The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

But will this have any consequences?

The many other obvious untruths before have hardly had any influence on his back-and-forth tactics.

In an interview with a far-right media network, Trump called the Epstein files a “scam” that’s “all put out by Democrats, some of the naive Republicans fall right into line like they always do”.

“Fall in line with what?” an exasperated Meyers asked. “Democrats didn’t say a word. Your own supporters are the ones who spent years demanding the files and obsessing over the Epstein case, which was a very real criminal case involving a very real person, and now you’re the one fanning the flames of the conspiracy by calling it all a hoax. I swear we’re like a day away from Trump claiming Jeffrey Epstein was never even a real person.”


Meyers also homed in on the far-right interviewer who validated Trump with “they definitely set the Republicans up.”

“Set them up how?!” he implored. “We’ve been asking this question all week: how did they set up the Republicans? They made up fake Epstein files, then kept those fake files secret, then convinced the entire Maga base to spend years demanding the release of those files, then knew they would lose the election to Trump, who would then refuse to release the files they made up? You people all need to take a ******* dementia test.”

On Friday, during an interview on CNBC, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that President Trump was among the most popular people to ever occupy the Oval Office.

The president is the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics. There’s no question about it, but he’s also the most resilient. And you see at the same time, his approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story, I think, a day or two ago. He was at 90 percent approval rating. There’s never been a president that high.

You can decide for yourself if you think this president is “the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics” (Abraham Lincoln might disagree), but it is frankly ludicrous to say that Trump’s approval ratings are “skyrocketing” or that he represents a high-water mark of presidential popularity.

Recent surveys from YouGov, Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC and Reuters/Ipsos place Trump at roughly 40 percent approval. CNN, contra Johnson, puts Trump at 42 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval. Overall, according to the Strength in Numbers presidential approval average, 42.6 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance while 53.5 percent disapprove, for a net negative of -10.9 points, a low for his second term so far.

But the substance of Johnson’s absurd claim about the president’s popularity is less interesting to me than the fact that he would even say it. The House speaker’s assertion that Trump was at a “90 percent approval rating” is the kind of falsehood you might hear from authoritarian state media. It is a servile display of allegiance as much as it is an attempt to mislead viewers. It’s Johnson telling Trump he is his man.

In the neo-republican ideology that shaped the American founding, civic virtue is a key part of self-government. A corrupt people cannot, in this vision, form a free government. “Just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained,” Machiavelli observed, “so laws require good customs in order to be observed.”

For Frederick Douglass — the great abolitionist and thinker whose political philosophy was shaped by republican thinking — virtue includes self-respect, cultivated through education, and self-reliance. “Liberty has its manners as well as slavery,” Douglass wrote to the Black abolitionist and journalist Martin Delany in 1871, “and with those manners true self-respect goes hand in hand with a just respect for the rights and feelings of others.”

My immediate thought upon seeing Johnson’s performance on air was to reflect on this relationship between self-respect and self-government. To tell such egregious lies for the approval of some higher authority is to prostrate yourself — to show, for the world to see, your lack of self-respect. This becomes all the more egregious when one considers that Mike Johnson, as speaker of the House of Representatives, is more an equal to the president, in the American constitutional order, than he is a subordinate. He should have the dignity, at least, to act as a peer and not a supplicant.

With that said, Johnson’s behavior as speaker makes sense if he lacks the self-respect befitting a free citizen of a republic. A man who takes every opportunity available to show his belly to his leader would sign his constitutional authority away to an aspiring tyrant, ceding his power like Esau did his birthright. But where Isaac’s firstborn son could at least get a bowl of stew, all that Johnson really has is the idle approval of Donald Trump, a man not known for loyalty or even appreciation. That, I’d say, is thin gruel for what one must sacrifice to receive it.

On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.

Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.

American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”

Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.

And then there are the Epstein files.

A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.

As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.

You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.

On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”

But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump's enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”

Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”

On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.

Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.

Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”

At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.

Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.

Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.

“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”

Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”

On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last night, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”

Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.

Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.

President Donald Trump’s bid to take down the Wall Street Journal over its coverage of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein has landed in the courtroom of Darrin Gayles, who is likely experiencing deja vu.

That’s because Gayles, a 2014 appointee of Barack Obama, had another brush with a litigious Trump in 2023, when the then-former president sought to punish his onetime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.

Trump sued Cohen in April 2023 seeking a $500 million payout for claims that Cohen violated his attorney-client relationship with Trump and enriched himself off their relationship. Six months later, Trump abandoned the lawsuit, just before Cohen’s lawyers were set to question him under oath.

Trump’s new lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and owner Rupert Murdoch seeks an even more audacious sum: $20 billion. Trump says the newspaper defamed him by reporting last week that Trump may have sent Epstein a suggestive birthday card more than two decades ago. Trump filed the lawsuit on Friday, and Gayles was assigned to preside over the case on Monday.

But as with the Cohen case, there’s an open question of whether Trump’s new lawsuit is more of a political stunt than a serious attempt to litigate the issue. If Trump pursues the case, he would open himself up to answering questions under oath about his connection to the disgraced financier who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Trump’s decision to file the case in southern Florida led to suspicions he was hoping to draw U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, his own appointee who helped him escape criminal charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith. But Trump’s attorney Alejandro Brito — the same lawyer who led the ill-fated Cohen suit — filed the case in the Miami division of the federal judicial district of south Florida. Cannon sits in the Fort Pierce district, making it unlikely she would have been selected under the court’s assignment process.

