[…] iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. […]
… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.
Satire 10.77–81 – Juvenal
Of all of the things I would have imagined being able to seriously neuter or actually bring down the current administration given the stunning levels of corruption and unconstitutional behaviour in plain view of the citizenry they’ve engaged in these past few months, I never really imagined Jeffrey Epstein being able to do just that from his grave and likely permanent residence on the ninth ring of Dante’s Inferno.
But the absolutely abysmal way that Trump and his enablers have dealt with this worst and most persistent public relations nightmare really brings Juvenal’s satirical observation of the excesses of the elite of Rome and how the powers that be would survive by ensuring that the people had ample food and entertainment to distract them from what their government was doing right in front of them.
I’m sure the historians of this period in American political history will be writing massive tomes on how not to handle an existential crisis using among other things involving a distraction technique literally taking food away from 42 million citizens dependent on SNAP/food stamps assistance!
They’ve certainly provided (and continue to do so on a daily basis!) the political circuses but blowing the bread part of that famous equation certainly reinforces the idea that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them!
The administration and their enablers certainly didn’t help their cause when it became painfully clear that Speaker Johnson was more than happy to do everything in his power to delay swearing in the 218th signature on the discharge petition that will force a vote on the release of the massive collection of files the Department of Justice had amassed on Epstein’s paedophilia trafficking operation.
If Johnson’s intent was to provide the people with circuses to distract them, he certainly had enough clowns in his tent to put on a world-class performance starting with himself.
It seemed like every day he was trying a new excuse to stall Adelita Grijalva’s swearing in and the shutdown that he so deplored and was happily blaming on the Democrats was a gift from heaven to help him do so.
He tried the tack of saying he couldn’t swear her in whilst the government was shut down even though the House was doing daily pro-forma sessions even though he’d had no problem swearing in two Republicans elected in by-elections just months earlier under such a pro-forma session.
Then he tried to invent a “Pelosi Precedent” where a representative-elect wasn’t sworn in until 25 days after election even though the only reason that happened was that the representative-elect in question had asked then Speaker Pelosi to delay the swearing-in ceremony until their family could attend.
Representative Grijalva had to actually sue him in court to try to get the Speaker to stop depriving roughly 800,000 Arizonans their rightful representative in the House before it was finally made a moot case when the Democrats inexplicably gave up on their massive advantage in the polls when it came to renewing the Affordable Care Act premium subsidies and blame for the shutdown on the Republicans where they enjoyed a roughly 80% favourable advantage on both questions with the electorate at large.
Then there is that quartet of clowns in the employ of the Department of Justice, all of whom campaigned on the issue of transparency and that the Epstein files should be released to the public regardless of who was named on the client list.
The dual fools in charge of the FBI both made many promises on various podcasts that the files needed to be made public and were making noises about suppressing the files being a step way too far even after they were nominated and confirmed. Their position now? Crickets.
How about Attorney General Barbie (sorry, Bondi) claiming the files were on her desk awaiting final review and release only to continually change her story on the files being there to them not being there to there never being a client list even though in May she briefed President Trump that his name actually appeared in the files more than a few times. Those files that supposedly never existed by that point in her ever changing story.
My favourite is her deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche who was one of his personal legal stooges from those idyllic days before the Supreme Court declared Trump king in all but name who interviewed the one living witness to the existence of the client list as well as a co-conspirator of the trafficking operation. The transcripts (which I am not at all convinced are a complete record of what was said and certainly nothing of what was likely promised for testimony favourable to President Trump) make it clear that Ghislane Maxwell was lying through her teeth about what she knew and the President’s involvement in the scandal.
Do these clowns think that we should totally believe their story about how no quid pro quo was proposed when literally days after those meetings and interviews, convicted sex trafficker and Federal prisoner Maxwell was transferred from a maximum security facility in Florida to a minimum security Club Fed in Bryan TX which prisoners with similar convictions are not eligible to be housed?
Apparently so.
We are also supposed to take at face value the notion that Trump has not considered giving Maxwell a commutation of her sentence if not a full pardon. Lord knows he’s pardoned darned near everyone else who really shouldn’t have been but we’re supposed to believe that his deputy AG didn’t offer Maxwell that in exchange for a pardon down the road and an easier time on her 20-year sentence in a rather nasty prison?
Nope. He’s apparently never even thought about it even though he has to be deathly scared of what she might say if he doesn’t hold up his end of what you know Blanche had to agree to in walking away with Maxwell supposedly clearing Trump’s name.
Pull the other one, you tosser!
