The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

On November 19, 2025, Congress passed H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and although there was none of the usual publicity and fanfare President Donald Trump enjoys around a bill signing, the White House said that Trump signed it the same day, making it a law.

It required the United States Attorney General to “release all documents and records in possession of the Department of Justice relating to Jeffrey Epstein” no later than 30 days after the date the measure became law. It required that the Department of Justice “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to: Jeffrey Epstein including all investigations, prosecutions, or custodial matters…. Ghislaine Maxwell…. Flight logs or travel records, including but not limited to manifests, itineraries, pilot records, and customs or immigration documentation, for any aircraft, vessel, or vehicle owned, operated, or used by Jeffrey Epstein or any related entity…. Individuals, including government officials, named or referenced in connection with Epstein’s criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings…. Entities (corporate, nonprofit, academic, or governmental) with known or alleged ties to Epstein’s trafficking or financial networks.”

It required the release of “[a]ny immunity deals, non-prosecution agreements, plea bargains, or sealed settlements involving Epstein or his associates” and “[i}nternal DOJ communications, including emails, memos, meeting notes, concerning decisions to charge, not charge, investigate, or decline to investigate Epstein or his associates.”

It required the Department of Justice to produce “[a]ll communications, memoranda, directives, logs, or metadata concerning the destruction, deletion, alteration, misplacement, or concealment of documents, recordings, or electronic data related to Epstein, his associates, his detention and death, or any investigative files.” It demanded “[d]ocumentation of Epstein’s detention or death, including incident reports, witness interviews, medical examiner files, autopsy reports, and written records detailing the circumstances and cause of death.”

The law established that the Department of Justice could withhold only information that was classified or that contained “personally identifiable information of victims or victims’ personal and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”; images that “depict or contain child sexual abuse materials… [or] would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary”; images that “depict or contain images of death, physical abuse, or injury of any person; or…contain information specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order.”

The law required that the Department of Justice must justify all redactions with “a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress.”

Otherwise, it said, records could not be “withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”

The deadline for the release of that information was yesterday, December 19.

In the afternoon, the department began to release the required materials. But despite the law’s specification that the department release ALL the records, it released just a fraction of the required materials, saying it would release more later. Missing were any of the FBI interviews with survivors or internal Justice Department memos about charging decisions.

There are very few images of Epstein with Trump, despite their close relationship. Instead, the files focused on former Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose office responded with a statement saying: “The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20–plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be. Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton.”

And then there were the redactions. So much of the material was redacted that, in front of television cameras, Jake Tapper of CNN scrolled through an entirely-blacked-out 100-page document on his phone and said: “That’s the transparency we’re getting here.”

Today observers caught that for all that the Department of Justice had omitted materials the law required they produce, Justice Department staffers had inserted unrelated material: a photo of former Democratic president Bill Clinton, pop music star Michael Jackson, and music legend Diana Ross, with children, suggesting that the three were associated with sex abuser Jeffery Epstein. The image was quickly identified by social media users not as a private image from the Epstein files, but as a publicly available image from a 2003 fundraiser. The children were not Epstein victims, but rather Jackson’s and Ross’s own kids.

Then it turned out, as Michael R. Sisak and David B. Caruso of the Associated Press reported, at least 16 files that had initially been posted on the Justice Department’s public website have disappeared without explanation, including one that showed multiple photographs of Trump with Epstein.

Democratic lawmakers Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement yesterday after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the Department of Justice would not meet the deadline for the release of the Epstein files established by law.

“Donald Trump and the Department of Justice are now violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring,” the two wrote. “For months, [Attorney General] Pam Bondi has denied survivors the transparency and accountability they have demanded and deserve and has defied the Oversight Committee’s subpoena. The Department of Justice is now making clear it intends to defy Congress itself, even as it gives star treatment to Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Courts around the country have repeatedly intervened when this Administration has broken the law. We are now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”

Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actions that last more than 60 days.

Now, with their disregard for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, they are also treating voters, especially their own MAGA voters who stood behind Trump because he promised to release the Epstein files, with outright contempt.

