I must confess I hadn’t heard about these protests at all until now.
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Information about upcoming protests and other events can usually be found here…
…or here:
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July 18, 2025 (Friday)
[There is a lot about sexual assault in tonight’s letter.]
Now we know why President Donald J. Trump earlier this week began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
The journalists say the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
The lines of text represent an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein:
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.
“Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
“Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
“Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
“Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
“Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
“Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
“Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Florida police began investigating Epstein in 2005 after allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. They identified five victims and 17 witnesses, but ultimately the U.S. attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, negotiated a plea deal with Epstein in 2008, by which Epstein pleaded guilty only to state charges, including soliciting a minor, and avoided federal charges. Trump appointed Acosta to be the secretary of labor in his first administration; Acosta resigned in 2019 after new reporting by the Miami Herald accused Epstein of abusing about 80 girls and women and showed how Acosta had shut down an FBI investigation into Epstein’s actions.
In July 2019, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman charged Epstein with sex trafficking of minors as young as 14. The indictment charged Epstein with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of underage girls who engaged in sex acts for money at Epstein’s properties in New York and Florida. Arrested in New Jersey in July, Epstein died in his Manhattan prison cell in August.
In 2020, Epstein’s associate Maxwell was indicted on charges of assisting, facilitating, and contributing to Epstein’s abuse of minor girls, not only in New York and Florida, but also at his residences in New Mexico and London, “helping Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to Maxwell and Epstein to be under the age of 18.” Epstein also owned a private 72-acre island off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, rumored to be another site of sex trafficking. In 2021 a jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor and transporting a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity.
When the FBI raided Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan in 2019, they seized piles of evidence, including stacks of compact disks bearing the labels “Young [Name] + [Name]," suggesting he had kept video evidence of men sexually assaulting underage girls.
Within hours of the discovery of Epstein’s body in his prison cell in 2019, Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory alleging that former president Bill Clinton was involved in his death. Trump and his loyalists pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood actors, an accusation that dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was secretly leading the fight against such a cabal. Trump fed the idea that if reelected, he would release the information he claimed was being withheld as part of a coverup.
In fact, the politician most closely associated with Epstein was Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
And yet Trump supporters overlooked Trump’s long friendship with Epstein until billionaire Elon Musk resurrected the story that Trump might be implicated in the records of the Epstein investigation. On June 5, in the midst of a fight with Trump, Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
On July 7, the Department of Justice announced that Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” that he died by suicide, and that it would not be releasing any more information about the investigation into his activities, although it released a video from outside Epstein’s prison cell the night he died to show that no one had entered the cell, claiming it was “raw” footage. MAGA exploded, and Trump’s attempt to downplay the Epstein files made things worse. Then he turned on his supporters, calling them “stupid” and “foolish” and saying he didn’t want their support while also insisting that Democrats had written the files.
And then Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired reported that two minutes and fifty-three seconds were missing from the “raw” video.
On Wednesday night, far-right influencer Nick Fuentes responded to Trump: “F*ck you. You suck. You are fat, you are a joke, you are stupid, you are not funny, you are not as smart as you think you are.” “[W]e are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history,” he added. “And the liberals were right. The MAGA supporters were had. They were.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, has been working for the past three years to trace Epstein’s finances, and yesterday, Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times reported his staff’s discovery that four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in financial transactions, but only after Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Wyden renewed the demand for more financial information about Epstein he had called upon the administration to release in March.
Yesterday, Trump announced on social media: “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
But the grand jury testimony was a small part of the information from the investigation, and as legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, this demand was “a meaningless trick” anyway, because courts prohibit public disclosure of such information. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance clarifies in Civil Discourse that while it is possible in rare circumstances to publish grand jury testimony, the process will be slow and difficult.
Bondi promptly assured Trump she was ready to do as he asked, but Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that the actual document asked the court to unseal the transcripts “subject to appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information,” a provision that has the potential to protect Trump if his name was discussed.
The story of the birthday message has thrown gasoline on this fire. The Wall Street Journal reporters said that when they contacted Trump about the story, he denied writing the letter or drawing the picture and threatened to sue them. Then, hours later, Trump told reporters that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden had made up the story, although neither was in office when the FBI investigated Epstein. Trump was. Oliver Darcy of Status News reported that Trump personally called the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal to try to stop her from publishing the story.
After the story dropped, Trump posted that the letter was “FAKE.” “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”
Reporters had a field day today rebutting his claim with accounts of all the times Trump auctioned off his doodles for charities, with photos of the sketches. “The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature,” wrote Tyler Pager of the New York Times, “are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.”
In a letter to FBI director Kash Patel today, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that his office had received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured the FBI to put 1,000 personnel to work in 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein records. Durbin said his office had received information that the personnel were instructed “to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
Patel pushed the idea that the Epstein files were being covered up during the Biden administration, only to change his tune once he took charge of the FBI. Durbin asked him to answer a series of questions about the information the FBI holds and how the administration is handling that information, like, for example, how the “raw” footage was modified.
This afternoon, with a complaint that misrepresents the Wall Street Journal story and reads like a Trump press release, Trump sued for defamation Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., its parent company News Corp, owner Rupert Murdoch, chief executive Robert Thomson, and the two reporters who broke the story, asking for $10 billion in damages. A Dow Jones spokesperson responded: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
The Epstein story is about more than the sex trafficking of girls. It is also about rich and privileged people evading accountability for breaking the law. MAGA likely jumped on the story for both of these reasons when they thought a coverup was protecting Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites.
