I’ve told you before about my kind of love/hate feelings about Tom Edsall, longtime reporter for The Washington Post, who more recently writes a weekly column for the New York Times. It’s not too much to say that almost regardless of the facts of the moment he’ll come up with an explanation for why those facts are terrible news for Democrats. Yesterday’s column is a kind of tour de force in this genre (“This Is a Realignment That Has Significant Staying Power.”) The column collects quotes and quick exchanges with a range of political scientists who argue that the first six months of 2025 have shown just how enduring Donald Trump’s 2024 realignment is turning out to be and quickly dismisses the views of the few observers he quotes who disagree.

As someone who tries to comment on and understand current events as best as I’m able, columns like this are kind of a warning sign of a path not to go down, that path being looking for the analyses and data points which back your preferred view of things or the one you feel reflexively must be the case. So I tried my best to not do that while thinking about this piece.

Every time I think Donald Trump is putting some distance between himself and the Epstein scandal he does some new thing to make it the centerpoint story in the American news ecosystem. Last night House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) decide to shut the entire House of Representatives for the rest of the summer so members don’t have to make any more painful coverup votes related to the Epstein case. Yesterday, the White House ordered the release of a vast trove of FBI files about Martin Luther King, Jr., a bizarre, pathetic, wrong and ultimately counterproductive attempt to distract from the Epstein Files.

We should start by noting that the King files were overwhelmingly the product of illegal surveillance that then FBI-director J. Edgar Hoover ordered to get blackmail information on King either to discredit him, force him out of public life, or, in specific cases, drive him to suicide. So it was anything but disinterested surveillance, and FBI agents had a huge incentive to include rumor, innuendo and more, whether it was true or not. With that said, King was also what used to be known as a womanizer. This is simply a fact of history along with King being one of the giants and heroes of the American 20th century. We know this mainly from the FBI files that were released decades ago — which is to say that we know from illegal surveillance that was conducted with the specific intent of neutralizing him as a leader of the civil rights movement.

I can only imagine that Trump ordered this with the idea that people can say “Ahha! Many prominent men had subpar sexual morality! Ahha! Ahha!” Either that, or to somehow cast Trump as another freedom fighter who the deep state is trying to bring down with sexual peccadillos. It is very important to note that I don’t think there’s ever been evidence or the suggestion that King’s paramours were anything but adult and willing. The part of this that is so wild is that I don’t think Epstein was really top of mind in the news world Monday morning, certainly not as much as was any day last week. But Trump put it right back there with the King materials. It’s the most obvious thing: releasing any trove of documents just reminds people of the trove Trump is moving heaven and earth not to release. I don’t think anything is more obvious. It’s like a quick fix that deepens the craving.

Today we learn that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will be meeting with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell looking for the “real pedophile” and presumably coordinating stories. And just this morning while meeting with the President of the Philippines, President Trump told reporters his intelligence chief has now proven that Hillary Clinton and “Barack Hussein Obama” are guilty of “treason” and they “ought to take a look at that and stop talking about” the Epstein files.

It’s really not too much to say that just as the House has been shut down to avoid more Epstein cover-up votes, the executive branch is now more or less exclusively focused on trying to shut down the Epstein story: MLK assassination documents, a meeting with Maxwell, a new Hillary/Obama treason investigation. It’s all they’re doing.

I keep thinking some new thing will happen or people will lose interest. This weekend there was an emerging conventional wisdom in the Beltway publications that Trump had flipped the script with the Wall Street Journal article, something that never made much sense. But that clearly wasn’t the case and Trump himself forced it back to the top of news attention with his flurry of new diversions.

What can possibly be in those files?

I wanted to take a moment today to highlight something that to me, at least, is behind a certain uncanny quality to the summer of 2025. Two things, which point in two entirely different directions, are happening at the same time. Every day you can find in the news a new example of the president cutting funding (either by legal or extra-legal means) or asserting direct control over funding in order to entrench his direct personal power. This might be defunding universities, ending funding of public broadcasting, or anything in between. He’s now opened criminal probes into numerous public officials. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to expand its war not only against the undocumented and legal residents but also against self-government in major American (blue) cities. I could mention dozens of other examples but the simplest overview is that the president continues to expand and entrench his authoritarian vision of rule, in which the whole machinery of government exists to impose his will and battle his enemies, with courts that are mostly but not always compliant.

You’ve no doubt seen the Wall Street Journal story on Trump’s lewd and innuendo-rich 2003 birthday card to Jeff Epstein. That speaks for itself. To me what speaks more loudly is what appears to have been an all-out war from the White House to get the Journal to kill the story. Just after 8:30 p.m. ET the President posted a jangling rant attacking Rupert Murdoch and Journal editor Emma Tucker, insisting he’ll sue, blaming Hillary and Obama. An hour and a half later, he posted a more succinct version of the same post, again claiming the letter was “FAKE”, threatening to sue, yada. In between those two posts he did yet another post clearly intended to appear to be Trump finally losing his patience and insisting that all information be made public. Only it wasn’t that at all. Trump said he was asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetrated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”

There are three problems with this.

