Thanks to Pam Bondi, we may have a better idea of why Trump is so terrified of the 'Epstein files'

The odds seem high, at this point, that photographs exist showing Donald Trump in the company of multiple topless "young women," which may or may not include children. That's a claim that's been made repeatedly by author Michael Wolff, who conducted hours of interviews with now-dead child molester Jeffrey Epstein; Wolff claims Epstein showed him those pictures, which Epstein allegedly kept in a safe and allegedly ought to have still been there when the FBI raided his estates and hauled the safe off to their own offices. Barely a week ago, Trump's own Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, also bizarrely piped up to opine that his once-neighbor Epstein likely kept such evidence as blackmail material; he also strongly implied that Epstein was not at all circumspect about his perversions and that others knew about and "participated" in them.

We can say that the odds seem high that such photos do exist mainly because that is the sort of rumor you would want to shoot down with a vengeance, if you were a thoroughly in-the-tank attorney general for the now-president alleged to have participated in such trafficking. And Pam Bondi, possibly the most in-the-tank attorney general to ever exist, very notably did not do that when she was asked point-blank about those allegations.

Bondi's response came in two parts. Her first attempt was to deflect with an insult-laden monologue attacking questioner Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. When Whitehouse pressed for an actual answer, Bondi's brain appeared to forcibly reboot itself, rendering her silent; it's a shame Whitehouse moved on rather than waiting for the boot cycle to finish up, if only because we'll now never know how long it would have lasted. We could have placed bets.

What can we say? The man has no scientific curiosity.

Now, Pam Bondi was not exactly plucked from the best the MAGA movement has to offer, or perhaps she was and that's a whole different problem, but she was a lawyer and a state attorney general, if you still consider Florida a state—and that, too, is an argument for another time. But she has plenty of argumentative experience, if nothing else. It is peculiar, to say the least, that Bondi stubbornly refused to shoot down allegations that photographs exist of Dear Leader availing himself of semi-nude Epstein trafficking victims.

It's a simple enough question. If there isn't any evidence, there isn't any evidence. Instead, we got a soliloquy about something something something, and that is one of the key tells that judges, juries, and sitting senators use to gauge whether a witness is hiding something. Bondi couldn't have done worse on that front if she tried. It was a master class in how to look guilty as sin.

"Attorney General, we have received reports that are responsible for the murders of 12 old-timey prospectors, all of whom are now buried under your porch. Your response?"

"I think you need to clarify what you mean by 'old-timey', senator."

"I have here a photograph of you murdering one of the prospectors."

"Technically that is not a photograph, senator, that appears to be an image captured from video. And as you can see, that prospector was wearing sneakers. I hardly think sneakers can be described as old-timey."

A question like "does the FBI have photographs of Donald Trump frolicking with semi-nude young women" all but requires a one-word answer, but that's not what we got. Instead, her brain hopped over a nearby fence and hid in the bushes while her mouth led senators on a short but intense high-speed chase. I don't know how Bondi expected anyone to interpret her sputtering as anything but a "Hell yes, and I've seen those photos personally," and that's exactly how most bystanders seem to be interpreting it.

If anything, the more puzzling question why Bondi, a proven liar who lies just as often everyone else the convicted felon president has surrounded himself with, didn't lie and say "no" even if she knew full well the answer was "yes." Did that long pause come about because she was silently weighing whether she could offer any denial that wouldn't come back to bite her later? What else could that pause possibly signify?

There is no reason to evade that damn question. You know what answer Trump wants: an emphatic No. You know what answer allied Republican senators want: an emphatic No. There's nothing to think about here, nothing to weave around, unless No is not just a lie but a lie you suspect you might not get away with.

None of this makes a lick of sense, and I don't want to live in a nation where it would. At the very least, it would be nice to imagine that we Americans have strong enough objections to being led into authoritarianism by multiple accomplices to child sex trafficking that such things wouldn't be possible, but there's nothing, really nothing at all, to suggest that's the case.

Even as Trump claims supposed near-dictatorial powers over everything from local law enforcement to tariffs to how much of a cut individual private corporations are expected to fork over for Dear Leader's priorities, he continues to be more rattled by ongoing Epstein questions than by any others. He remains adamant that information about his longtime friend Epstein is not to be released, and has reportedly fumed at House Speaker Mike Johnson and others, demanding that everyone in the House and Senate stop asking questions right-the-hell-now. Shutting down any further Epstein probes is something he's been spending significant political capital on. He straight-up lied about his contribution to Epstein's notorious "birthday" book, and went as far as to file suit against the Wall Street Journal for accurately reporting on it, and when the actual picture was released to the public he bumblefucked his way into a theory that it was planted to frame him, something that even he had to know sounded ridiculous.

Trump's seeming panic over anything Epstein-related has mostly seemed nonsensical to the rest of us, because whether you're a fan of Dear Leader or hold him in eternal contempt, if there's one thing everyone in the country can agree on it's that Donald Trump is absolutely the kind of raping, abusive mega-perve he's always boasted of being. We are at this point incapable of new surprise; there couldn't possibly be anything in the supposed Epstein Files that would make him look any worse than the country already knows him to be, and that half the nation praises him for being.

Unless, of course, Donald thinks there is something even worse. Actual tapes, or actual photographs. He and he alone would know whether he ever did anything horrific in Epstein's company that might have been recorded for posterity—and Trump's every action, and every action from his Department of Justice, and every enabling action from House and Senate Republicans all suggest that he thinks the odds are pretty damn high.

And every Republican in power appears to believe that it's their job to cover it up. No—not just that. The entirety of Republicanism is now premised on covering up every potential Republican crime.

Trump's Border Whatever-He-Is explicitly took $50,000 in cash to steer government contracts towards the cash-giver, with the "in cash" part being the clearest possible evidence that Tom Homan knew damn well the act was criminal, his fellow Trump administration officials dropped the case, and nobody in the Republican Party gives a shit because it's just presumed, now, that if you are a Republican you're either a sex criminal or a criminal criminal.

I'm not even exaggerating. It's a cult of ostentatious perversion and criminality. It just never ends.

Break any laws you want, allies of Dear Leader, there's a whole party devoted to explaining that laws are for suckers and little people. We're all about ideology-based purges and brown nosing Our Eternal Felon, Seditionist, and Pervert.

I am so tired. I am so, so tired. Maybe none of us have "long Covid," maybe a good chunk of the nation is just in a permanent state of exhaustion from the daily flood of news stories proven that we are not anything like the nation our lying school textbooks claimed to be, we are just a captured tax base for an entire society of rich criminal perverts.

I don't know. I don't know the truth of how far Epstein's perversions bled into the rest of the wealthy class—though it's evident from his "birthday album" that he had far more friends who knew him as a professional trafficker than as an alleged businessman. But Trump seems certain that Epstein left things behind that implicate the only important person in the nation: himself. Mike Johnson seems fairly certain; Pam Bondi's twitchiness on the subject has been going on for months.

None of that makes sense unless there's a hell of a lot to hide. A hell of a lot to hide.