The coup-attempting president faces new allegations of child rape

I think I finally understand the conservative elite obsession with conspiracy theories. I don't mean the obsession that the conservative base has with such theories: I mean the predilection of conservative pundits, influencers, megadonors, and especially actual Republican elected officials to believe the most crackpot things you have ever heard, and to announce to the public that they are investigating those crackpot things and by God will get to the bottom of it all, just you wait.

I used to think it was just cynicism. During the 1990s there was a bizarre theory circulating among conservative attention-seekers that supposed Bill and Hillary Clinton were secretly trafficking cocaine from a small Arkansas airport because something-something-something, or at least that's what they were doing when they weren't busy with serial murders, and all of it was so spaghetti-on-a-wall crankish that we onlookers were mostly of the belief that they didn't actually believe their own claims, it was just Rush Limbaugh-style attention whoring for the sake of selling poorly written books.

That was a thing, back in the 1900s. Apparently you could write something called a "book" and make actual cash money if people bought it, though the precise mechanisms of this process have been lost to time.

Most of us used to presume, then, that when semi-prominent professional conservatives piped up with the most batshit supposedly-global conspiracies you'd ever heard, it was all just performance art for the sake of riling up the rubes of the base; like Scientology, it was never meant to be believed earnestly. It was a for-profit game.

And we were wrong, when we assumed that. We were young and innocent; we believed that the conservative peddlers of batshit theories must have of course realized none of it made any sense because we lived in social circles that just took for granted that our national and business leaders wouldn't traffic cocaine or secretly murder accomplices or be important associates inside international sex trafficking rings.

What we failed to realize, at the time, is that in the social circles of the aforementioned conservative pundits, influencers, megadonors, and especially actual Republican elected officials making such claims, being enmeshed in international crime and elite sex clubs was, apparently, just your average Tuesday.

Nothing makes that more clear than the cast of characters in the so-called "Epstein files." You'd now be forgiven for suspecting that Donald Trump's main criteria for staffing his administration has been "had significant dealings with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein."

[Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick] previously insisted he and his wife cut ties with Epstein in 2005, after they moved next door to Epstein’s mansion in New York City. In an interview last year, Lutnick said that Epstein had given them an unsettling tour of his home and that he vowed he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

But the files showed that Lutnick and his family visited Epstein on his private island in 2012, that Epstein in 2017 donated $50,000 to a charity dinner honoring Lutnick, and that the following year the two communicated about countering an expansion of a neighboring museum.

Earlier this month, CBS News revealed more on their connection by reporting that Lutnick and Epstein each signed a contract in 2012—four years after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes—to invest in a digital ad technology company called AdFin Solutions Inc. The deal was dated just five days after Lutnick and his family visited Epstein on his private island.

Now, I am a charitable man. But there is a significant difference between "I had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction as a sex offender" and "I visited the convicted sex offender on his private island, where we finalized a long-term business relationship that continued until his death." That is not something a person just forgets to mention. Lutnick lied flat-out on this one, and now he's caught.

Other administration figures might be able to claim a more casual relationship.

In an email from Mehmet and Lisa Oz to Epstein, the subject line reads, “Mehmet and Liza Oz’s Valentine’s Day Celebration.” The message contains a digital invite.

Is it normal to have "Valentine's Day" parties? I'm asking because I don't know. Is it normal to invite the wealthiest, most connected convicted sex trafficker you know to your Valentine's Day get-together? Not gonna lie, that one feels a bit off.

Then there is Donald Trump himself. It once would have been absurd to think that a sitting U.S. president would attempt a coup rather than acknowledge his election loss, but then it happened, right there on live television. We saw him taking each required step; we saw the steps to forge false electoral certifications, to organize a mob for the specific purpose of intimidating Congress into going along, the silence as the mob grew increasingly violent.