Covering MAGA and Trump is a bit like an old-time, hard-boiled detective novel. Everyone’s bad. Or at least shady. The challenge is distinguishing between the merely shady sorta bad and bad bad. And apart from the bad and those who were merely drawn that way, sometimes you have two really bad people and one of them is victimizing the other, making the latter person a victim while also being bad. Which brings us to this quote from an article in the Washington Post about Eric Schnabel, the Chief Operating Officer of the National Institute of Health (NIH) who, as I noted earlier this week, was fired and marched off the premises Monday, allegedly for directing a contract to a company which employed his wife. This is a text he sent to a WaPo reporter after the Post tried numerous times to contact him and his wife.

“I need your help. I didn’t do what they said I did,” he texted. “This was a political hit job. Please call me.” Schnabel didn’t reply to numerous further attempts to contact him. (The quote was added after I originally linked to the piece.)

I must admit to being a bit perplexed at what Donald Trump is doing with the Epstein story. He went on Truth Social, the family’s vanity social network and corruption vehicle, today and again went off about how his own supporters are fools for not moving on from the Epstein story and how they should just — goshdarnit! — forget about it and move the F on! Trump seems to be demanding, for any of us who thought there was no there there in the Epstein material, that we realize there must be — that we believe there must be. He’s not asking my consent or yours. He’s just doing it. And this is what I mean: When Donald Trump is guilty as sin on something he insists that whatever is out there that you might have thought was incriminating is actually the work of Obama, Hillary and James Comey. And that is literally what he is doing. Here’s today update from Truth Social.

Is it a harmonic convergence? Is the Rep. Corey Mills (R-FL) alleged assault case finally coming into focus? Let me try to explain the moving parts here. Remember back in February, D.C. police went to home of Mills responding to reports that he had assaulted a woman who D.C. publications delicately noted was not his wife. Prosecuting something like this in D.C. is in the hands of the U.S. Attorney for D.C., who, at the time, was Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin. Through some mix of Martin doing Mills a solid and the D.C. police spoiling the case because of who Mills was, charges were never brought. So, big win for Mills, as D.C. goes. You can’t be charged with a crime in Washington, D.C. if you’re a Republican these days. I don’t make the rules.

Last night, Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger posted on Twitter that Mills is being evicted from his D.C. apartment on which he owes $85,000. The rent is $20,833 a month.

Three thoughts on the delicious and deserved Jeff Epstein wildfire currently engulfing MAGA world.

First, a follow up on my post from last week. I stand by what I said about general skepticism about the whole Epstein meta story — the belief that some significant number of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men slept with teenaged girls procured by Jeff Epstein and have used their power to keep the truth of their crimes secret. But some of you said I was either letting Epstein, his purported co-rapists or the MAGA movement off the hook. Not at all. I expressed something very specific which is that there are a lot of things that seem widely accepted about Epstein and his world for which there seems to be pretty thin actual evidence. But that’s totally consistent with wanting to turn over every stone to find out what’s real and what’s not. It is even more consistent with putting MAGA to its task. They created this. They ran on this. They used it to tarnish countless of their enemies based on little or no evidence. So there’s zero way anyone should let them just take a mulligan on the whole thing now. “Hey, so we took a look at all the secret information and it turns out it’s all fine. So we’re moving on.” No way.

We went into this administration with a seemingly durable baseline assumption that, whatever his unpopularity in other areas, President Trump had durable if not overwhelming support for his hardline immigration policies. But something started to show up in polls in the late spring or early summer.

While his numbers on “immigration” were still reasonably robust, we saw a dramatically different picture when pollster’s asked about “deportation” or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Not surprisingly, “immigration” is a very big word and covers a vast range of policy territory. Looked at from a different vantage point, Trump retained a bare majority of public support on “border security” but his “deportation” policy had the support of barely one-third of the population.

As more than a hundred fatalities have been confirmed in Texas flash floods and some 170 remain missing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has both denied that DOGE cuts to the National Weather Service played a role in the tragedy and also focused on the importance of timely and effective communications about extreme weather events, which she says wasn’t up to par. Coverage of the Texas flash flood calamity has made clear that it’s not just the work of forecasters that is critical. You can have a timely and accurate forecast but it does little good if it isn’t effectively communicated to local authorities in the effected areas. That “last mile” communication is critical and it seems like there were breakdowns on that front both with county officials and possibly on the National Weather Service side, where a senior position in charge of liaising with local officials was vacant at the time of the floods. But even as the rescue workers were searching for bodies in Texas on Tuesday, DHS canceled a $3 million grant aimed at ensuring precisely those kinds of “last mile” communications.