protecting anyone -other than himself?
He certainly hasn’t shown any real desire to protect those
underage girls -some of whom have expressed, not only a willingness, but a
desire, to testify about what they know before Congress.
Once they get back from vacation, if they ever do.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee
Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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