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Sexual Hypocrisy, Pious Corruption, And Why Russ Vought Is So Damn Mad

Sexual Hypocrisy, Pious Corruption, And Why Russ Vought Is So Damn Mad

In dark times, is there anything more cheering than a little white Christian nationalist hypocrisy scandal? Performative sanctimony is so embedded in American political culture that these moments come around with the seasons: Jerry Falwell Jr. and the poolboy, Robert Morris of megachurch Gateway going to jail for pedo sex abuse, American Conservative Union leader Matt Schlapp repeatedly accused of sexual transgressions with men.

Now comes Russ Vought, Trump’s little white nationalist budget manager, a barely-there but relentlessly scheming lifetime conservative Washington insider. Vought’s piety is matched only by his passionate loathing for government employees, who he famously promised to put “in trauma.” Given the power to do exactly that by Trump, he now gets some credit – though maybe not as much as Elon Musk – for putting hundreds of thousands of workers on the street.

In his strangely personal craving for vengeance, Vought (who we featured in a Freak of the Week earlier this year) has traveled far from the “love thy enemy” message of the messiah he claims to follow. But what made him so mad?

Around the time he told political donors that he wanted to put federal employees into trauma, he was experiencing a major trauma of his own: In August 2023, Vought was divorced by his wife, the mother of his two daughters. Details are buried in the Arlington County case record, but it took only 20 days from filing to decree.

Ex-wife Mary Grace Vought is at least as crazily right wing as Russ. She cut her teeth working for white supremacy-sympathizer Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, runs her own consulting company, Vought Strategies, and double-dips in MAGAland as vice president of communications at the Heritage Foundation.

Her longtime “personal and professional relationship” with a Texas political strategist is at the heart of a little mini-scandal out in Oklahoma that appears to have ended the political career of that state’s notorious Superintendent of Public Instruction, baby-faced Bible banger Ryan Walters. Starting in fall 2023, not long after her divorce, Walters was wildly overpaying Vought Strategies on a de facto no-bid contract, a situation that eventually came to the attention of the Oklahoma legislature.

Vought was granted a contract, apparently without any competitive bids, to arrange “national media appearances” for Walters. Walters would soon rocket into lib-baiting stardom on the national scene with stunts including forcing all Oklahoma teachers to have Trump-branded Bibles in their classrooms, initiating a statewide public school curriculum partnership with right-wing PragerU, and creating a library book review committee headed by controversial “LibsofTikTok” influencer Chaya Raichik.

For a while, LibsofTikTok and other MAGA influencers even pushed Ryan for Trump’s education secretary – a role that went, more appropriately given the administration’s stance on books and experts, to the World Wrestling Entertainment founder’s wife.

A local Oklahoma Fox affiliate tallied more than 400 national media appearances over two years by Walters as he sought to raise his national profile. The attention wasn’t cheap: Walters hired Vought Strategies to book media interviews and write op-eds for $200 per hour. The initial contract was for four months with three one-year extensions possible, for a potential total of at least $210,000 in taxpayer funds. And Vought’s bid for $5,000 per month was attached to the contract, along with an even more detailed pricing proposal totaling $5,000 per week.

The contract caught the attention of Oklahoma state representatives who were looking into another deal Walters had struck with his campaign manager turned chief policy advisor, Matt Langston. Langston runs a Texas-based consulting firm, Engage Right, LLC. After working on Walters’ campaign, he took a position as his chief policy advisor – making six figures.

By March 2024, state legislators discovered that Ryan Walters had never bothered to create a formal Oklahoma state employment agreement for Langston. In fact, Langston didn’t even live in the state of Oklahoma – he hung his hat in Texas. But his influence crossed the panhandle. “Matt Langston is the puppeteer,” Oklahoma Republican State Rep. McBride said. “He’s the guy that pulls Ryan Walters’ strings.”

It turns out the Vought and Langston contracts were connected. While investigating last year, Oklahoma City-based news station KFOR obtained thousands of emails between Mary Grace Vought and Matt Langston spanning more than a decade, indicating they had a personal relationship and had done business together for years.

A few months before the Vought divorce, Oklahoma City attorney Cameron Spradling tweeted the full text of a scathing email Langston’s ex-wife sent to a reporter. She called him a sociopath, accused him of tax evasion, serial infidelity including with a woman in Wisconsin, and failing to pay child support for their five children.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Walters accidentally put up a porn video from his office computer while giving a staff talk.

By this fall, the game was up. Walters was forced to send Langston packing. And last month, Walters himself quit. He announced that he was moving on to run Teacher Freedom Alliance, an outfit that, according to its website, aims to assist educators in developing “free, moral and upright” American citizens. The organization of a few thousand members is dwarfed by the nationwide teachers’ union, American Federation of Teachers, with 1.8 million members, but Walters promised to tilt at that great Marxist windmill. Announcing his new job on Fox, Walters promised: “We’re going to destroy the teachers’ unions.”

Mary Grace Vought’s name made the Oklahoma news. But her DC reputation remains intact.

As a member in good standing of a clan of men who make fake uxoriousness a brand enhancer, the fact that Mr. Family Values Russ Vought was cut loose by his wife like Steve Carell in Crazy, Stupid Love has always amused the Freakshow. It turns out Vought’s personal life fascinates his boss as much as it does us!

Donald Trump has been trying to play wingman for the newly-minted middle aged DC stud with the Palm Beach ladies.

