Raw Story

There are still some centrist Democrats in Washington who want to be seen as above politics, rather than of politics, and so take great care to make sure you understand that the Epstein scandal is “bull----,” and that they have nobler things to do, like serving the American people.

It so happens that’s what the president would like us to do — focus on how well the economy is performing, for instance, or on the allegations that Barack Obama cheated on the 2016 election, whatever that’s supposed to mean. In other words, Donald Trump would rather we pay attention to something else. Anything but the Epstein scandal.

Fortunately, I think this holier-than-thou attitude among certain moderate (and unnamed) members of the Democratic caucus is not representative of the whole party. Even Nancy Pelosi — the centrist’s centrist — has come around. First, the former House Speaker said the Epstein scandal was “a distraction.” But she voted with other House Democrats to release the Epstein files.

Here and there are hints that ambitious Democrats recognize that the Epstein scandal is the best frame in which to shoehorn virtually all their allegations against the president. Even if the facts of the Epstein case are never fully known, the scandal itself still remains the most constructive means of convincing not only a majority of the people, but his own people, that Donald Trump isn’t what he appears to be.

If we boil down the Epstein scandal to a word, it might be “weakness.” MAGA world was willing to overlook virtually any crime Trump committed with the understanding that he would, as president, use that power to bring to justice people who were, in MAGA’s eyes, “the real criminals.” Who those “criminals” were can be found here. Anyway, it’s safe to say MAGA gave Trump the power, then he … didn’t use it.

I think, as far as MAGA is concerned, the psychological ramifications of weakness are deeply hidden beneath all other considerations. Right now, there’s focus on details, like the fact that Trump gave Jeffrey Epstein a birthday note in which he appears to joke about their shared interest in sex with underage girls, and the fact that Trump’s goons at the Justice Department are now trying to get Epstein’s accomplice, who is currently serving the rest of her life in prison on child-sex trafficking convictions, to declare that Trump never knew Epstein and Epstein never knew Trump, in exchange for a presidential pardon.

But MAGA isn’t a detailed-oriented bunch. They supported Trump for 10 years because he was supposed to be the biggest and strongest of the big and strong, a man of action willing to break all the rules to “restore justice,” because all the rules had been corrupted by “the real criminals.”

Yet when it came time to act — to release the Epstein files, thus exposing a cosmic conspiracy against America — Trump choked.

As far as MAGA is concerned, every question about the Epstein scandal is downstream from the fact that Trump didn’t use the power he was given to do what he was supposed to do. Even if Trump manages to paper over the scandal, by getting convicted child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to say nice things about him, for instance, he still can’t explain his impotence. Indeed, the more he papers it over, the more he deepens the appearance among his own people that he’s weak.

This weakness, and the implied fraudulence within it, could be the foundation for what some might call a “permission structure” in which GOP voters are allowed to complain about Trump without seeming liberal or woke or some other thing that’s taboo in their communities. They might vote for a Democrat or, likely, stay home on Election Day.

Without this permission-structure, the Democrats would have a much harder time reaching GOP voters. As long as the president was the ultimate victim of a conspiracy against America, and the ultimate hero ordained to save America from the greatest of evils, no amount of suffering would divide them. The Democrats could talk all day every day about rural hospitals closing and Medicaid vanishing as a result of Trump’s big budget bill, and GOP voters would never blame him.

But with a permission-structure in place, or a semblance of one, GOP voters might start believing the Democrats or even better, they might start believing the evidence of their own eyes. The consequences of Trump’s policies — mainly his tariffs and “One Big Beautiful Bill” — will be felt hard. GOP voters and their families will suffer. However, instead of complaining about their suffering, and looking weak to their peers, they might find ways to complain about Trump’s weakness in the face of their perceived enemies, therefore, remaining loyal to their cause.

They can say they didn’t leave Trump.

Trump left them.

But the Epstein scandal has potential to widen in such a way that the president’s base is no longer our primary focus. Indeed, it is the ideal framing for attracting virtually anyone with a generalized sense that something is deeply and perhaps irreversibly wrong with this country. I think it would be especially effective for people who do not follow politics except as a form of entertainment. (The so-called Joe Rogan crowd.) It can be short-hand for the fact that the rich and powerful regularly act outside the boundaries of the law while the rest of us watch our hopes and dreams go up in the smoke. In the case of Epstein, young girls were groomed, consumed and thrown away.