Btw, Donald Trump and his entire administration is 100% sold out to Netanyahu and his genocidal band of murdering rapists.

Not the only corrupt president—but most definitely the stupidest, most obviously sold out president in the history of this sad collapsing country.

When Donald Trump has something to say, he takes to Truth Social.

Trump has used the platform to announce policies on everything from the economy to travel bans, making declarations that are key for Americans seeking information about his government.

Perhaps just as importantly, Americans could be missing out on understanding Trump’s mental state and his performance in office. On at least one occasion Trump has appeared to be confused about whether or not certain AI videos are real on Truth Social. In early December, the president posted 158 times on the platform in three hours, raising questions not just about his increasingly unusual behavior, but also how he is spending his time.

But few Americans will have witnessed this erratic, and revealing, behavior directly because just 3% of people in the US use Truth Social.

The relatively tiny number of people using Truth Social, revealed in a Pew Research Center study published in late November, could effectively cut people off from direct communication from their president. It may also shield Trump, 79, from some questions over his mental state.

Trump’s restriction to Truth Social, a company which he owns and whose value has contributed to his soaring net worth, means only 3% of US adults have witnessed Trump’s increasingly incoherent rants, frequent sharing of racist posts, and generally odd behavior.

On 1 December, he shared a post that referred to Somali Americans as “inbred savages” who are seeking to “impose their Sharia bullshit”. That the president was apparently endorsing racism towards immigrants in this way went largely unnoticed by the media – thankfully for the sake of people who want to know what’s on Trump’s mind, he repeated some of the same framing in public days later.

In an example that brings into question the president’s competence, at 5.44pm on Saturday, Trump announced on Truth Social that “the suspect” in the Brown university shooting “is in custody”.

No doubt the post came as a relief to the small number of people who saw it, but unfortunately it wasn’t true. Nineteen minutes later Trump was forced to correct his post. “The suspect is NOT in custody,” he wrote.

The rants and inaccuracies are mixed in with what is just odd behavior. Trump reposts random videos without comment, including a 10 second clip which features a dance track over a photo of three men in military clothing, and throws up photos of himself with no context provided.

In late September, Trump, the oldest person ever to be inaugurated as president, appeared confused about what policies he had or had not announced, and also about which videos are real and which are AI-generated. He reposted to Truth Social an AI-generated fake video which promoted “med bed hospitals”, a video which showed an AI version of himself speaking.

Setting aside that the idea of “med beds” is a rightwing conspiracy theory – one version of the theory posits that the government and/or a group of wealthy Americans have access to medical bed-like devices that can cure almost every illness, but are withholding the technology – Trump’s post prompted a number of questions.

Did Trump believe that the video really showed him announcing med bed hospitals? Did the president think he gave a speech about “med beds” at the White House? Did he believe that his government is about to send “med bed cards” to every US citizen?

We will probably never know the answer, and Trump deleted the post, but this was at least an example of his Truth Social confusion breaking through to a wider audience: much of the media picked up on his confusion.

Emmitt Riley III, associate professor of politics at the University of the South and the president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, said some of Trump’s output is “amplified by mainstream media, and recirculated across various other platforms”.

And some things have been big enough to break through: Trump’s rant about Rob Reiner, published on Truth Social a day after the film-maker died, was widely reported. It may be that even using a sparsely populated social platform cannot hide the behavior of an erratic, seemingly exhausted president from the American public.

“Americans have a front-row seat to the decline of Trump, right? So we’re now seeing videos and pictures of him falling asleep during cabinet meetings, dozing off doing important international summits,” Riley said.

“He spent a lot of time on the campaign trail criticizing the former president’s cognitive decline, and yet we’re watching his age catch up with him in real time.”

As the Republican party, which is indelibly tied to Trump and his whims, gears up for crucial midterm elections, the question is whether Trump’s supporters will choose to believe what they are seeing, or opt to bury their heads in the sand.

I'm assuming it was the nipple action mentioned. If it was a Trump supporter none of our posts would be SFW.