And all of the circuses that have been put in front of the American public can’t possibly overshadow the fact that even before the revelations of the past few months from EMAILs out of the Epstein estate, there was a solid majority of the electorate including many Republican voters who viewed Trump’s association and friendship with Epstein and Maxwell with great suspicion.
The prevailing view was that he was almost certainly going to be found in the files and indeed Bondi told the President just that after many FBI agents were detailed to scour those files for any mention of President Trump.
The President’s own public statements and behaviour just reinforced the electorate’s view that his sexual predilections were to infidelity, preferably with much younger women.
The man bragged about being able to grab women by their genitalia and he’d be allowed to get away with it. He made comments about his daughter’s body and being willing to have a go at her if he were a bit younger (as if that were really a barrier based on his other behaviour that has been documented in the courts by various investigations).
Those were things that no man should ever say about any woman ever but for a father to make those sorts of comments about his own daughter is a level of creepiness in a league of it’s own!
So it couldn’t have been that much of a conceptual leap for an electorate who already had ample evidence that he was a serial womaniser who was perfectly happy with engaging in adultery coupled with his comments and clear preference for younger women to come to the conclusion that there were likely worse aspects of his relationship with Epstein and Maxwell than what we’ve known about with current public disclosures.
Seeing that SCOTUS has made it clear that even the most serious crimes comitted by Presidents are beyond the reach of the courts, it rather begs the question why this administration didn’t take one of two possible actions to deal with the drip-drip-drip of awful news that is legitimately threatening his presidency unlike anything else such as the grift and self-dealing and profiting off the office we can all see happening right in front of us:
- Order that the files be released and trust in SCOTUS to protect Trump from accountability for his part in the crimes therein. Yeah, it’s a huge political hit and he’d probably lose some of his base of support in the process but he does not have another election ahead of him so he no longer needs their votes having escaped accountability for other crimes he committed once he was re-elected to the office. And I’m not entirely convinced it’s a huge hit politically when many in his base have been more than happy to ignore what their eyes can see and basic reasoning knows is criminal behaviour on the part of the President and his administration. Even when it’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they’ve stuck with him preferring to believe that the whole sordid mess is some huge conspiracy concocted by the Democrats.
- Order that the files and all copies be deleted and silence anyone who may be able to speak to their contents. It’s not too much of a stretch for my imagination to think that during the first term of a certain President Trump, he’d would have been more than happy for someone to rid him of a very troublesome problem that he’d supposedly fallen out with years prior over having “stolen” an employee from his club at Mar-a-Lago. Epstein died in Federal custody by his own hand even though he was supposedly on suicide watch during that first term and even though AG Barr and the FBI chalked it up to a perfect storm of incompetence, the whole “suicide” just reeks of a happy convenience for the President who is still dealing with Epstein’s revelations from the grave. I’m sure Trump’s advisors would find a “national security” angle to cover any additional wetwork that might be required (I’d be awfully concerned about being double-crossed on a permanent basis if I were Maxwell!) so that Trump would evade accountability.
The only reason I believe neither of these have happened yet is that the crown bestowed by SCOTUS in “Trump v United States” only applies to the President and I don’t know that his administration and enablers really want to be done for being complicit in crimes that the President would not be able to be held accountable.
I don’t see the President personally getting his hands dirty, either.
I get it that these two choices are horrible at best but I was of a mind before the election that he needed to just release the files if elected and trust that the people who are blindly devoted to supporting him would likely still do so in spite of overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t.
But that rather goes against the President’s insatiable need for flattery and being liked.
Being thought of as a pervert and a paedophile rather works against that goal.
Maybe he should have thought about that rather than engaging in decades of behaviour that’s at best creepy if not devastatingly illegal that his wealth and privilege have so far shielded him from any significant accountability!
But that as they say is that. For now, I expect we’ll have to beg for our ever more expensive bread and endure the circuses of distraction and depravity that have thoroughly brought our country and the Presidency into ill repute round the world. 🙁
That next circus starts with the vote on the bill discharged to the House floor against the Speaker’s wishes and every action to date where every Republican is going to have to make a very simple choice: either they are willing to continue to be willing accomplices to the covering up of Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes as well as the many others who participated in those evil acts or they’re going to stand with the American people who largely believe that paedophiles should be exposed and punished to the fullest extent of the law.
And they’re going to have to do that publicly where they can no longer duck their own accountability.
The Senate is going to likely be offered the same choice.
When that bill hits Trump’s desk, he’ll almost certainly veto it.
If there’s a veto-proof majority of both houses of Congress that would almost certainly seal Trump’s fate politically as there would really be no way his frequent threats and bullying behaviour will have quite the force once the full details of Trump’s complicity come to light.
May that day come swiftly!