In other words, people believe there is a conspiracy against America, because there is a conspiracy against America. The difference is that some of them believe the bad guys are Satan-worshiping Jews who drink children’s blood and sell girls for sex, while others believe the bad guys are rich white men like Trump who act with total impunity.

A new poll released by Fox shows broad public awareness of the Epstein scandal as well as broad public skepticism of the Trump administration’s handling of it.

“Only 13 percent think the government has been open and transparent about the Jeffrey Epstein case, while more than five times as many, 67 percent, disagree — including 60 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of MAGA supporters. One voter in five says they haven’t been following the case.”

Trump is weak, but within that weakness is a deep moral cancer that requires broad acts of liberal reform through democratic means to restore justice and heal the republic. The longer the Epstein scandal goes on, the more the president brings needed attention to that cancer. As Lindsay Beyerstein said, he is literally trying to get a woman who is “a pedophile, a sex trafficker and a perjurer … to vouch for him.”

Sadly, some centrist Democrats see the Epstein scandal as “bull----.”

They should, however, see it as a means of achieving a noble end.

Unlike most polls that propose answers, a new Washington Post survey asked voters open-ended questions requesting responses about President Donald Trump's scandal around Jeffrey Epstein and the documents surrounding his investigation.

The poll was conducted by text to a random sample of 1,089 people, according to the Post, and "was weighted to match U.S. population demographics, partisanship and 2024 vote choice." The margin of sampling error was "plus or minus 3.3 percentage points," the report said.

The survey revealed that just 38% of Republicans approved of Trump's handling of the scandal. Trump typically enjoys high support among Republican voters, but even that has fallen over the issue.

Trump's "disapproval" rating for the way he's handling the scandal reached 58% in the Post survey with only 16% willing to say they "approve" of the way Trump is handling the matter.

Meanwhile, 67% of respondents wanted all of the files to be released from the case, not merely the grand jury testimony or a few documents. Another 19% said that they "somewhat support" the release. The total of the two marked a whopping 86% of respondents who want the files released.

While several participants self-identified as MAGA Republicans, even some of those supporters were unwilling to give Trump a pass.

"Everything else in his campaign has been about transparency, why not this?" texted a 24-year-old MAGA Republican woman from Washington state, according to the Post. She wasn't the only young MAGA follower to question the president.

"I want to know who is on the list and if Donald Trump is on the list," answered a 25-year-old Illinois man who identified as a MAGA Republican.

A 47-year-old non-MAGA Republican from Utah commented, "The information should just be released. Instead of doing this, he has been attempting to minimize their importance and misdirect focus elsewhere."

Another non-MAGA Republican, 54, told the Post, "He has been claiming for years he would release the files. Now he is trying everything he can to not release the files because he knows he is on the list."

See the full responses here.

A resurfaced memo from the Justice Department may compromise President Donald Trump’s latest ploy to save face amid growing scrutiny into his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is currently facing a firestorm – largely of his own making – over his past ties with Epstein, who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and his subsequent stonewalling on releasing files on the disgraced financier.

In an effort to quash outrage from his most loyal supporters, Trump has moved to unseal grand jury testimony related to Epstein – a move that has already been denied by the courts – and has directed Justice Department officials to meet with Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking victims for Epstein.

Trump has not ruled out pardoning Maxwell, with some experts theorizing that the president may order her release in exchange for damaging information on political opponents such as former President Bill Clinton who, like Trump, also had close ties with Epstein.

However, a 2022 sentencing memo from the DOJ may have already poured cold water on that idea. In it, officials suggested that any testimony from Maxwell couldn’t be trusted.

“If anything stands out from the defendant’s sentencing submission, it is her complete failure to address her offense conduct and her utter lack of remorse,” the memo reads.

“Instead of showing even a hint of acceptance of responsibility, the defendant makes a desperate attempt to cast blame wherever else she can.”

Comments from several high-profile Republicans on Maxwell may also compromise Trump’s potential plan to pardon Maxwell as a way out of what some have described as a “MAGA revolt.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said over the weekend that he believed Maxwell’s 20-year sentence was “a pittance,” and that she should instead be serving a life sentence, “at least,” The Daily Beast reported. Alyssa Griffin, a former Trump White House aide, said “there’s a special place in hell for women who would help men abuse younger women,” speaking with CNN.