"Jeff understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security, and will strongly advance our Country’s Interests for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Allies, and indeed, the World," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Speaking today at Turning Point USA’s annual “AmericaFest” conference, Vice President J.D. Vance said, to great applause: “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God we always will be, a Christian nation.”

Actually, we haven’t.

Vance’s statement flies in the face of our Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why it was fundamentally important to make sure the government kept away from religion.

In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as Virginia arrested itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which our own Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—would be based. It reads, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Madison believed that a variety of religious sects would balance each other out, keeping the new nation free of the religious violence of Europe. He drew on that vision explicitly when he envisioned a new political system, expecting that a variety of political expressions would protect the new government. In Federalist #51, he said: “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”

In 1790, the year after he took office as the nation’s first president, George Washington assured a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, that in the United States of America, “[a]ll possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” The government of the United States, he wrote, “gives to bigotry no sanction” and “to persecution no assistance.” He wished that Jewish Americans “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants— while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

The next year, the states ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. In order to ensure men had the right of conscience, it reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson called this amendment “a wall of separation between Church & State.” In a letter of January 1, 1802, he explained to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, how that principle made him refuse to call for national religious days of fasting and thanksgiving in his role as head of the government.

Like Madison, he maintained that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “[T]he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “[and] not [religious] opinions.”

“[T]hat act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” he wrote, built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

In the early years of the nation, Americans zealously guarded that wall. They strictly limited the power of the federal government to reflect religion, refusing even to permit the government to stop delivery of the U.S. mails on Sunday out of concern that Jews and Christians did not share the same Sabbath and the government could not choose one over the other. The Constitution, a congressional report noted, gave Congress no authority “to inquire and determine what part of time, or whether any has been set apart by the Almighty for religious exercises.”

But the Civil War marked a change. As early as the 1830s, southern white enslavers relied on religious justification for their hierarchical system that rested on white supremacy. God, they argued, had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts.

A character in an 1836 novel written by a Virginia gentleman explained to a younger man that God had given everyone a place in society. Women and Black people were at the bottom, “subordinate” to white men by design. “All women live by marriage,” he said. “It is their only duty.” Trying to make them equal was a cruelty. “For my part,” the older man said, “I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.”

The Confederacy rejected the idea of popular government, maintaining instead that a few Americans should make the rules for the majority. As historian Gaines Foster explained in his 2002 book Moral Reconstruction, which explores the nineteenth-century relationship between government and morality, it was the Confederacy, not the U.S. government, that sought to align the state with God. A nation was more than the “aggregation of individuals,” one Presbyterian minister preached, it was “a sort of person before God,” and the government must purge that nation of sins.

Confederates not only invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in their Constitution, they established as their motto “Deo vindice,” or “God will vindicate.”

The United States, in contrast, was recentering democracy during the war, and it rejected the alignment of the federal government with a religious vision. When reformers in the United States tried to change the preamble of the U.S. Constitution to read, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the sources of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Ruler among nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union,” the House Committee on the Judiciary concluded that “the Constitution of the United States does not recognize a Supreme Being.”

That defense of democracy—the will of the majority—continued to hold religious extremists at bay.

Reformers continued to try to add a Christian amendment to the Constitution, Foster explains, and in March 1896 once again got so far as the House Committee on the Judiciary. One reformer stressed that turning the Constitution into a Christian document would provide a source of authority for the government that, he implied, it lacked when it simply relied on a voting majority. A religious amendment “asks the Bible to decide moral issues in political life; not all moral questions, but simply those that have become political questions.”

Opponents recognized this attempt as a revolutionary attack that would dissolve the separation of church and state, and hand power to a religious minority. One reformer said that Congress had no right to enact laws that were not in “harmony with the justice of God” and that the voice of the people should prevail only when it was “right.” Congressmen then asked who would decide what was right, and what would happen if the majority was wrong. Would the Supreme Court turn into an interpreter of the Bible?

The committee set the proposal aside.

Now, once again, we are watching a minority trying to impose its will on the majority, with leaders like Vice President J.D. Vance trying to rewrite American history.