But the story is also about a group of elite people who think they are better than the rest of us and have the right to dominate anyone that is not part of their group, particularly people of color, Black Americans, and women, no matter what the law says.
Journalist Fareed Zakaria called out that worldview today in a Washington Post story noting that for all their performative cruelty, Trump’s ICE raids have led to far fewer deportations than took place under Obama, and barely more than under Biden. ICE does not coordinate with local law enforcement, follow rules, or work with legal processing—all of which are necessary for an efficient process. The plan appears to be simply to create a spectacle that demonstrates power and dominance.
The latest step from the Justice Department in the case of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, woman killed during a botched police raid in 2020, reinforces that message. In 2024 a federal jury convicted former police officer Brett Hankison of depriving Taylor of her civil rights when he fired several shots into her home through a covered window and glass door. While his bullets were not the ones that killed Taylor, a jury decided that his blind firing constituted excessive force.
On Wednesday, assistant attorney general for the civil rights unit in the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, asked a federal judge to sentence Hankison to a single day in jail, time he has already served.
Civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Sherrilyn Ifill wrote: “They mean to be as insulting to Black people, as dismissive of our lives, as [resistant] to our status as full citizens in this country as they can be.”
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I hope Murdoch turns on Trump and orders Fox News to turn on him. That might actually end him.
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Honestly, it sounds like Murdoch was done with him before the call from Trump. I get the feeling that if Murdoch still had any use for Trump, we wouldn’t be hearing about this.
Which makes me wonder: It’s unlikely that Murdoch has given up on the whole conservative / authoritarian mindset, so what’s he thinking the next big thing will be?
And as well all know, Nick Fuentes is pretty much always mad for exactly the opposite reason that normal people are mad. He’s mad that Drumpf has failed to deliver a white Christofascist state.
But if he’s mad that Drumpf can’t deliver, that’s at least a setback for them. I’ll take it.
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Yup. “The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy.” Nothing more, nothing less. If this is what it takes to fracture the fascists, so be it. There is irony to be found, but I will just sit back and watch the fireworks. Important to keep in mind, this will not end the attempt to establish a white christofascist state, just slow it down a bit. We still have lots of work to do.
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I’m sure he’d back Vance or whomever was less erratic. I assume he wants the agenda still. It allows him to be the ministry of truth.
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Yeah, he’d back the techno/crypto-fascist group backed by Thiel and Musk. The good news there, for the rest of us, is that none of those people have an ounce of any kind of charisma, and the MAGA idiots who love Trump hate them, even though they sometimes tolerate them because Trump does.
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July 19, 2025 (Saturday)
On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from Lunar Module Eagle to the surface of the Moon. One hundred and twenty-five million Americans—63% percent of the population—were watching on live television as Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
Televisions showed Armstrong stepping out of the lunar module onto the Moon just before 11:00 p.m. Eastern time.
My siblings and I were among those watching. Our parents had taken us across the harbor to our aunt and uncle’s house, where there was a TV. I remember being groggy from being rousted out of bed and unimpressed by the fuzzy little black-and-white screen the adults were crowded around and kept trying to get us to look at. At six, I had no idea that it was an unusual thing for people to walk on the Moon and was much more impressed that my aunt had a big fishing net with colorful glass weights in it hanging as a decoration near her fieldstone fireplace.
My older sister says that unlike me, she was indeed impressed that night…but not with the Moon landing. Our older cousin Jeff was playing an album by The Doors, and she says she remembers being blown away both by their music, which she was hearing for the first time, and by the weighty realization that we had the coolest cousin in the world.
Clearly, it was a night to remember, even if we didn’t quite understand why. And at a time in which our elected leaders are deliberately breaking our government and institutions, it seems worthwhile to look back at a time when the U.S. government put its power behind enabling the American people to achieve something epic, leading a scientific triumph for people around the world.
So here, thanks to my wonderful team, is the story of Apollo 11. I hope you enjoy it.
And, if you are old enough to remember the Moon landing, I’d love to read your recollections in the comments. Let’s see if we can make a record of what that moment looked like.
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Sadly, I don’t know that many people understand just how miraculous getting to the moon was… or rather, just how much work went into making it happen. It blows my mind, just thinking how incredibly it was that this happened.
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That, and those stupid assholes who want it to be fake. I just don’t get it. This is one of humankind’s most impressive achievements. Discussions about the how and why or whether it was necessary or not, fine. But outright denial it ever happened?
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Yeah, it’s weird and upsetting…
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I did love Ali G interviewing Buzz Aldrin and asking “What do you say to the conspiracy theorists that say ‘There is no moon’?”
It’s fair to say that Buzz was prepared for a rather different question.
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And calling him Buzz Lightyear.
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July 20, 2025 (Sunday)
On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.
Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.
American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”
Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.
And then there are the Epstein files.
A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.
As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.
You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.
On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”
But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”
Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”
On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.
Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.
Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”
Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”
At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.
Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.
Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.
“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”
Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”
On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last Thursday, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”
Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.
Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.
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“Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.
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