Here’s the nauseating report from Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo news correspondent Asawin “Swin” Suebsang:

By mid-2024, Donald Trump and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought were talking on the phone fairly regularly. But it often wasn’t about policy. Trump – when he had downtime from campaigning and plotting his fascist presidency – appeared preoccupied with getting the recently divorced Vought laid, two knowledgeable sources tell me. Trump spoke to Vought… about the ‘gorgeous’ and ‘beautiful ladies’ who roam Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, so often that it ‘weirded out’ some of his advisers, in one source’s words. Trump offered to be Vought’s wingman. And Trump spoke crudely of all the ‘p——’ that Vought would surely get as the president’s favorite ‘bachelor.’

The executive branch incel dipshits who craft AI clips of Trump shitting on America made a cartoon hero of Vought set to Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper.

Russ is suddenly cool, maybe for the first time in his life. Look sharp, ladies. To update Jane Austen for Mar-a-Lago 2025: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single white man in possession of a White House job must be in want of a plastic-enhanced Florida femme.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Conspiracy Theory? That Time When Jeffrey Epstein Visited The CIA

Conspiracy Theory? That Time When Jeffrey Epstein Visited The CIA

At the Freakshow we don’t spend a lot of time on conspiracy theories – but we make an exception when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, a career criminal burrowed deep into the American national security and foreign affairs establishment for reasons that are unclear and with effects that are not fully understood. Was he a spy? Alex Acosta, the Miami federal prosecutor who cut Epstein’s infamous sweetheart deal, supposedly said he was told to “back off” because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”

So many of Epstein’s connections are well-known and hashed over. Rich men have lost wives and jobs and paid massive settlements for their involvement, while others squirm and deny or issue carefully worded apologies. We know their names. But there’s more to uncover. Epstein was a predator and pimp, yes, but it was never just about the girls.

House and Senate committees might wait forever for full disclosure from the Justice Department, but there are hoards of archives in the public realm that they could start looking into. A good place to start? The records of those old bogeymen, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. These organizations preceded Davos, serving something of the same purpose – hosting self-important gasbag speakers for audiences of men with even greater self-regard. They primarily serve as closed-door clubs where private interests can be quietly advanced into public policy.

Epstein showed up inside these lofty clubs in the early 1990s – the launch years of his utterly mysterious rise in the American establishment. As we reported in a previous Freakshow, the doors to global power opened wide for Epstein in 1991 after the gnomelike Ohio billionaire Les Wexner very questionably gave him power of attorney over his billions. That same year, Jeff got his first jet and Ghislaine Maxwell appeared on the scene as his enabler and sometimes girlfriend.

He put the Wexner pile to work on power-networking right away. By 1992, Epstein was loaning $100,000 to Bill Clinton’s inaugural committee. Between 1991 and 1995, he made 17 White House visits. The visits abruptly stopped in January 1995, the same year he joined both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

In the June 12, 1995, roster of the Trilateral Commission, he is identified as Jeffrey E. Epstein, President, New Albany Property Inc. (New Albany was the planned village near Columbus that Wexner was developing and living in). He soon forked over $350,000 to the Council on Foreign Relations, which has since publicly disavowed him. The CFR has also claimed he only showed up for two meetings as a member, but club records suggest otherwise.

In October 1995, Les Gelb – an international affairs éminence grise and New York Times columnist who appeared in Epstein’s black book and traveled with him on his plane – arranged with Clinton’s CIA director John Deutch for a “private tour and briefing” at the CIA. The daylong agenda included briefings on “info. warfare,” “global humanitarian emergencies,” “proliferation” and “economic intelligence,” and even included a $12 lunch with Deutch (that the CFR told the members they would have to cover themselves).

...

Trip to Central Intelligence Agency; Council on Foreign Relations Records, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library

Epstein was among a small number of Gelb’s invitees to that CIA event, along with some white shoe lawyers, oil and weapons industry reps, and consultants from Kissinger Associates and the Carlyle International Group. (MAGA conspiracists will be sorry to see that in one of the records related to this lunch, Gelb hand-wrote “George Soros unable to attend CIA Day anytime Oct-Nov.”)

The CIA director who hosted the event, John M. Deutch, also served as Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, and was later accused of spectacular breaches of national security protocol. Official reports on his habits make Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents bathroom pile look like Fort Knox in comparison.

He kept a running journal of his work at the agency on a computer disk that he carried home with him every night and subsequently accessed on computers designated for “unclassified” use that were connected to the internet. He refused home security that most DCIs get, attempted to reformat and delete files when the CIA asked him to turn them over, and had a computer expert visit him weekly to discuss encryption and other issues, according to one inspector general’s report..

“Dr. Deutch failed to follow even the most basic security precautions” read a Pentagon report on the matter. A CIA investigation concluded that he “intentionally processed... highly classified information” on his home computers in Massachusetts and Maryland.

Deutch refused to cooperate and was never charged; Clinton pardoned him two hours before he handed the White House over to George W. Bush in January 2001.

One could chalk up this behavior to being a bureaucratic tech Luddite – except that Deutch had been at MIT for decades by then, had served in the Pentagon and the Energy department and was regarded by a computer expert he worked with as a “fairly advanced” user.

After his government years, Deutch returned to MIT – another node of American national security and scientific power that Epstein was burrowing into with money and personal charm. He gave MIT $850,000 and struck up a friendship with, among others, Deutsch’s friend Noam Chomsky. Deutch was head of the Department of Chemistry, Dean of Science and Provost, and eventually served on the board of a company started by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who had close ties to Epstein. Epstein connected Vekselberg with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2013, and the men went into business together. Deutch also helped Vekselberg create the Skolkovo Institute, a Russian-MIT collaboration that by 2014, Boston FBI warned could be a vehicle for Russia to steal US technology, and in 2022, the U.S. sanctioned it for its “close relationship with Russia’s defense sector.”

