Saturday Report 7/19/25 — There's a special place in Hell for Franklin Graham & I'll tell you why...

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

— If possible, the whole Epstein saga is getting weirder. Trump and Epstein were best buds for over a decade, according to Epstein, and Trump frequently traveled on the Lolita Express, Epstein’s private jet. Former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta cut the sweetheart deal for Epstein after he was indicted for trafficking minors, and Trump’s current Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, was Jeffrey’s nextdoor neighbor and still owns that property (he denies hooking up with Jeff). The Wall Street Journal has outed Trump’s gushing birthday letter about the “secrets” they shared, which is all over the news. But I have two takes on this that I’m not seeing in the media so, here goes. 1) This is a testimonial to how airtight the rightwing media ecosystem is. Most of the world, and certainly any Democrats paying attention, have known since at least 2015 about Trump’s tight association with Epstein, but apparently most of Trump’s cult followers who limit their news exposure to Fox, et al, had no idea and are genuinely shocked to discover the depth and breadth of the two men’s relationship and their shared addiction to young women. “News” that Trump owned the Miss Teen USA pageant during that time and bragged to Howard Stern about walking into dressing rooms to catch girls naked has blown their minds, for example. They’d spent the past decade marinating in the bizarre Pizzagate conspiracy theory that there was a Hillary-run Democratic pedophile ring that had something to do with Epstein, but none apparently realized that of all Epstein’s associates Trump may well have been the closest to him as they lived nearly next-door both in New York City and in Palm Beach. 2) It’s not the rape, it’s the conspiracy that’s flipping out young male Trump cultists like Nick Fuentes, who told Trump yesterday, “F*ck you!” These people have spent most of their lives convinced there’s a shadowy international conspiracy of rich men who basically run the world and have their pick of tender young girls. Most of these theories are also antisemitic and so posit that these “rulers” are Jewish, thus the Illuminati, Bilderberger, Soros, etc., theories, and Epstein fit right into that as he was also Jewish. The Trump cultists saw Donald as the guy who was going to expose these conspirators, break up the network, and throw the rich pedophiles and satanic conspirators in prison; now they’re discovering that if there actually is such a billionaire network/conspiracy Trump is apparently right in the middle of it. If Trump was just implicated in having sex with underage girls, they’d probably forgive him (or even envy him); he brought the Tate brothers back to the US, paid for sex with Stormy and Karen, cheated on every one of his wives, etc., etc. and they were fine with that. But now it looks like Epstein was connected to some of the most powerful men in the world and Trump was right there with him. Thus, Trump must be part of the Epstein/Illuminati/Bilderberger/Soros/whatever conspiracy and their minds are so blown that they’re experiencing life-wrenching cognitive dissonance. This is why this story has legs, won’t go away, and even has the potential to bring Trump down. To add gasoline to the fire, JD Vance is now publicly calling for the letter the WSJ wrote about to be released which will further badly wound Trump; my bet is that JD thinks he’ll inherit the mantle when Trump takes sick leave or whatever, and thinks the MAGA base will simply transfer their loyalty to him. He’s wrong, of course; he’s not the “manly man” Trump can pretend to be, his wife is a woman of color, and he comes across as effete with his eyeliner and weird affect. There’s no replacement for Trump, although nobody in the GOP appears to have yet figured that out. As the old curse goes, we live in interesting times…

— The suck-ups and cowards at CBS apparently caved to Trump and canceled Stephen Colbert. Trump is celebrating his power over our media and the rest of us should be genuinely horrified; this is the sort of thing that happens in authoritarian states, not in democracies where the press is free. Some speculate that Colbert’s monologue condemning CBS for paying Trump a $15 million “bribe” to further the merger is why he was canned and his show was cancelled; I’m skeptical. This seems to have far more to do with the billionaire Ellisons being deeply into Trump’s type of neofascist politics than just being insulted by a comedian’s rant. Now Jon Stewart is wondering if he’ll be pulled off Comedy Central — also owned by the same group — once the merger goes through or even before. This is not healthy. The CBS merger, by the way, is exactly the sort of monopolistic merger that prior to Reagan instructing the SEC, DOJ, and FTC to stop rigorously enforcing antitrust laws, would have been forbidden (and Biden’s administration was on the verge of killing it for just that reason). If nothing else, this is a strong warning about the importance of once again enforcing the anti-monopoly laws that have been on the books since 1890 and I wrote about in detail in The Hidden History of American Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (foreword by Ralph Nader).

