Friday, July 18, 2025

Epstein-Gate goes ka-boom!


Today the Wall Street Journal dropped what might well become the Story of the Decade - back in 2003, Trump sent an obscene birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, saying how much they have in common and the "wonderful secret" they shared.
Oops!
I'm not sure why they didn't reproduce a copy of the card instead of just describing its contents - maybe they think of themselves as a "family" paper -- but here is a detailed description and analysis of what it means: 
The Birthday Card That Speaks Volumes: Decoding Trump's Message to Epstein
...The Wall Street Journal's revelation of Donald Trump's 2003 birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein isn't merely another embarrassment for a scandal-prone presidency—it's a Rosetta Stone for understanding how predators recognize each other across crowded rooms, how they speak in code, and how they celebrate their shared impunity.
The birthday card itself defies belief, yet its very absurdity rings true. Picture this: typewritten dialogue between "Donald" and "Jeffrey," formatted like a script, surrounded by the hand-drawn outline of a naked woman sketched in heavy marker. Two small arcs denote breasts. Below the waist, where one might expect to find additional anatomical detail, there is instead Trump's signature—a squiggly "Donald" serving as pubic hair.
The dialogue reads like a fever dream of narcissistic recognition:
    Voice Over: "There must be more to life than having everything."
    Donald: "Yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is."
    Jeffrey: "Nor will I, since I also know what it is."
    Donald: "We have certain things in common, Jeffrey."
    Jeffrey: "Yes, we do, come to think of it."
    Donald: "Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?"
    Jeffrey: "As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you."
    Trump: "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."
This isn't birthday whimsy—it's the language of mutual blackmail dressed up as celebration. Every line drips with subtext, every exchange winks at unspoken knowledge. The format itself—a dialogue between two characters who complete each other's thoughts—suggests a relationship so symbiotic it borders on the vampiric....
What makes the birthday message so damning isn't just its existence but its dialect. The theatrical format, the knowing references to shared secrets, the reduction of women to body parts—this is how predators communicate when they believe themselves beyond consequence. It's a language that assumes impunity, that celebrates transgression, that bonds through the implied threat of mutual destruction.
Consider the progression of the dialogue: from philosophical musing about "having everything" to the acknowledgment of shared, unspoken knowledge, culminating in the celebration of secrets. This isn't casual correspondence; it's a ritualized exchange of compromising material, a celebration of what both men know about each other and what they know about the world's willingness to look away.
The phrase "enigmas never age" takes on particularly sinister undertones given Epstein's predilection for underage girls. Is this Trump's way of noting that his friend's tastes remain consistent? The ambiguity feels intentional, the kind of plausible deniability that allows monsters to recognize each other while maintaining facades of respectability.
The administration's decision to close the Epstein investigation without releasing additional documents transforms this birthday card from embarrassing artifact to active evidence of cover-up. Every denial, every legal threat, every attempt to change the subject only emphasizes what's being hidden. Trump isn't just protecting his own reputation; he's protecting an entire ecosystem of compromise.
The birthday card exists within a constellation of evidence: the photos of Trump and Epstein laughing at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's 2002 quote about Epstein liking women "on the younger side," the flight logs, the parties, the decades of social overlap. Each piece alone might be explained away. Together, they form a pattern as clear as it is damning.
...What we're witnessing isn't merely another presidential scandal but a collision between two versions of Trump: the populist hero who promised to expose the corrupt elite and the corrupt elite member desperate to keep his secrets buried. The birthday card serves as the perfect metaphor for this contradiction—crude enough to shock, coded enough to deny, real enough to destroy the mythology Trump has built around himself.
The most generous interpretation of this artifact—that it represents nothing more than wealthy men's locker room humor circa 2003—still reveals a man who views women as anatomical drawings, who bonds with other men through shared secrecy, who celebrates what cannot be spoken aloud. The less generous interpretations venture into darkness that American democracy may lack the stomach to fully explore.
In the end, Trump's birthday message to Epstein achieves something remarkable: it makes the unbelievable undeniable. No fiction writer would dare invent something so perfectly symbolic—a powerful man's signature serving as a crude drawing's pubic hair, sent to a pedophile with wishes for "wonderful secrets." Reality, once again, proves more grotesque than imagination.
The card's final line—"may every day be another wonderful secret"—now reads less like a birthday wish and more like a curse. For Trump, every day brings new revelations about old secrets, each one wonderful only in its capacity to inspire wonder at how such men achieved such power and why we ever believed their lies....
A couple of points occur to me:
Yesterday, without any explanation or notice, the Department of Justice fired Maurene Comey, the attorney from their New York office who prosecuted both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and is, as a result, totally knowledgeable about all of the case file materials held by the DOJ. 
I wonder now if it was because her Non-Disclosure Agreement would prevent her from confirming the card's accuracy. Or maybe the DOJ wanted a scapegoat to blame for the Wall Street Journal getting the card. Or both.
And this, too - one of his defenses today was about how he hadn't ever drawn anything. But remember Sharpie-Gate, when Trump drew his own hurricane prediction on a weather map so he wouldn't have to admit he had scared people needlessly.
He's also trying to persuade MAGA that the whole mess is just a Democratic hoax :

Trump is trying to convince people that Obama and Biden made up fake evidence implicating him in the Epstein case, inserted it in the file, and then KEPT IT COMPLETELY SECRET It’s completely nonsensical

- Judd Legum

Read on Substack
Some comments:

Elon bought a sense of humor lately, cool cool.

- Robin Wilding

Read on Substack

Coyne on Epstein-Gate:

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— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 11:49 PM

🤭🤭🤭

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— The Daily Show (@thedailyshow.com) July 16, 2025 at 12:00 PM
View on Threads
(The Coldplay concert refers to the day's other salacious story about the CEO and his HR director:  This happened. Then this. And this.)
And here's some more stuff I bet you didn't know: Sticking his finger into the dyke, Trump now says he wants to release some grand jury transcripts or some such:

Don’t be fooled. This is pure theatre and is designed to turn up nothing new.

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— Tea Pain (@teapainusa.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 9:37 PM
This isn't gonna work, donnie, because MAGA knows there is more than this and they won't be fooled again by attempted Jedi mind tricks:

The funniest thing about it all is this:
What Tom Nichols says here is absolutely true. Trump never cared a jot or a tittle about the pedophile conspiracies that his MAGA supporters believed in so fervently. Now these are coming around to bite him in the ass:
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