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honestly amazed at how poorly they’re playing this one. Up till now Trump’s gotten away with everything because he says it out loud — which short-circuits our impropriety sensors eg “surely if he’s saying it on live TV, it can’t be illegal, right?”
See for the past 5-10 years the thing that’s most confounded traditional voters and media types is that nothing seems to stick to Trump. Scandals are forgotten in days if not hours, despite — and often because of — the endless deluge of criminality and poor taste. The flood-the-zone-with-shit strategy objectively works on that front.
But equally effective, and perhaps even more important, is that Trump is unique in the modern political scene in that he always does everything out loud in the open — even and especially his crimes.
And boy has the mainstream media been terrible at knowing how to report this, generally defaulting to simply repeating what the president said, occasionally with some slight uncertainty. And the public has trouble conceiving of anybody simply stating their crimes out loud — so they assume they’re not actually crimes. Most white collar crime is revealed these days through email discovery dumps — and Trump doesn’t use email. A lifetime of questionable-literacy and little industry has set him up good for the modern media landscape.
Which brings us to Epstein. To date, the sole criminality Trump’s refused to own in the public forum. For the first time, constituents are seeing Trump hide something from the American People — and it’s a significant something.
All of which to say: we’re still talking about Epstein because it’s the singular illegal act that he’s ever worked to suppress from public view.
NB: it wasn’t their crimes that brought down Nixon and Capone — it was the coverup.