By 2003, Epstein had embedded himself all the way into the establishment. It had taken just over ten years. His birthday book is a record of the respect, love and affection of numerous extremely powerful men. At the Trilateral Commission and the CFR, he smirked and slunk and rubbed shoulders with U.S. Senators current and former, Secretaries of State current and former, chairmen of banks and financial firms and aerospace and international conglomerates – men who would go on to make decisions affecting the course of world affairs and millions of people’s lives, from Moscow to Tel Aviv, from Berlin to Abu Dhabi, from the status of Palestine to a nuclear-armed Iran.

These are all just breadcrumbs: facts over time that might suggest connections to larger events. Mostly they raise questions without answers. The Epstein motherlode is hoarded up in a Justice Department vault, currently guarded by K$H Patel and Pam Bondi. The Trump regime has gone to great lengths to divert attention from what had been their followers’ greatest conspiracy obsession. Besides provoking unrest in American cities, they are hiding the files, flagging (and presumably erasing) King Don’s presence in said files, slow walking or flat out ignoring Congressional subpoenas, and giving the royal prison treatment to Epstein’s depraved procuress Ghislaine Maxwell.

Even Bible Mike, our God-lovin’ House Speaker, is in on the coverup, refusing to swear in a duly elected member of Congress, apparently to delay or block a full House vote that would open the Epstein matter for discussion. To quote a song from one of Epstein’s Boomer era bands: “There’s something happening here… What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Donald's Diversionary Crackdown Is A MAGA Comic Book Spectacle

Donald's Diversionary Crackdown Is A MAGA Comic Book Spectacle

In recent days, the spectacle of state power abusing American citizens has reached critical mass. Coast to coast, masked thugs are dragging Americans off by their clothes and hair. Peaceful protestors branded as “terrorists” are being shoved into unmarked vans. Untold numbers of immigrants with and without documents have already disappeared into an American gulag. Even city cops are being tear gassed by masked federal agents.

All without due process.

Most of us are appalled. But not all. Some of these activities have been recorded, set to music and released by the Trump administration for the viewing pleasure, presumably, of MAGA fans. As artifacts of this time, these little works of art don’t reach for the mythologizing grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl (that will come later, surely), but they capture the granularity of the American 21st century fascist aesthetic, which is, of course, the Marvel comic.

Around the time Trump rode down the golden escalator to blame “Mexican rapists” for America’s problems, America slipped through a wormhole into a Freakshow of cartoonish evil. Trump, the saurian reality show impresario, overseeing a cast of characters with analogues in comic books or horror classics. The senior official behind the assault on American cities is a dead ringer for Nosferatu. Trump advisor Roger Stone, dandy in bespoke Penguin suits, bares his teeth like a Tasmanian devil. The Health and Human Services Secretary had a literal dead worm in his brain. “Stormy” and “Pecker” starred in the Presidential sex scandal, a “Trashelle” in another. Raven-haired plastic-fantastic villainess Laura Loomer is a millennial Cruella DeVil. And a shaky dry drunk weekend anchorman has nominal control over the most lethal military in human history.

As the administration ramps up its assault on American cities, the Marvel movie production values are undeniable. Over the weekend, right wing influencer Benny Johnson went to Chicago with ICE, donned a flak vest and got to cosplay warrior, selfie-sashaying past a line of sign-holding protesters he called “terrorists.” He later created an AI-generated video of himself as Batman, battling sombrero-wearing “terrorists.”

Benny makes a fitting mascot for this phase of the MAGA insurrection. Like all MAGA influencers, he’s a longtime fraud whose shamelessness helped him fail upward. Sacked for plagiarism not only by mainstream media but by a right wing outlet, he was rescued from oblivion by Russian covert disinformation money that literally made him rich and famous.

Now, like all the superstar MAGA influencer-bros, Benny leans on performative uxoriousness (they all profess to be happily married), fake-Christian sanctimony, and racist/misogynist political insult comedy. Tweeting out his slick embed video, he announced, “From tunnels under Trump Tower to the most targeted ICE facility, we faced violent Antifa, chaos, and criminals on the run.” Anyone who bothered to actually watch the video didn’t see any violence from the sign-holding protesters, and the only chaos appeared to be among the twitchy men in flak vests.

Before he “deployed” to the streets, he snagged an interview with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. In the video, they hug and then have a chat… about Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl. For those blissfully unaware of MAGA’s buffet of racialist obsessions, they’ve lately been losing it over the NFL’s choice of halftime entertainment. Bad Bunny, born and raised in Puerto Rico, a US territory, is an American citizen. But because he sings mostly in Spanish and is vocally anti-Trump, MAGA world views his selection as a personal affront, a pro football diss to the greater whiteness project.

Bad Bunny outright said that he excluded the US from his forthcoming world tour because of fears that ICE would deploy immigration raids targeting his fans, something Benny brought up in his video. He tees up Kristi Noem: “What is your message to Bad Bunny? Will there be ICE enforcement at the Super Bowl?”

“We’ll be all over that place,” replies the fake frontier woman and unrepentant puppy-killer. “We are going to enforce the law. You shouldn’t be coming to the Super Bowl unless you are a law-abiding American citizen.”

(As if any undocumented immigrant would have the thousands of dollars for a ticket or the audacity to come around one of the most heavily guarded sporting events in America.)

The fact that two adults – one of whom is overseeing an extralegal assault on a major American city they claim is “under siege” by the left– appear to be chiefly concerned with the ideology of Super Bowl halftime entertainment is laughable.

During the presidential debate, Kamala Harris stated of Trump: “He’s not a serious person.” His greatest living biographer, Michael Wolff, calls him “an idiot.” But the spectacle is not supposed to be serious. Trump is an idiot savant when it comes to entertainingly manipulating race and class grievances.

The cartoon world his voters bought into last November has now turned dark, real and serious. Hundreds of Texas National Guard troops are headed up to Chicago, dispatched in accordance with Trump’s wishes, in defiance of judges and the governor of Illinois. A West Coast federal judge has managed to stave off the deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon (where the chief of police is on record that the so-called emergency is a tiny protest taking place within one square block of the city). How long before armed men with Dixieland accents are shoving northern cops aside in the northern cities?

After ICE’s Blackhawk helicopter assault on a Chicago apartment building, right wing social media justified it by sharing reports of “30 shootings” in the city over the weekend. Sadly, 30 shootings in a weekend is not a lot by American standards. It is less than average. This year, there have been 11,359 gun deaths and 20,574 gun injuries nationwide. And according to the CDC, last year, the states with the highest rate of gun deaths per 100,000 were Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The lowest were New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Fox “News” has done its part for a decade at least, terrorizing white rural and suburban Americans with stories about urban crime infernos. That myth of blue city violence is a new Big Lie pretext for the Insurrectionist in Chief to realize a dream he’s cherished since at least January 6, 2021.

Would he really invoke the Insurrection Act? He footsied around with that question last night. Maaaybe …

Kinda depends: how much American carnage will it take to make us forget Trump-Epstein? This morning, Pam Bondi remained silent at a Congressional hearing when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), asked her if there were pictures of “Trump with half-naked young women” in the DOJ’s Epstein files.

She didn’t say no.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Epstein Files: Jet Flights To Istanbul And Massive Money Transfers

Epstein Files: Jet Flights To Istanbul And Massive Money Transfers

Charlie Kirk’s assassination diverted attention from some of the most odious and embarrassing episodes of Trumpies engaged in the Epstein coverup. While Donald Trump orchestrated a national mourning spectacle for the TPUSA founder, his toadies were out in shifty-eyed overtime on Capitol Hill, parroting the brazen “nothing to see here” message.

We know that Trump judiciary officials deployed a thousand FBI agents – a veritable Roman legion – to flag the Trump name in the hundreds of thousands of pages of Epstein case files. And yet, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel embarrassed himself, dodging repeated direct questions about how many times Trump’s name is in the files, and whether he told Attorney General Pam Bondi that Trump’s name was in the Justice Department's Epstein files.

K$H, as Patel brands his Trumpy merch, insultingly claimed he had seen no “credible evidence” that any man other than Epstein had sex with his trafficked victims – despite the many public statements and courtroom testimony from those women.

He then stonewalled a House Committee hearing at which Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie grilled him about the men believed to have been recipients of Epstein’s trafficked girls.

“According to victims, these documents in your possession, detail at least 20 men, including [Jes] Staley, CEO Barclays Bank, who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked victims to,” Massie said. “That list includes 19 over individuals, one Hollywood producer worth a few hundred million dollars. One very prominent banker, one high profile government official, one high profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files.”

K$H had nothing to add.

Also over at the House, former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the Miami federal prosecutor who ignominiously signed off on the cushy Florida Epstein plea deal, claimed to a closed-door Oversight Committee hearing that je ne regrette pas any of it.

Perhaps he will someday revise that sentiment. It’s clear that Trump’s Manhattan running buddy and fellow “modelizer” was empowered to globalize his sick business after the Acosta slap on the wrist.

Here at the Freakshow, we’ve found a cache of previously unreported global Epstein travel records, with a curious pattern: In the years 2010 to 2014, right after his laughably brief jail stint, Epstein was jetting back and forth to Istanbul, then back to the US, frequently stopping at his tropical hideaway, which he’d made his official residence. Records from Customs and Border Protection show Epstein flying his private jet into and out of Istanbul 64 times during that four-year period, often landing at St. Thomas only to turn around and make another round trip to Istanbul the very next day.

The source for all this is in CBP records here.

Weirdly, these documents are in the public domain only because of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Epstein’s own lawyer in July 2013, after Epstein had already been making regular trips in and out of Istanbul for two years. Was Jeff checking his tracks? (Epstein lawyer Darren Indyke has not replied to email or phone messages about this FOIA. If he does, we will update.)

More often than not, the records indicate female passengers were also on these flights. But their names are redacted. So many questions. Why Istanbul? Why always the private jet to Istanbul, when he flew commercial to Paris and London? Had the supply of underprivileged American girls run dry or had soliciting them gotten too risky after the plea deal?

Regrets-free Alex Acosta, in concert with Epstein’s A-Team of the best American defense lawyers money could buy, released Epstein into the wild in 2009. Instead of facing potential decades in prison, he spent 13 months of his 19-month sentence in the private wing of a Palm Beach jail, and was allowed to go home to his “office” by day. Once freed, he went on to fraternize with some of the most powerful men on the planet (we will have more on his relations with Vladimir Putin and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the next installment of The Trump-Epstein Files). And he would globalize his business, using multiple Russian banks to process payments related to sex trafficking.

The Trump-Epstein story isn’t going anywhere – as much as the administration would like to divert our attention with authoritarian threats to dissenters. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), has attached a request for thousands of Epstein-related documents at the Treasury to the National Defense Authorization bill, which Congress rarely if ever fails to pass. (More on this in a riveting new report by my COURIER colleague Camaron Stevenson.)

