Yeah, hey, it is tawdry but… And it’s not as if he got ALL of high society to invest. But if you were the sort of guy who felt that some teenage action was a “nice bonus”… as was mentioned:
Which is not a majority phenomenon but frequent enough to be unsurprising.
At the same time,
It is prudent to be skeptical of claims of vast conspiracies involving powerful people because that is often a kind of counterculture fantasy but in this case there is actually a lot of evidence to back it up.
But in this case what may be happening is that what the counterculture fantasy assembled by the QAnon MAGAs turns out to NOT be what they were expecting (for that matter, it may not even be what either the regular Republicans or Democrats expected either –taking the “release all now and let the chips fall where they may!!” position will likely only put the Ds in the same spot one day).
Exactly and it is important to note that Trump always over-performs his polls. People support him who lie to pollsters about that support. It’s almost as if they know they should be ashamed.
Or they just don’t respond to or are selected by pollsters. Polling is anything but an exact science, and it is almost never possible to get a sampling with high statistical confidence on a topical issue in time to capture the ‘true’ public sentiment. The real function of polls is to give a snapshot of how issues are trending, not to make some absurdly high confidence prediction about how an election will turn out weeks or months ahead of time.
Also, pollsters have to make guesses about how likely their subjects are to actually vote. Trump supporters tend to be very enthusiastic, so there’s a tendency to underestimate how many of them will turn out.
Unlike past should be scandals, this one is something that Trump himself said was important. This isn’t a left-wing thing, like “be outraged about grabbing pussies or making fun of solders.” This is something Trump said was outrageous. So, that’s why I think it’s sticking (to the extent it may be).
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was thinking that there might be payments to Epstein for services rendered. Epstein was running an expensive, global human trafficking scheme, with money flying all over the place. I assume his clientele had to pay, one way or another.
Ever since Trump claimed that his name may have been ‘planted’ in the non-existent Epstein files, we know he’s afraid of something. I have a hard time believing there is physical (video, photograhic) evidence of Trump with the victims, but who knows? With all the supposed physical evidence, it’s insane that Maxwell is the only who’s been convicted of anything.
Trump’s over performance in polls is well documents from 2016 to the present. It is fairly unique to him and undermines any idea that Epstein is “sticking” to Trump. Even this modest dip in July is probably over reported. His base like him child rape and all.
I have no doubt there were shenanigans with Epstein but I think what will “save” Trump is that the relationship soured a few years before Epstein got in trouble the first time. There may be no direct concrete evidence. The issue drove the wedge between them wasn’t the sex trafficking, it was a real estate deal.
It is difficult to guess what (if anything) may actually be in the ‘Epstein Files’ regarding Trump, but even if it isn’t sexual encounters there may be joint ventures that would show that Trump was at least aware of what was going on, or even knowingly facilitating trafficking to advance his real estate and other(?) ventures.
It’s not in “insane that Maxwell is the only who’s been convicted of anything”; it is evidence is for massive and pervasive corruption at high levels. Remember, Epstein was subjected to a fifty-odd page criminal indictment but given a plea deal with a non-prosecution agreement in exchange of being convicted only of two state-level felony prostitution charges, arranged by then US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta and later described by DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility as “poor judgement” and having failed to notify Epstein’s alleged victims about the agreement or get their consensus. That takes a lot of suction and indicates that there were some pretty powerful influences that didn’t want Epstein on a federal witness stand or talking to other prosecutors or investigators.
I don’t disagree that Trump has repeatedly ‘overperformed’ with respect to polls; I’m just reluctant to ascribe any particular cause to it other than it is difficult to produce polls without bias, and especially for ‘non-traditional’ candidates whose support doesn’t align to policy or traditional party positions. Trump essentially came to power in 2016 claiming he was going to “drain the swamp” even as he surrounded himself with the most swampy boosters and campaign advisors in living memory and then appointed a bunch of them to Cabinet and leadership positions in government, and managed to get re-elected in 2024 despite having fumbled a pandemic response, instigated an insurrection, and spent the better part of the intervening four years sulking at his golf resorts. People are certainly willing overlooking any number of Trump’s foibles, but then Bill Clinton’s enthusiasts excused him for decades for having sex with a 22 year old intern and then defaming her by denying it, or allowing Gennifer Flowers and Kathleen Willey to be dragged through mud by the media for incidents that we can be all but absolutely certain actually happened as described, so this phenomenon is not limited to just Donald Trump.
Well, that’s what Trump says, but consider the source.
Earlier this year I attended a sexual assault survivors’ March (as an employee) and some guy driving by shouted out, “Trump rules!" So yes, I am inclined to believe a significant portion of his base likes rape.
Yeah, I’m probably guily of overlooking Clinton’s sins. I don’t remember exactly what I knew in ‘96 but it was enough to know he was a sleaze. Well, at least he didn’t try to overthrow the legitimately elected government. The Democrats need to move on from the Clintons at the next convention. Keep the Obamas, let Bill fade into the sunset.
I’m glad this scandal has legs. It gives Trump multiple opportunities to stick his foot his mouth. Like today, about Virginia Giuffre.
"I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa, I think so, I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he stole her.
Or just being fucking edgelord dickheads who like the idea of bullying people because that is essentially what the MAGA movement is all about; beating down on people who are already marginalized. They are such weak-minded, unprincipled, malleable people that they’ll comply to basically any movement that feeds off of their inherent insecurities even when they make no sense, like immigrants taking back-breaking basic labor at sub-minimum wage that they would never be willing or indeed able to do anyway.
I would like to be sympathetic because many of these people have legitimately been hard done by both political parties in the rush to offshore manufacturing for the cheap labor, but it isn’t as if Trump has actually done a fucking thing for them or expresses anything but utter contempt at them, although perhaps not as much as ‘elitists’ Democratic elders who just don’t understand why everyone won’t fall in line with ‘progress’ even if they are being personally marginalized.
If you look at the numbers, offshoring began in the 70s and was basically already fait accompli by the point that NAFTA and GATT were signed. Labor cost margins between the US and impoverished nations were all that were needed for businesses to rush abroad, not political shenanigans. NAFTA purely worked to keep at least some of the production on the same continent so that supply lines could more readily be defended during times of war, it didn’t create the conditions for offshoring to Mexico and certainly not to China.
Perhaps if offshoring had created widespread unemployment, the politicians would have stepped in. Instead, most of everyone and everything moved to indoor work without big arm crushing machines, with air conditioning, and with better pay. We’ve got lower unemployment than at most other points in history.
You can make some national security argument that we need to be able to make computers and chips domestically, along with the other implements of war. Trying to get the US to make toasters and microwaves just decreases our ability to compete in the fields at which we’re the most competitive. It would be like telling Einstein that he needs to run a farm and patrol the walls guy invaders, and expecting him to do all the same physics as before.
But to be sure, Trump’s not bringing back manufacturing. If he wanted to, he might do something like passing legislation that slowly brings up tariffs by set increments over the course of the next decade or two, until balance normalizes. As it is, by this point, it’s fairly clear that he’s just trying to pass the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. He’s royally fucking everyone that voted for him.
I heard that on the radio earlier. Trump claimed tha they fell out over Epstein hiring some spa workers away from Trump after Trump had asked him not to.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but did he just confess to colluding with someone to keep the wages of his employees artificially low?
Yeah, hey, it is tawdry but… And it’s not as if he got ALL of high society to invest. But if you were the sort of guy who felt that some teenage action was a “nice bonus”… as was mentioned: