The real Epstein question is whether these increasingly extreme delusions – and, yes, anyone who thinks an already well covered “scandal” regarding a person that’s been dead for almost six years will take down a sitting President is deluded – will ever end. Sadly, there is no evidence that’s the case.
In the world of mathematics, things can be infinite in number, meaning you could count them forever and still have forever to go, but in the real world, resources are finite and there is no unlimited supply of anything. Thus, most things tend to follow some kind of curve, where we begin with a small number that increases over time before peaking and ultimately decreasing as supplies begin to run out. When an economist speaks of “peak oil,” for example, they are referring to the period where the maximum amount is being produced before the inevitable decline. The same can also be said of cultural phenomena, which tend to rise, peak, and fall in a similar cycle. When we speak of “peak TV” we are referring to the explosion of high-profile shows since The Sopranos (or as I have posited, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks), and questioning whether or not we have begun a decline in quality. Today, we might also speak of “peak delusion,” that is the phenomena wherein Democrats and their progressive allies continue to insist that President Donald Trump cannot possibly remain in office much longer, and is sure to either resign or be impeached and convicted in short order.
During his first term, it manifested as the belief that claims of Russia Collusion as investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller were sure to drive him from office at some point followed by not one but two impeachments. Even before Special Counsel Mueller released his final report, the Democrat’s Action Network was collecting signatures among those who supported his removal from office, however possible including his own cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment. “It is time for the Congress and the President’s Cabinet to remove Donald Trump from office before he gets us all killed. Most of us knew before election day that Donald Trump was unfit for office. But many of us held our tongue — not in criticizing Trump, but in demanding that Congress and the Cabinet remove Trump from office. Some of us hoped beyond hope that Trump might grow in the job. Others worried that calling for Trump’s removal too early in his presidency might turn the issue ‘political’; and scare off Democrats, while forcing Republicans to defend Trump out of party loyalty. But now that Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has publicly warned that Donald Trump is leading us into World War III, enough is enough, we’ve waited long enough. In fact, we’ve already waited too long.” To many in the pundit class, the phrase “the walls are closing in” was used to describe President Trump’s imminent demise. As CNN’s Frida Ghitis put it in December 2018 at what we might call near the peak of Russian Collusion hysteria, “On Monday, we saw more mountains of evidence of how the Russians worked to help Trump win the election – as if we needed more. (We also saw evidence that Russia is still entrenched in US social media networks.) And those were just some of the walls threatening to suffocate the presidency. In January, US Rep. Adam Schiff, the incoming head of the House Intelligence Committee, plans to plunge into Trump’s finances and other activities. Earlier this month, Schiff said Trump could face ‘the real prospect of jail time.’” Though none of this came to pass and President Trump ultimately emerged more powerful than before, capturing the White House a second time despite the persistent belief that he would likely end up in a jail cell at some point, the same delusions have plagued his second term so far and if nothing else, the sequel appears to be less compelling and more bizarre than the original.
Over the summer, some progressives managed to convince themselves that the President had simply passed away, gone from their lives forever in a bit of unexpected good news. As Minnesota Governor and former Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz put it when this news turned out to be false, don’t worry, he might die soon. “You get up in the morning – the last few days, you woke up thinking there might be news! Just saying…There WILL be news, some time!” Barely two months later, they appear to have settled on yet another shiny new thing certain to end with the President leaving office in disgrace or being forced from it. Actually, it’s an old thing recently repackaged as new: The supposed files concerning disgraced financier and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. While the man killed himself in late 2019, progressives have convinced themselves that his ghost is haunting President Trump and is certain to slay him, figuratively at least, for good, pay no attention to the fact the scandal re-erupted immediately after Democrats abandoned their base and caved on the government shutdown. To do so, Democrats in Congress began releasing emails last week purported to implicate President Trump in collaborating with Mr. Epstein in illegal activity. In one, Mr. Epstein wrote gmax1@ellmax.coom in April 2011, saying “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump…[REDACTED VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there.” Progressives somehow took this cryptic message to mean the President hadn’t yet been implicated in the investigation and Mr. Epstein might have done so himself had he lived, until it was revealed that the redacted victim was Virginia Guiffre, who had previously claimed under oath that she didn’t personally observe President Trump doing anything wrong, not even flirting with her, nor did she personally see Mr. Epstein or the future President together. Sadly, Ms. Guiffre committed suicide in April this year and can no longer testify, meaning to believe the Democrat version you have to believe she committed perjury the first time around, plus that they have chosen to use an email implicating her because she cannot clear the record and speak for herself. In a second email dated late January 2019, Mr. Epstein emailed Michael Wolff, telling him that another redacted victim was from Mar-a-Lago followed by a redacted statement, then “trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.” Equally of course, this is what President Trump already claimed happened. When he realized that Mr. Epstein might have been engaging in illegal behavior with underage women, he banned him from Mar-a-Lago and told him to stop, making it hard to see the point of the release except to exonerate the President, which I highly doubt was their intention.