Gayles, a George Washington University law graduate who made history as the first openly gay Black man appointed to the federal bench, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. One reason: His judicial background tilts bipartisan. He was appointed to state-court judgeships in Florida by two Republican governors, Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist, before Obama nominated him to his current role.


Darrin Gayles stands for a portrait in 2023.

His prominent cases include a $73 million judgment against the Venezuelan government in 2022 over a purported murder-for-hire scheme. Gayles ordered a new trial in a $25 million fraud scheme in Florida after finding that the Justice Department had committed misconduct and then lied to him about it. And Gayles notably sat with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on a voting rights case, writing a dissent that found evidence of discrimination behind an Alabama voter ID law.

Speaking at an American Bar Association conference in March, Gayles lamented the decline in public confidence in the judiciary. He gave a few reasons for that decline, including the Supreme Court’s frequent reliance on its “shadow docket” to issue short-form emergency rulings. He also blamed the practice of litigants strategically filing lawsuits in certain districts in hopes of drawing favorable judges willing to issue nationwide injunctions. And he lamented expectations that judges will rule based on the president who appointed them.

“We all have to do better and push back. We are independent, we make decisions on the facts and the law,” he said.

Gayles also denounced attacks on the judiciary that go beyond mere criticism and put people in danger. “We’re not infallible. Sometimes we get it wrong because we deal with a lot of very difficult, complicated issues,” he said. “It’s the nature of the criticism. If it’s done in a way that subjects us to harm, that’s problematic.”

After Obama nominated him in 2014, Gayles explained his judicial philosophy and experience in a 48-page Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire. He described presiding over hundreds of criminal trials as a state judge in Florida.

Responding to a question about his philosophy on recusal, he said he closely follows long-established ethical procedures but pointed out one memorable example: when a lawyer asked him to recuse from a case because he was Facebook friends with one of the other attorneys.

“After verifying that the attorney and I were Facebook ‘friends,’ I granted the motion,” Gayles noted. “I also ‘defriended.’”

Gayles does not appear to have handled any substantial media-related cases, though he did note in his questionnaire that an article about him in 2008 “contains several misstatements, inaccuracies, and grammatical errors” and that his “immediate written request for corrections” went ignored.

BREAKING: Major bombshell drops as a Jeffrey Epstein accuser reveals that she asked the FBI twice to look into Donald Trump after a disturbing incident with him — first in 1996 and then roughly a decade later.

The details will make your skin crawl...

Maria Farmer told The New York Times that she asked both the FBI and New York City Police Department to dig into the people inside Epstein's close circle, including Trump. She made the request in 1996 and then another when the FBI reinterviewed her about the billionaire pedophile roughly ten years later.

While Farmer told the Times that she had "no evidence of criminal wrongdoing" on the part of Epstein's friends and associates, she wanted the authorities to probe them due to gnawing suspicions about their behavior. The Times calls her account the "the clearest indications yet of how Mr. Trump might have come to be named in the unreleased investigative files in the Epstein case."

Farmer, who says she was sexually assaulted by Maxwell and Epstein, told law enforcement to look into Trump after she had a disturbing encounter with him in 1995 when she was preparing to work for Epstein.

"She said she told the authorities that late one night, Mr. Epstein unexpectedly called her to his offices in a luxury building in Manhattan, and she arrived in running shorts," reports the Times. "Mr. Trump then arrived, wearing a business suit, and started to hover over her, she said she told the authorities."

She felt "scared" as "Trump stared at her bare legs." Epstein then entered the room and said to Trump: "No, no.
She’s not here for you." Epstein and Trump then left, and she heard Trump say that he thought she was sixteen years old.

One could surmise from this story that Trump was accustomed to being provided underage girls by Epstein, whom he had a lengthy friendship with and once called a "terrific guy" who was "a lot of fun." Trump is also on the record stating that Epstein "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

Farmer worked for Epstein from 1995 to 1996 and while she was originally hired to acquire art for him, her duties eventually progressed to overseeing the "comings and goings of girls, young women and celebrities at the front entrance of his Upper East Side townhouse."

The Times confirmed that records from Sixth Precinct of the New York Police Department state that Farmer spoke to them in 1996.

"It is unclear whether federal investigators pursued a deeper examination of Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Epstein or whether the authorities documented what Ms. Farmer said she told them about Mr. Trump," the Times adds.

If such an investigation was carried out, the details may be contained in the unreleased Epstein files that the Trump administration is refusing to make public. It would also explain why Attorney General Pam Bondi directed roughly 1,000 FBI personnel to sift through tens of thousands of Epstein documents to "flag" all mentions of Donald Trump.

The American people have a right to see those documents.

Democrats need to win back the working class in 2028. Our research shows what does and doesn’t work.

Trump bans Wall Street Journal from Scotland trip press pool over Epstein report
As president sues paper over alleged letter, Karoline Leavitt cites ‘fake and defamatory conduct’ for kicking out reporter

A Wall Street Journal reporter was kicked out of Donald Trump’s press pool for his upcoming weekend trip to Scotland. The removal marked increased retaliation after the newspaper published an article alleging the US president sent Jeffrey Epstein a 50th birthday letter that included a drawing of a naked woman. The US president promptly sued the paper for $10bn.

“As the appeals court confirmed, the Wall Street Journal or any other news outlet are not guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” said White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, in a statement. “Thirteen diverse outlets will participate in the press pool to cover the President’s trip to Scotland. Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board. Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”