— Do Americans want Trump to give asylum to Bolsonaro?! The former Brazilian wannbe dictator is facing at least a decade in prison for leading a mob against that country’s parliament after he lost an election in a bizarre simulacrum of January 6th here, and word has it that Trump is considering giving him asylum here in the US. In response to the rumors, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered the federal police to raid Bolsonaro’s home, seize him, and attach an ankle bracelet to him so he can’t flee the country. You’d think we would have learned our lesson when we gave asylum to the Shah of Iran and the Marcos family…

— There’s a special place in Hell reserved for Franklin Graham and I’ll tell you why... That’s the essence of a brilliant article by one of my favorite Substack writers, former pastor John Pavlovitz. He points out that Graham, in contrast to his father who publicly apologized for letting Nixon politicize him, has embraced an adulterous, greedy, sociopathic (my terms, not his) con man. The final straw for Pavlovitz, apparently, was when Graham posted on Xitter condemning gay marriage and adoption, a topic about which Jesus never uttered a word. Christ did have more than a few words, however, about divorce, theft, lying, hypocrisy, leading your flock astray, and greed. If Hell exists, it’s custom-built for phony blasphemers like the uber-wealthy and utterly cynical Franklin Graham.

— Four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions to Epstein from wealthy people including thousands of wire transfers and payoffs of women, and Senator Ron Wyden is on it! My senator from Oregon is the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee and has been investigating Epstein for three years, long before it was fashionable. What he’s found is gobsmacking: Epstein was handling over a billion dollars and the banks that were obligated under federal law to report suspicious transactions never bothered to say a word until after Jeffrey was indicted. “Follow the money” was Deep Throat’s advice to Woodward and Bernstein and Wyden is all over it: this has the potential to bust open a whole lot of stuff that Trump would almost certainly never sees the light of day. Will Republicans on the committee try to block Wyden’s efforts? As the old saying goes, “Is a frog’s ass watertight?”

— Fired Epstein Prosecutor Maurene Comey exposes a big truth: “Fear Is the Tool of a Tyrant.” Maurene Comey (James’ daughter) was the lead prosecutor against both Epstein and Maxwell and just hours after Trump learned about the impending Wall Street Journal story was unceremoniously fired from her job with the Justice Department. Was it because Trump and Bondi (who apparently looked the other way WRT Epstein for years as he operated in Florida when she was AG there) thought Comey was the source of the document the WSJ published? Or just simple revenge? Or did they think she knew too much? If so, why fire her and give her a reason to blow the whistle? Inquiring minds want to know. Comey, for her part, isn’t leaving quietly, writing a letter to her former colleagues saying, “If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain. Do not let that happen. Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought.” Meanwhile, Trump says Bondi is going to release “pertinent” grand jury records from Comey’s prosecution of Epstein. That’s probably not going to happen because they’re necessary for Maxwell’s ongoing appeal of her conviction. Unless, of course, Trump pardons her. Which, of course, there are rumors that he’s considering doing. Even if those records come out, it’s a safe bet they’ll be so sanitized as to be useless. The old saying is that the coverup is worse than the crime; Trump could probably have bypassed all this years ago if, like Alan Dershowitz, he simply acknowledged that he’d gotten “massages” at Epstein’s place but “kept my underwear on during the massage.” But even that would have been too much for the compulsive liar and fraud; he had to go full denial and now it’s biting him on the backside.