In an email from Mr. Wolff to Mr. Epstein in 2015, about six months after President Trump announced he was running for office, the former claimed that the latter should just let “him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in the Trump regime.” What this was supposed to mean beyond a disgraced and completely ostracized from the public sphere person wondering if the President’s meteoric political rise could benefit him somehow, was left completely unsaid and has remained so the entire time. Instead, they released an email asserting what Mr. Epstein thought of the President and then proceeded to suggest a dead pedophile was a good character witness, when he claimed in 2017 “recall ive told you ,, … i have met some very bad people ,, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body,, so yes – dangerous.” Needless to say, this runs counter to the entire narrative that the two were best buddies, joined at the hip in terrorize underage woman, and can more properly be seen as Mr. Epstein’s rage that the President had socially exiled him in the past, but it gets even stranger when you consider that Democrats also suggested the President and Mr. Epstein had Thanksgiving dinner that same year, while Trump was in office.
In an exchange of messages with Faith Kates, Mr. Epstein said he was having Thanksgiving at “eva” with “david fizel, hanson, trump,” even though Mr. Epstein was a convicted sex offender at the time, any meeting between the two would have been explosive to say the least, and yet there was no coverage of it anywhere. In reality, First Lady Melania Trump had posted a photo of her President husband visiting the Coast Guard in Florida that day and ultimately, the claim was so laughably egregious even the Democrat Party could not keep it up for long. It was soon deleted without comment or correction, but that still didn’t prevent some from claiming so much damage had been done, President Trump could not long survive in office especially as the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Republicans, would be voting sometime soon to release even more files (likely later on today). As Politico framed it without mentioning the suspicious timing of these revelations considering progressive ire at ending the shutdown without any concessions from Republicans, “Latest Epstein files knock White House on its heels. The latest revelations stand to further fracture a party that already splintered once this year over the so-called Epstein files — during a much less politically fraught moment.” After noting that these were the much same claims made less than six months ago, claims which went nowhere whatsoever much less resulting in a removal from office, “The turmoil echoes the morass the White House found itself in during the summer when high-profile MAGA figures including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) fueled a conflagration the White House spent weeks trying to put out after the Justice Department released a memo saying that no files from the Epstein investigation would be made public,” they continued to insist that this time, it’s different because President has other issues to deal with as if that isn’t always the case for a sitting freaking President, who apparently never has anything on his plate and sits around twiddling his thumbs all day as they say. Seriously, they noted this as though this were news, “the president is grappling with an economic and foreign policy agenda that stands to be entirely upended. He is confronted with a public that does not believe he has improved their financial situations, the issue on which many of them voted to elect him. And his party is deeply divided over what to do with Carlson’s podcast interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes — and the defense of it from the leader of the storied Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.”
Democrat Senator Chris Murphy apparently agreed, claiming that the files could contain “the biggest scandal in presidential history” and that it could bring the President down, of course without mentioning that he participated in the biggest scandal in history by helping to hide President Biden’s obvious mental decline for years. “Well, he is in daily panic mode as we get closer to the moment these files and the fullest truth that we have available to us is going to be made public,” he said. “He wouldn’t be acting this way if he wasn’t so deeply worried about what sits in those files. What we’ve already seen is immensely incriminating. Clearly, Donald Trump was at the center of a child sex ring,” he said without evidence as though it was proven. Then, he went on to say the development was “heartbreaking,” “that kind of gross, craven immorality,” adding that “it stands to reason that he wouldn’t be fighting so hard to spin against this story or bullying Republicans in the House if there wasn’t something especially and specifically incriminating in that information.” Others were even more blunt, outright calling for his impeachment and removal from office. In fact, a supposed crowd gathered at the White House over the weekend, demanding it and according to Newsweek, “Donald Trump Impeachment Chances Surge Amid Epstein Revelations.” As they described the situation, “On Wednesday, lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents connected to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting sex trafficking charges. Some of the documents mentioned Trump. Following this release, according to online gambling website Polymarket, a platform where users can place bets on the likelihood of world events, the chances that Trump will be impeached by the end of 2026 increased from 5 percent on Wednesday to 15 percent on Friday.”
President Trump, however, doesn’t seem to be concerned in the least. In what was considered an unexpected development over the weekend, he is now calling for Congress to fully release the files, contrary to some of his prior statements. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he wrote on Truth Social. Perhaps needless to say, CNN promptly declared this represented a rare moment of weakness rather than strength for reasons only they apparently understand or simply because everything that happens must be interpreted in the worst possible way for the President. “The Jeffrey Epstein files saga is far from over, even after President Donald Trump suddenly reversed himself Sunday night and told Republicans to vote for releasing them. But regardless of how it shakes out, the drama around the files has punctured Trump’s aura of invincibility within the MAGA movement in a way few, if any, things have before. And it has proved a massive unforced political error by Trump. The man who has for a decade dominated his base and told it what to care about has backed down when that base decided its priorities didn’t align with his own.” Left unsaid: Much the same was being claimed over the summer and yet President Trump is still in office and will remain so with his base will behind him 99% of the time. To me at least, the real question is whether these increasingly extreme delusions – and, yes, anyone who thinks an already incredibly well covered “scandal” regarding a person that’s been dead for almost six years will take down a sitting President is deluded – will ever end. Sadly, there is no evidence that’s the case.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 