In a recent statement about these records, Wyden stated: “Treasury’s Epstein file details 4,725 wire transfers… adding up to nearly $1.1 billion flowing in and out of just ONE of Mr. Epstein’s bank accounts. If you ask me, that is more than 4,000 potential lines of investigation right there. Hundreds of millions more flowed through other accounts – that is even a lot more to investigate.”

Epstein’s private jet jaunts into and out of Istanbul coincide with a period when Turkey – Türkiye as it’s now more commonly spelled – and Istanbul specifically, was becoming a key transit point for trafficking in and out of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

According to a State Department report published by the UNHCR in 2014:

Turkey is a source, destination, and transit country for women, men, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Trafficking victims identified in Turkey are from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Syria, and Morocco… Foreign victims are offered cleaning and childcare jobs in Turkey and, upon arrival, traffickers confiscate their passports and force them into prostitution in hotels, discos, and homes. Turkish women are subjected to sex trafficking within the country and in Western Europe, including Germany and Belgium. Traffickers increasingly use psychological coercion, threats, and debt bondage to compel victims into sex trafficking… Displaced Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi nationals are increasingly vulnerable to trafficking in Turkey.

The dry language of that report just hints at a chain of pain and trauma, of course. Stateless people on the run, looking for a better life, tricked and trafficked, without passports or guides to lead them out of hell, and running into rich, sly predator Jeff. Their names will likely never be known to us. One hopes that someday their collective memory haunts Epstein’s surviving pals, including Trump, and all of the posthumous enablers working so hard to make everyone forget.

“A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan,” Wyden stated. “You shudder to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and girls out of those countries and into Epstein’s web of abuse.”

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freak Show.

The Big Chill: How Trump's Censorship Crusade Dishonors Charlie Kirk

The Big Chill: How Trump's Censorship Crusade Dishonors Charlie Kirk

I disagreed with most of what the martyred rightwing thought-warrior said. But it would have been far better to have him alive today to argue with. In his famous tract arguing against censorship, the English poet John Milton laid down the foundation of our concept of freedom of speech. Milton’s argument was that Truth and Falsehood should “grapple” in the public square, because in the end, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

The tract was called Areopagitica, a reference to Areopagus, the hill in Athens named after Ares, the god of war. It was published in 1644, at a time of great political upheaval and violence (the British had just beheaded their king and religious conflict had been increasing across Europe since the invention of the printing press).

Milton wrote it in response to Parliament passing a law requiring a pre-publication license on pamphlets. Almost four centuries on, the nation founded on the principles he set forth is confronting a similar challenge.

The last time I paid attention to Charlie Kirk before he died was when he came on my Twitter feed opening a chat room called “Should Taylor Swift Submit?” Kirk was one of the right wing bros obsessed with TayTay (I wrote about that here) and this was how he marked the occasion of her engagement to Travis Kelce.

I tuned in for a minute, as he was exclaiming that he didn’t want a wife who told him where to invest his money. What a strange obsession, I thought again. And flagged it for examination in a future Freakshow. Alas, that won’t be written.

Kirk was a polemicist and an effective one. He said outrageous and deeply offensive things. Black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.” He praised the idea of public executions and called for the death penalty for Joe Biden.

To add pious odiousness to insult, he did all that while praising Jesus, of course.

Kirk’s accused assassin was raised to be a sharpshooter by his own gun-loving conservative family. If he was influenced to murder by the left, as the Trump administration wants us to believe, he is an outlier among our nation’s heavily armed cohort. But yesterday, the Vice President sat in Charlie Kirk’s podcasting chair and laid out the Trump administration's plan to use Kirk’s death to criminalize dissent.

Political animal Vance cannot hope to don Charlie’s mantle. He’s wobbly on the issues and will never possess the mesmeric reality star wizardry that the president has over the masses. But the MAGA movement needs a younger unifier if and when King Don steps off the mortal coil, and Vance is first in line.

From the White House, Vance announced that the government will use the Kirk assassination as a tool to go after NGOs and left leaning groups. It’s not yet clear which ones, but presumably they mean to reclassify many of MAGA’s political foes, pesky civil liberties organizations and independent or corporate journalists as hate speakers. Meanwhile, Trump – as ever utterly transparent about his true aims – announced he is suing the New York Times and four reporters for $15 billion supposedly for endorsing Harris “on the front cover” of the paper.

More likely – based on the timing – he’s upset that the Times team is not taking eyes off the shameless self dealing and personal enrichment he is overseeing from inside the White House.

Two things are going to break MAGA, two things that therefore must be shut down, speech-wise. One is Epstein – as Michael Wolff put it in his latest Instagram mini-lecture, Trump cannot get away from Epstein because “Epstein” is “everything we don’t know about Donald Trump.”

The second thing that must be silenced is Gaza, which the UN has finally officially recognized as genocide. Two years of increasingly shocking restrictions on Gaza speech here and abroad are the kernel out of which the current clampdown grows. Yet even Charlie Kirk, a staunch Israel supporter who spent most of his time around college kids, could not have missed what an issue this is for youth on both sides of the political divide.

It is probably too late to do this, but let’s envision where this crackdown on speech and thought is headed. What is an America where dissent is criminal, where every person must first test a thought or an idea against how the religious right or the regime might respond?

We already live in an America where it’s legal to spread lies about public health and vaccines, where American history is being erased by executive order at the Smithsonian and the National Park Service, and where Bari Weiss is about to be empowered by one of the biggest media concerns in the world to tell us to love Israel unconditionally.

As if that wasn’t enough, now those who disagree must be criminalized.

I will always remember something about the inauguration of Trump 2017. There wasn’t much of a crowd (nowhere near the wall of humanity at Obama’s 2009 inauguration). All along Pennsylvania Avenue, peaceful protesters were penned off behind riot guards. These groups provided spots of color and even gaiety, with clever signs and songs. Shuffling between them on the sidewalk were the free people, visitors from states that had supported Trump, wondering what they were supposed to be doing.

Four years later almost to the day, January 6, 2021, the world witnessed a very different kind of scene in Washington, with no singing and no peace. The effects of the right’s online radicalization pipeline are well-known, including mass murders of innocent Americans from Santa Barbara to Pittsburgh to El Paso to Minneapolis.

Areopagitica is considered one of the foundational arguments against censorship and for freedom of thought in modern western history. Thomas Jefferson paraphrased some of it in his inaugural address: "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

The key word is tolerated. We might not all like each other in this great American experiment of blended peoples and ideas, but to survive as a democracy we agree to tolerate one another.

The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword. We scribes and polemicists and provocateurs – maybe even Kirk too – like to think that’s true. In some sense, it is. Words inspire and create movements and disagreement, force people to think, and promote a vitality that is the very best of America.

As Milton wrote: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Words are powerful. But as we see in the tens of thousands of gun killings across our nation, now including Kirk’s murder, words and weapons are not equal. Not at all. And we are about to restrict the less lethal of the two.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

Hair Plugs And Diet Pills: Trump's Personal Decay Is Nation's Avatar

Hair Plugs And Diet Pills: Trump's Personal Decay Is Nation's Avatar

In one of his earliest insane acts in public office, two weeks after his first inauguration, President Trump dispatched his former NYPD bodyguard to “raid” the office of his Upper East Side doctor and seize his medical records. The doctor had made the fatal mistake of revealing he’d prescribed hair growth drugs to the newly installed Leader of the Free World. Poor Dr. Harold Bornstein told reporters he felt "raped, frightened and sad" when Trump goon Keith Schiller and another "large man" came to his office to rifle the files and collect the records.

Despite that mobsterish incident, much reliable public reporting exists that Trump has resorted to hair plugs, baldness surgery and diet pills over the years to maintain his signature look. One former producer on The Apprentice, Noel Casler, has even insisted that Trump regularly snorted Adderall to stay focused.

But the rest of his self-care regimen is more murky. Did a doctor ever step forward to explain what really happened to his earlobe after the shooting in Butler? Did the public even see those medical records? Why, no!

After weeks of speculation about the Presidential cankles, the White House announced that he had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a fairly common condition that can also lead to amputation and death.

All we know for sure is that a steady diet of red meat and a little golf have apparently been sufficient to fuel production of the liters of bile required for hourly acts of vengeance.

For the last three days, social media was a-sizzle with macabre speculation about President Trump’s death. Granted it was a slow end-of-summer news weekend and people had a lot of time for wistful musing. He hadn’t looked well recently, his signature word salad was getting way more pronounced and there’s that weird bruise on his paw. Plus, the last Cabinet meeting played out like a creepy living eulogy session. Then he disappeared, without a word of explanation or reassurance in mainstream media.

The information vacuum became a vortex of speculation. Melania was (unreliably, but who knows) reported to have shown up unannounced in the maternity ward at Walter Reed. An unverifiable video went viral of a shadowy figure flinging something brown (a diaper? a McDonald’s bag?) out a third floor window of the White House. A Democrat I know in Washington spent the weekend querying ChatGPT about the prospects for an obese 79 year old with increasingly paraphasic, disorganized speech and with a noticeable weaving gait. Chat kept coming up with the same diagnosis: Transient ischemic attacks (little strokes).

Trump might be doing just fine. But like Biden, he is obviously experiencing some form of decline and his people are scurrying to cover it up. The ridiculous proof of life emissions the White House released over the weekend – old golf pictures and extended maniacal Truth Social rants – did little to reassure.

The old golf pictures presented as new were actually the most alarming sign that something was amiss. The Truth Social rants, not so much. (Clearly, he doesn’t write his own social media pronouncements – in my opinion, an official Trump rant channeler has been at work since covfefe. The tell is consistently correct spelling and perfect grammar, including semicolons and commas. We eagerly await that person’s unmasking.)

Whatever is going on with his health, we might not know about it for a generation or ever. Trump has overturned decades of tradition around transparency when it comes to Presidential health. But given that we are living at a time when the right’s brain trust openly advocates for a return to dictatorship or monarchy, it is worthwhile to remember how the medieval Europeans viewed the king’s body. Essentially it was doubled. The King was his physical body and the body politic. The physical body would decline and die, but the body politic was the eternal part of the man, hence “The King is Dead; Long Live the King.”

Trump can’t live forever. But his physical decline tracks with America’s.

The profound unhealthiness of the Trump moment is all around us: the MAGA social media grifters making bank on quack supplements; its women injected with plastic and hobbled in stilettos like footbound Chinese aristocrats, the reverence for pollution and worship of fossil fuel extraction, for "beautiful coal,” and more cracker plants to produce more tons of nurdles just as the rest of the nations on earth are trying to reduce plastic.

And most unforgivable – the deliberate destruction of our national medical research and public health systems to own the libs, save a few tax dollars for billionaires, and commence the great eugenics project openly cherished by the right wing fringe.

The MAGA movement has undeniable aspects of body horror, a subgenre of horror that involves grotesque degeneration, mutation, or transformation of the human body. The fear body horror evokes is rooted in violations of bodily integrity and the loss of control over one's own physical form, due to mutations, parasitism, infections, and augmentations or modifications. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is considered a principal originator of body horror films like Shivers and Rabid, his remake of The Fly. Think also of extremely unwanted pregnancies involving alien or Satanic gestations such as in Rosemary’s Baby or Alien.

The doddering old man’s body is metaphor for the ghastly corrupting effect he has had on our country: a decade-long descent of our public discourse into profane spectacle, the jettisoning of common decency and empathy in favor of rudeness and cruelty, the daily rituals of public humiliation, open racism and sexism, and the craven terror of the disfigured Republican Party.

How much longer can the health of the body politic withstand the weaving fat man at the podium, the most divisive leader in modern American history, crooning about internal enemies over and over in that saccharine hiss so mesmerizing to so many: “They hate our country. They hate our country. They hate our country”?

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

When I was helping produce a three part series about Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, our team put in many hours discussing how and why she became the woman dozens of witnesses accused of heinous acts including underage solicitation, grooming, and trafficking. What kind of woman would serve up teen “nubiles” to a man who supposedly needed new girls on the daily? Why would she participate in an industrial scale sex trafficking operation? Was she pathologically inclined to assault? Was she groomed herself from childhood into the perfect tool for powerful men?

We hunted down and pored over clues to her psyche. We spoke with dozens of people who knew her in New York and in the U.K. where she grew up the tenth child in a wealthy family. We studied her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, a cruel, damaged oaf and one of the most mysterious figures in Cold War intrigue, associated with Israeli, and probably American, and maybe even Russian intelligence. What we didn’t do – what no one then could do - was hear from the woman herself.

Now she has spoken. In the released transcripts and audio from two days in a closed room with a Trump lawyer at a Tallahassee courthouse, she participated in a brazen feint at “transparency” for the Epstein conspiracy diehards threatening the MAGA coalition. It’s a fascinating charade and some enterprising theater director could turn the transcript verbatim into an excellent off-Broadway play.

Todd Blanche (one of the Epsteingate plumbers we covered here) threw softballs, and often answered Maxwell’s questions for her, while she suffered memory lapses, trashed victims, and demonstrably lied about her role and relationship with Epstein. (To be fair, Blanche did seem a little shocked that she couldn’t remember the reason for an $18 million payment from the sex trafficker.)

Blanche arranged the meeting after the Wall Street Journal published Trump’s “shared secrets” birthday note. That item is one of many artifacts – mostly photographic – confirming that the two men were close friends for years. The White House reportedly believed the item came from Maxwell’s side.

What else might be stashed in Pandora’s box?

While working on the documentary, we thought Maxwell would eventually trade evidence against untold numbers of powerful men ensnared in Epstein’s surveilled pleasure palace. Alan Dershowitz calls her “the key” to the case.

Anyone who reads the transcript and is familiar with the Maxwell story knows that there are many questions Blanche didn’t ask. But the transcript is filled with Easter eggs nonetheless.

Maxwell said a friend introduced her to Epstein as a potential husband in April 1991. If that’s true, is it just coincidence that it’s the same month Les Wexner mysteriously gave Epstein power of attorney over his entire fortune – a sum that enabled Epstein to catapult into the realm of blackmailable influential rich men. That same month, Epstein got his first private jet. According to flight logs, Maxwell would make 50 flights during the first year he owned it, often to Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived.

When Blanche asked her whether she had ever had any contact with an individual from Mossad, Maxwell replied: “Well not deliberately.”

“Pardon me?” Blanche replied, then moved on.

He was similarly blasé when she said Epstein hosted Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and head of military intelligence. Blanche breezed on to a question about Epstein’s use of testosterone instead.

Blanche worked to deliver backup for the MAGA obsession du jour, baiting his hook with the names of various Democrats – Andrew and Chris Cuomo, Bill Gates, Bobby Kennedy – trawling for evidence to build the elusive “client list” of progressive libertines. But Maxwell stood firm. “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age. I never saw inappropriate habits.”

Kind of depends on your definition of “inappropriate” of course: in court testimony, numerous women described Maxwell participating in the “massages” – stripping, pulling out sex toys, etc. To Blanche, she added a caveat: “Now, somebody's inappropriate and mine may be different.”

Inquiring minds might ask a follow-up to that. Blanche replied only: “Yep.”

In Maxwell’s memory, the bathrobe is the great leitmotif. “I don’t believe I ever saw him in a bathrobe,” Maxwell replied to a question about whether Dershowitz ever received a massage.

Maxwell used the exposure to settle scores and portray herself as a victim, a rebrand that, if successful, should win a Clio. She blamed her first public accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, 16 when she was recruited to service Epstein, for turning Jeff from a regular guy who just liked a daily massage or two, into an insatiable sex monster who always “wanted new,” causing Maxwell to trawl the spas of Palm Beach or the Caribbean for “masseuses” (she never called the victims women or girls). Roberts, Maxwell said, was trained “to be what every man wants in all its manners, fellatio and everything else.”

The transcript ends exactly where it likely began as the stunt was conceived in Washington – the birthday book. Blanche’s final question is the one eating his boss alive: “Do you know -- do you remember being told or knowing where the book is now?” Maxwell said she assumed the Southern District of New York feds had leaked it.

Maxwell knew exactly why she was there: She produced the money quote for Trump right away: “In the time that I was with him he was a gentleman in all respects.” The line made Fox News headlines and allowed MAGA propagandists to crow that Trump was ever honorable.

A week later Ghislaine was moved to finer prison digs, a way station perhaps to a pardon. And so the myth of the orange archangel sent from above to rescue children from pedophile elites lives another day.