And former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger suggested that pardoning Maxwell would be impossible for Trump to spin to his base as anything less than an effort to conceal culpability as it relates to Epstein.

“She knows about Trump – and if Trump pardons her, she won’t talk,” Kinzinger said, The Daily Beast reported. “How are you going to spin this one? Do we care about child sex trafficking or don’t we? Answer that, guys.”

The city manager of Kerrville, Texas vented his frustrations at Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in private messages, KSAT reported — including calling her a derogatory nickname.

The messages from Dalton Rice, who handles the day to day operations of the city on behalf of Mayor Joe Herring Jr., reveal a local government struggling to get back on its feet amid a horrific crisis that killed over 100 people in the surrounding area.

"On July 5, Rice took part in an afternoon press conference in Kerrville with federal, state and local leaders to update the public on search and rescue efforts," said the report. "Hours after the press conference ended, a city staffer texted Rice, 'Just saw you met Homeland Barbi, how is she?!?!?!'"

In a text response, Rice wrote, “Beahahaha basically homeland Barbie.”

Noem has come under criticism for the federal response to the crisis, particularly after reports that because of rule changes to when spending contracts needed to be signed off on personally by the secretary, first responders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were delayed around three days.

Other issues have been scrutinized at every level of government, including the fact that state and local officials in Texas were unwilling to spend the money for a siren system along the Guadalupe River where the deadliest parts of the flood occurred, and the fact that President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force pushed out a vital emergency coordination officer from the National Weather Service.

Documents obtained by The Guardian and reported on Monday further detail how the Trump Justice Department has been forced to drop cases against protesters in Los Angeles because of false claims made by federal immigration agents.

The Guardian's review of federal law enforcement files revealed that "out of nine 'assault' and 'impeding' felony cases the Justice Department filed immediately after the start of the protests and promoted by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges," the newspaper reported.

"In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video," The Guardian continued.

"One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester. One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government's most high-profile cases."

The new reporting builds on a story published last week by the Los Angeles Times, which detailed how interim U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli has struggled to secure grand jury indictments against Los Angeles demonstrators who have taken part in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in recent weeks.

"Although his office filed felony cases against at least 38 people for alleged misconduct that either took place during last month's protests or near the sites of immigration raids, many have been dismissed or reduced to misdemeanor charges," the Times reported.

Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former California state prosecutor who currently works as director of the criminal justice reform group Prosecutors Alliance Action, told The Guardian that "when I see felonies dismissed, that tells me either the federal officers have filed affidavits that are not truthful and that has been uncovered, or U.S. attorneys reviewing the cases realize the evidence does not support the charges."

"It seems this is a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear, and discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights," DeBerry added.

I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily favored former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee to sail on through the final election in November as is generally the case. And so would we, his supporters, all.

Instead, Mamdani finds himself actively opposed by elements of just about every significant anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly than anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.

On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all the stops, to try all avenues — increased rent control and housing construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line — in an effort to allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class, rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer afford to live there.

On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the overprivileged few — the billionaires who think that the city owes it all to them — are not the saviors they think themselves to be, but are actually part and parcel of the problem.

First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels.

Sliwa, however, is not expected to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest in the race is primarily represented — as it is in all things — by our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal funding to the city, and even taking direct control of it, a threat he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to his taste.

Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in the working class — unfortunately a rather large sector of the party — along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza, two groups with significant overlap.

This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the minority leaders of both branches of Congress — Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer — are Brooklyn voters.

So are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile. Democrat Laura Gillen, representative of a New York city-adjacent district, for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my constituents.”

Next we have the independent candidates themselves, who have now come to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them is actually the current mayor of New York.

That would be Eric Adams, elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald Trump.

The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25 million — the heaviest spending in the history of New York City politics.

Cuomo has decided that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.”

His campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke — the Florida part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.

And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, never one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is — he spent over $1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won American Samoa) — dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000.

Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.

And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires — in this case for Eric Adams — including grocery (Gristedes and D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor.

As Kenneth Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.”

At this point, this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually happening.

(Personal disclosure: As one who was once slightly famous long ago, when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a self-described socialist — said to be the first since the Sacco and Vanzetti era — I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election night, I was literally moved to tears of joy. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one feeling envious.

The upshot of all this? This is our race.

Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way to wrest control of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting, giving a buck — even if just that — all of us should give this race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will be to beat that whole crew.

• Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco.