And how much craziness will be too much?
Those have always been the essential questions regarding President Donald Trump.
In the years since he entered public life, he has stacked mistruth upon falsification upon fabrication until he has built a massive edifice of mendacity and obfuscation. He’s demanded that his followers—both the eager ones and the ones too frightened of him to do otherwise—embrace his bizarro alternate reality in which wrong is right, down is up and lies are truth.
Truth, though, provides a firm foundation.
Lies do not.
And that is what we’re beginning to see with the president’s maladroit handling of the whole unbelievably sad Jeffrey Epstein saga.
Overwhelming evidence and the testimony of many—too many—survivors demonstrates that Epstein was a sexual predator who preyed on underage girls. He was able to roam free, damaging and destroying lives along his way, because he was a billionaire and because he enjoyed the friendship of prominent and powerful friends.
Including Donald Trump.
When Epstein was caught and it became clear that he finally would be held fully accountable for his crimes, he killed himself in his cell.
That’s the official story.
There are other stories. Since Epstein’s death during Trump’s first term in the White House, conspiracy theories about the child rapist’s demise have sprung up like hothouse flowers.
But so have the public demands for a full and transparent accounting of how Epstein was able to prey on so many girls and young women for so long?
Powerful men—not just Trump, but also Great Britain’s Prince Andrew and former President Bill Clinton—have been implicated at times in the enduring controversy. The whole tragic and tawdry tale has become a flashpoint, a symbol of the many ways the lifestyles of the rich and shameless are different from those of the mass of Americans.
Trump exploited that division during his desperate campaign to return to the White House. He alluded to the great embarrassment and exposure many Democrats would experience once the records of Epstein’s activities became readily available. He vowed on the campaign trail to make “the Epstein files” public as soon as he was president.
That was before Trump learned, according to some excellent reporting by The Wall Street Journal, that his name was all over the Epstein files. That squares with the existing video and audio recordings of Trump talking about how close the two men were and how much they both “loved” beautiful women.
The fact that the president now stands to be implicated in some way by the release of the Epstein records has prompted him to do an about-face. He’s doing everything he can to delay having the files made public and to obfuscate about Epstein, their relationship and the origins of the controversy.
He’s called it a Democratic hoax and threatened Republicans who want to give the women Epstein wronged a platform and a chance for justice with dire punishments.
It’s not helping him.
A recent poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed that nearly half of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 think he’s handled the Epstein matter badly. More than a quarter of them—27% to be exact—now regret voting for him because of it.
That’s not surprising.
No matter how determined Trump is to divide America into two warring camps, most of us agree on some things.
When it comes to assaulting, molesting and raping young girls, we don’t care what political party the person belonged to. The important thing about that man isn’t that he’s a Republican or Democrat.
It is that he’s a sexual predator.
And we don’t like sexual predators.
To think that partisan loyalties should take priority over protecting innocent girls is, well, crazy.
Donald Trump has built his political career on unleashing the craziness in America, but I do not believe that most Americans are willing to be that crazy.
He also has acted as if he could lie his way out of any problem, but when half of the people who just voted for him say they want the truth, he’s got a problem.
We’re at the tipping point we Americans have been approaching for a decade now.
How many lies will be too many?
And how much craziness will be too much?
