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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: And the beat goes on and on and on [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-17
We begin today with Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic saying that the Jeffrey Epstein story is out of control even for the tacky shoe salesman (at least for now).
After years of sounding dog whistles and peddling outright conspiracism to work his supporters into a lather about global pedophile rings, Trump is telling those same people to move on. Earlier today, Trump posted on Truth Social that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy—a pillar of the MAGA cinematic universe—is a “hoax” and went so far as to disavow his “PAST supporters” over the issue. “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work,” he wrote. “I don’t want their support anymore!” The responses poured in immediately on the platform. It is not going well for Trump. “Why was Epstein in prison then? How about Ghislaine? For a hoax? I don’t think so,” a top reply to the post reads. “This is the hill we all die on.” [...] The Jeffrey Epstein saga is just about perfect, as conspiracy theories go. At its core, it’s about a cabal of corrupt billionaires, politicians, and celebrities exploiting children on a distant island—catnip for online influencers and QAnon types who have bought into any number of outlandish stories. Yet for such a dark conspiracy theory, there’s a great deal we know about Epstein’s life and crimes. There are unsealed court transcripts, flight records, victim statements. His black book has been reported on, giving the public access to names of people Epstein is thought to have associated with (though some have said they don’t know why he had their information). There’s real investigative reporting, much of it from the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, who spoke with detectives and victims and provided a fuller account of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and the attempts to downplay his crimes. Brown also credits the police officers who continued to press on their own investigation as federal officials seemed to wave it away. The case is real and horrifying, which gives life to all the wild speculation: If this is true, why not that? [...] Whatever happens next will be a defining moment for Trump. However strange it seems to measure the Epstein conspiracy theory against, say, the president’s approach to tariffs or his bombing of Iran, this is the stuff Trump’s mythology is based on. Trump has positioned himself as an outsider who shares enemies with his base—namely, elites. It hasn’t mattered to his supporters that Trump is an elite himself; the appeal, and the narrative, is that Trump wants to punish the same people his supporters loathe. In appearing to bury the Epstein list—which, again, may or may not exist—by calling it a “hoax” and pinning it to his “PAST supporters,” Trump is pushing up against the limits of this narrative—as well as his ability to command attention and use it to bend the world to his whims. If Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem can successfully spin the Epstein debacle into a conspiracy theory that helps them, or if they can make the story stop, it would suggest once again that his grip on the party and its base is total: an impenetrable force field no bit of reality can puncture.
David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times takes a look at the conspiracy theory world in the age of social media.
The imagined center of the “Epstein files” has long been his supposed “client list.” But how much of Epstein’s life is still secret? Gawker published his address book a full decade ago; New York magazine delivered an annotated version in 2019 and Business Insider a searchable version the next year. There followed investigations by The Times and The Wall Street Journal, prolific enough that they now have their own landing pages, and depositions and civil suits and a public criminal trial for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime partner in crime. The Epstein flight logs were made public in 2021, the same year that Michael Wolff published an astonishing account of Epstein’s final months, including the long transcript of an interview that Steve Bannon conducted with Epstein. Bannon has said he is sitting on 15 hours of material; Wolff says his own audio recordings run about a hundred hours. In one clip released just before the election, Epstein calls himself Trump’s “closest friend.” Almost none of this information has satisfied those seeking it, or those seeking still more. And really, how could it? As with so many contemporary conspiracies, the known picture is expansive and uncomfortable enough, with abundant detail arrayed like so much proverbial red yarn. But the logic of paranoid thinking demands ever more cycles of disclosure and running epicycles of analysis. (This is among the many ways it is an extremely good match for the age of social media.) And what is missing in the Epstein story isn’t exactly more information — it’s more meaning. Is there more to see here, beyond the striking fact of a suspiciously wealthy and curiously well-connected sex offender? Or perhaps less, with Epstein turning out to have been more a shady influence hustler and savvy estate planner than some world-historical man of mystery? We get a classic conspiracy theory, we’re often told, when disempowered people try to make sense of a disordered world, seizing on a story that gives them a comforting sense of control, at least as analysts of an otherwise overwhelming system producing improbable or inscrutable outcomes. How could a 24-year-old drifter have single-handedly killed a president and initiated an entirely new era of American life, and done so with just three bullets fired in just a few seconds? How could another young drifter, 61 years later, have gotten so close to changing the course of history, too? Then again, how could he have missed from that distance? And how could an ear have produced so much blood, then healed so quickly, leaving behind so little scarring?
Matt Gertz of MSNBC notes a split in MAGA media between the “establishment” Fox News and many podcasters and “influencers”.
Trump’s statement put to the test the MAGA pundits and influencers who had told their audiences for years that wealthy elites, corrupt officials and the mainstream press were covering up for Epstein. And most of them, particularly Fox’s anchors and hosts, promptly bent the knee. Epstein’s name was brought up only eight times across the network’s programming on Monday, with its first reference coming well into the 6 p.m. hour. By contrast, Fox name-checked former President Joe Biden 158 times that same day. [...] Outside the Fox News portion of the MAGA ecosystem, there’s been somewhat more debate about the Justice Department memo. Some MAGA influencers pointed out the absurdity of Trump’s new narrative. “Barack Obama wrote the Epstein files? LOL. This is outright embarrassing,” commented Candace Owens on X. Benny Johnson, responding on a livestream Sunday, mentioned Trump’s theory and remarked, “What?” Others were even more critical, at times even implicating Trump himself. “Either Pam Bondi is royally screwed up ... or there is something there and it’s being covered up and the president blessed it,” said Megyn Kelly, a member of the diaspora of former Fox News hosts who now compete for its audience. Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh said, “There just is no option that allows you to just, you know, vindicate the Trump administration entirely.”
Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare says that under no circumstances should the so-called “Epstein files” be released.
There are good reasons, a lot of them, why federal law enforcement doesn’t do investigations in public and why it doesn’t release the fruits of its investigative efforts as a matter of course. The case of a serial predator whose misconduct touched a thousand victims and hundreds of other people is no time to throw away rules and civil liberties protections that are designed to prevent law enforcement from being an instrument of indiscriminate shaming and public exposure. Even the so-called Epstein “client list,” which Bondi now says does not exist, would be a dicey thing to make public if it did. Imagine a list, in a little black book, labeled “Clients” that is somewhere in the Epstein files and has a list of names in it. Imagine that this list contains all the people you would want to be on it—that is, from whatever political persuasion you come from, it is the list that would vindicate you maximally were it to become public. Sure, you might imagine such a list to represent the list of powerful men to whom Epstein was providing underage or trafficked women for sexual exploitation. But Epstein was also a financier who had clients. How would you know, absent someone’s testimony, that it wasn’t just a list of financial clients? How would you know, that it wasn’t a list of people to whom he aspired to have as clients? [...] So no, don’t release the Epstein files. Not even if you’re sure they’ll humiliate the right person or people and class or cabal. It’s not the way our system works. And that’s a good thing.
Catie Edmondson of The New York Times writes that overnight, the Senate passed a bill to slash foreign aid and funding for public broadcasting over the “nay” votes of the caucus of concerned sisters.
The 51-to-48 vote came over the objections of two Republicans, who argued that their party was ceding Congress’s constitutional control over federal funding. The Republicans who opposed the measure were Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The bulk of the funds targeted — about $8 billion — was for foreign assistance programs. The remaining $1.1 billion was for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. The House is expected to give final approval to the package later this week, sending it to Mr. Trump for his signature. The debate on the measure laid bare a simmering fight over Congress’s power of the purse. Since Mr. Trump began his second term, the White House has moved aggressively and at times unilaterally, primarily through the Department of Government Efficiency, to expand the executive branch’s control over federal spending, a power the Constitution gives to the legislative branch.
Paul Krugman writes that while he doesn’t expect Trump to fire Fed chairman Jerome Powell, he is sure to pick a sycophant as a successor when Powell’s term is up in 2026.
Why aren’t we seeing the full effects of the tariffs in official statistics? For the record, I don’t believe Trump officials are cooking the books — yet. That’s not to say that they won’t at some point, and there’s a good chance that they will. But so far what we’re probably seeing is a combination of ordinary lags and the temporary effects of the TACO (Trump always chickens out) narrative. Buyers get pissed off at sellers when prices rise, so sellers who don’t want to lose market share have an incentive to hold prices down despite higher costs if they think the Trump tariffs will come back down in a few weeks. I, however, am a TACO skeptic. I think Trump really is a Tariff Man who will keep us at Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs indefinitely, and businesses will eventually realize that and raise prices accordingly. And then what? Clearly, we shouldn’t expect Trump to admit that his tariffs are raising prices, or even to admit that prices are rising. What we can expect is that he will keep putting pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates. I don’t think he’ll manage to push Jerome Powell out before next May, but as I wrote last week, whoever he picks after that will do his bidding.
Tom Phillips of the Guardian says that Trump’s tariff threats to Brazil have backfired and given Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a rise in popularity.
The US president apparently expected his intervention to improve the outlook for Bolsonaro, 70, who is already banned from running in next year’s election. Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio, urged Lula’s administration to immediately cave in to Trump’s ultimatum by offering his father an amnesty from prosecution. Flávio Bolsonaro likened Brazil’s predicament to Japan’s at the end of the second world war when the US’s B-29 bombers blasted it into submission. “It’s up to us to show the responsibility to avoid two atomic bombs landing on Brazil,” he said. [...] Eliane Cantanhêde, a columnist for the Estado de São Paulo, saw three motives behind Trump’s “indecent proposal”. He hoped to boost far-right fellow travellers in South America; retaliate against Chinese involvement in the region after the recent Brics summit in Rio; and do a personal favour to Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who has spent recent months lobbying officials in Washington after going into self-imposed exile in the US. But Cantanhêde believed Trump’s “megalomaniac” move had boomeranged, handing Lula a golden opportunity to recover slumping public support by posing as a nationalist defender of Brazilian coffee producers, orange growers, cattle ranchers and plane manufacturers in the face of Bolsonaro’s anti-patriotic and self-serving sellout to Trump. “Lula was on the ropes,” Cantanhêde said, highlighting the leftist’s falling ratings and growing doubts over his ability to win a fourth term next year. “Now he’s all smiles.”
Finally today, Ken Makin of the Christian Science Monitor looks at the efforts of baseball Hall of Fame Ken Griffey, Jr. to restore the African American legacy in Major League Baseball.
After conquering the sport with perhaps the sweetest swing in Major League history and securing a Hall of Fame career, Mr. Griffey is into passion projects now. One is photography. The other? Restoring the legacy of Black baseball. That lineage was alive and well Friday evening at Atlanta’s Truist Park during the HBCU Swingman Classic. The classic is a celebration of not only Black baseball players from historically Black institutions, but also the trends those schools and players cultivate. [...] Trends regarding Black, U.S.-born players were part of the inspiration for this event – and something worrying Mr. Griffey. “Thirty years ago, 17% of [MLB] ball players were Black. Now we’re at 6.7%, and we’re trying to get these kids to understand that if we can get them seen, we can get them heard, and we can get them out here,” Mr. Griffey says. “All it takes is for a parent to love baseball and to bring them into the sport. ... What we’re trying to do is get an opportunity for kids to be seen and elevate their lives, on and off the field.”
I assume that a significant portion of Latino players on Major League Baseball’s opening day rosters are also Black.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
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