And we saw how quickly the precise same power brokers who manufactured grand conspiracy claims against political opponents became increasingly indifferent to that real life attempted coup, boldly lying to Americans about what happened. We saw a consensus, among American political and business elites, that their fellow elites are allowed to gather mobs and set them loose on the Capitol without repercussions. We saw it formalized when Trump returned to the presidency and issued blanket pardons to even the most violent rioters—and when those elites again backed the move, either explicitly or through their silence.

These are not displays of cynicism or petty partisanship. It is a culture of indifference; a deep commitment to the theory that money erases consequences. And it seems to be all-encompassing.

The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.

Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor. [...]

The woman who directly named Trump in her abuse allegation claimed that around 1983, when she was around 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump, "who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out."

The omissions are the clearest evidence yet of the efforts Donald Trump's Justice Department, staffed by his own lawyers and hangers-on, have made to scrub the files of allegations against Trump himself. While some claims in the files should be met with skepticism, the FBI took this victim's claims seriously enough to conduct multiple interviews.

The omission of those interviews is noteworthy because they would contain, presumably, the FBI's efforts to extract details about the alleged assault that could bolster or discredit the claims, and we will not elaborate on what "details" we mean for the sake of our own sanity.

What we do know is that the Justice Department has been caught laundering these files several times now. We know that Epstein did traffic children and women to others in his orbit, an orbit that included not just a member of the British royal family but a seemingly endless array of American business and academic elites.

What we don't know, and what the release of the department's Epstein files were supposed to shed light on, is why the government apparently slow-walked investigations into any of those associates despite dozens of victims coming forward to demand justice.

So there we are, then. There is growing evidence that the now-sitting president of the United States raped a child, and possibly more than one. It is the same president who attempted to overthrow the government five years ago, and the same one who was caught hoarding highly classified national security secrets at his members-only club, and who got away with it because the United States is now, in plain fact, a nation where elite figures can be caught breaking laws with reckless abandon and not only face no consequences, but can count on a captured political and media establishment to defend them and lie for them.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, when you put it that way, but it is fact. And now I think we all are getting a much better picture of why conservative elites are continually inventing new conspiracy theories that suppose everyone but them is engaged in wide-ranging criminality: It turns out "conservatism" is not so much an ideology as a social club in which everybody is doing batshit insane things to begin with.

Sen. Lindsey Graham wasn't play-acting, when he broke down in tears over the audacity of women bringing up now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assaults. He was genuinely irate that his social peers might face consequences for doing horrible things. Rep. Mike Johnson didn't cover for Rep. Matt Gaetz in an attempt to help an ally; as events before and since have shown, he regularly recoils at any attempt to hold American elites to account. The Supreme Court has placed itself in the center of a morass of new legal conundrums through their own inconsistent rulings—all of which are perfectly consistent, if you reduce every case to are our allies allowed to abuse the law in ways that our enemies are not.

I used to think House Republicans like Rep. Glenn Grothman were genuine idiots, bizarre goofs so steeped in their own conspiracy thinking that they can barely stagger their way through each day.

Now I don't think that. Oh, I still think Grothman is a genuine idiot, to be clear. But I'm willing to concede that to him, a man in the center of the most ostentatiously corrupt political party in the nation's post-Civil War history, he may be being perfectly rational when he assumes that every last person around him is a creepy possibly-criminal pervert and it's the people who aren't in the Epstein files who have engaged in a super-secret conspiracy to, uh, not be in them.

The man probably looks around, every time he's in a House Republican meeting or White House event, and presumes that what he sees really is what "normal" society looks like. Oh look, there's the House Republican whose sexual harassment of a staffer appears to have contributed to that staffer's death by suicide. Oh look, there's the administration's Secretary of Labor, the one allegedly having an affair with another staffer, is being investigated for taking staff to a strip club during a taxpayer-funded work trip, and whose anesthesiologist husband has been banned from the building after a string of alleged gropings. Oh, and there's Corey Lewandowski off in the corner, how about that. I wonder what he's up to, these days.

After spending any amount of time in conservative circles, you'd be nuts to think the world wasn't being controlled by vice-chasing rule-breaking sex addicts who believe themselves above the law. For f--k's sake, half of them are clustered around the buffet table as we speak.