Originally published at: Epstein Tracked #MeToo Fallout and Advised Accused Men Behind the Scenes - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. The year was 2018, and Lawrence Krauss, the prominent physicist and scholar of the cosmos, was facing a Title IX investigation at Arizona State University. BuzzFeed News had just reported on…
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Free slogan for any Democrat running in 2028: Me Too 2. Nuremberg 2. Reconstruction 2.
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I hate to think this, but it seems to me that, if Trump really is worrying about the Epstein files’ potential fallout on him, he can probably just rest easy now.
For me, what’s showing up in these latest documents depicting this elite-guys’ cabal seems to be quite important information about how the world’s power elite works together to support each other and create a world system where they can do whatever they want and why we need to rein that power elite in…But even though I think that’s one of the most important public issues in the world today, I don’t think it’s of any concern at all to the Republicans – either voters or electeds. And they’ve been the real drivers of the Epstein-file outrage all along and the ones whose support Trump is terrified to lose.
But I don’t think he can possibly lose them based on what the files have turned out to have in them. MAGA and much of the rest of the GOP wanted him to release the stuff only because they thought it would be crammed full of Democrats committing vile sex acts against youngsters. And they were looking to Trump to bring that evidence out into the open.so that Democrats could be wiped off the map. But now we see that, while Trump’s government has put out a lot of stuff from the files, the hoped–for smoking penises of Dems just aren’t much in evidence.
So I would bet that most Republicans are beginning to think that Trump has done what he promised with respect to the files. And since the files don’t contain what they hoped, my guess is that their Epstein mania is likely to be dropping off and that pretty soon they’ll no longer care about the files at all. They certainly don’t care about consequences to the woman victims.
We tend to think on our side that seeing all the sex-related-to-trafficked-girls stuff and the sexual-violence-type stuff that Trump seems implicated in will outrage Republicans in general and MAGA in particular. But I think they’ve long proven they couldn’t care less about that.
They know as well as anyone that he’s bragged about grabbing many random women by the pussy – by which he clearly means “push 'em up against a wall and stick my hand into their underwear and then up their vaginas” — …that Ivana accused him of brutal rape…and that he’s long bragged about frequently walking into beauty-pageant dressing rooms at the exact time he knew that teenage girls would be naked and ogling them individually from six inches away. Those things, in essence, add up to something quite similar to the things the Epstein documents suggest he’s done, it seems to me. So, since Republicans clearly haven’t cared at all about his many acknowledged nonconsensual and violent sex acts, they clearly won’t care a bit about any of these new ones that are coming out in the famous files.
I truly think that we’ll soon reach the point where he’s off the hook with Republicans over the files, and he can just calm down about it. … I’m kind of surprised that he may still be worried about Epstein fallout from Repubs, because I just don’t see it.
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“Epstein also emailed Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel for President Barack Obama and now the chief counsel at Goldman Sachs”. Apparently she was on the short list for one of the Supreme Court seats. Now I can see why she probably didn’t pass muster. A confluence of Epsteins history and a Supreme Court nomination hearing wouldn’t have gone well.
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The MAGA don’t respond to facts – they respond to conspiracy theories. As long as Trump is overtly hiding anything they will be agitated.
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@marciaann And especially in the face of all these “nothingburger” releases, the lack of smoking guns will just convince them it’s being buried even deeper. It took years (and some probably still believe it) for these MAGA types to drop the Comet Pizza sex dungeon story. Even after Pizzagate blew up with the confused staff members pointing out that there is no basement in the building, MAGA couldn’t let it go.
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Yeah, I can definitely see this as a possibility (and I’d like it better than my suggestion, of course.) … But I also think that Repubs’ tendency to abandon everything they’ve ever previously thought and said for the purpose of defending and supporting whatever Trump is manifesting today is also an approach they often take … and maybe sometimes it’s the stronger one.
It will be interesting to see how the Republican Epstein outrage goes on from here.
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It is not correct to say that Trump has not been accused by any survivors. He was accused of rape by Katie Johnson in 2016. Katie withdrew her suit after intense threats from trump camp.
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And he’s also accused by survivors whose accusations turned up in the most recent document dump. Like this horrifying one (among others) –
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Counterintuitively, I think that holds true more for the upper-echelons of the GOP than it does for the rank-and-file. Up until now, Trump has been wildly popular with the rank-and-file, so the GOP leadership has been sucking up to Trump to stay in the base’s good graces. But they lag behind the r-a-f since they are using the base as a weather vane. The MAGA base will begin to break from Trump before the politicians do.
You can see some of that dynamic with Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was Trump’s biggest fan for a long time and now she’s resigned her seat and claimed she was lied to all these years.* If more people like her start to reject Trump’s denials, his whole house of cards could start tumbling down. At which point the Lindsey Grahams of the party will be claiming they’ve been on that bandwagon the whole time. But not before he’s well and truly cooked with the base.
* Sure, it was obvious to the rest of us who were actually paying attention, but better late than never? 
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Trump is never going to be elected president again. He has never going to be on the ballot again. His personal popularity matters only to the extent that he can leverage it against politicians that might actually face the electorate again.
I guess what I am saying is that I think that the relationship between Trump and his base is no longer politically relevant.
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