AUTHOR NOTE: Readers interested in more about Ghislaine Maxwell, watch my recent Substack Live Sex Lies and Money with director Barbara Shearer and a long talk with Sidney Blumenthal at his Court of History podcast.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Pete Hegseth

Gender Regression: Trump Weenies And Their Woman-Hating Women

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a CNN clip in which a pastor from his nominally Christian sect said that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands. Hegseth’s getting better at cosplaying a powerful man. The flopsweat of Pete’s early days – wandering with lawyers and aides through Senate offices spluttering away the roofie rape charges – is mostly gone. But his eyes are ever aglow with the terror of his imposter syndrome. In his profound insecurity and his utterly unearned global power, Hegseth is a mascot for all Trumpy and MAGA men.

With Hegseth to his right and Attorney General Pam Bondi to his left, Trump announced that National Guard troops are taking charge of “crime prevention” in the nation’s capital. This was an obvious attempt at distracting from the President’s weaponization of the U.S. government for an Epstein cover-up. And that case, as we all know, is about the status of American women.

The elections in 2016 and 2024 signaled the end of a period when women could assume that we were living in an era of steady progress welcomed by many –but not all –Americans. The Dobbs decision set women back medically, but we overlook the knock-on effects politically and culturally. Since Trump’s first election, surveys have found that decreasing numbers of teen boys believe that women and girls deserve equal pay.

On Election Night last year, Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi who had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, tweeted: “Your Body My Choice. Forever.” To slam home the point, the administration arranged for the accused sex trafficker, rapist, “manosphere influencer” brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate to be flown out of Romania, where they were awaiting criminal charges, and into Florida on a private jet.

The achievements of Second Wave feminism, a movement that profoundly challenged eons of patriarchy with the help of the birth control pill, seem to have culminated in the empowerment of a claque of extreme right-wing women serving arguably the rapiest White House in modern history.

These often blonde, conspicuous cross-wearing women – Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, political strategist Susie Wiles, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Agriculture Secretary and longtime hard-right conservative think tank figure Brooke Rollins, lawyer and media star Jeanine Pirro, profane right wing influencer Laura Loomer, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, media personality and lawyer Megyn Kelly and of course, mendacity phenom Karoline Leavitt, who stands steely-eyed before the entire world lying to vastly more experienced men and women – are the current de facto standard bearers for empowered American women.

Trump’s appointed eight women to his cabinet -- not a record but significant compared to the two in his first term. All are adept at the psychological and political jiu jitsu of serving a regime led by a convicted sex abuser, with a vice president who has seriously suggested that maybe single women shouldn’t vote. The disenfranchisement of women is just the beginning. Men’s rights cultists, religious leaders, and pandering legislatures fantasize about putting the “lock” back in wedlock, ending no fault divorce.

“Pastor” Doug Wilson is only one of the crackpot Men of God affiliated with Vance and Hegseth who openly proclaim that marital rape is impossible. (The “I do” in the vows constituted full and eternal consent, ladies. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” Wilson has written in one of his books. “ A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts…True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”)

The foundational premise of this regressive worldview is that men, not women, are capable of living lives of adventure, mission, and public purpose. It’s an archaic notion originating from the movement’s murkiest id of a brain trust including, on the secular side, the odious Bronze Age Pervert, on the supposedly Christian side, Wilson and his ilk. These men share the view that women’s “natural” qualities design them for domestic, indoor, mothering forms of labor, and are innately incapable of seeking worldly challenge, living with purpose, or practicing self-reliance.

Supporting this creed, the working women of Trumpworld must be simultaneously empowered and hobbled. They would have you believe that although they have babysitters and cooks, and leave the kids with their husbands while they work long hours and rack up frequent flier miles, they are in full agreement with the notion that mothering, bread baking, and serving male carnal needs constitute all of a woman’s primary purpose in life. (In a recent Wall Street Journal article about these women, some claim that “faith” distinguishes them from career women of the left, who they believe “are unhappy.”)

These women and their regime are quantifiably setting women back on too many fronts to list here, and the cognitive dissonance between their real lives and the ideology they serve is mind-boggling. One need only look at before and after photos of every woman over the age of 40 in Trump’s orbit to know that they remake themselves physically to conform to his “smaller bikinis, higher heels” archaic caricature of femininity. Like the nativists descended from immigrants (Stephen Miller, et al) who yank up the ladder behind them, the rock-ribbed ladies of Trumpworld rode feminism to the top of the power structure, only to latch themselves to a project to revert those gains.

The bargain these women make with the sexual assaulter in chief is this: pretend that he and his men are actually protectors of women in exchange for personal gain and access to power. During the last weeks of his 2024 campaign, Trump was explicit on this, in a menacing way. He declared he would be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not.” Of course, the real protection that Americans need is protection against the misogynist MAGAs and the manosphere influencers and loony church men like Pastors Doug Wilson and Joel Webber.

The sole upside of the current assault on our rights is that it must energize a new generation of young women whose upbringing and expectations are profoundly at odds with the regressive aims of this minority. Anyone born after 1970 was raised in a world molded by grandmothers who made epochal change. The societal reset that clicked in half a century ago cannot be so easily erased. In the months and (hopefully not too many) years to come, they will re-learn an old lesson: In the oldest conflict in human history—the war between the sexes—women can never leave the front lines unattended.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

The Epstein Coverup: Lawyers Descend Into Sewer To Protect Trump

The Epstein Coverup: Lawyers Descend Into Sewer To Protect Trump

“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.” So announced MAGA stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene recently in response to the Trump administration’s “nothing to see here” Epstein files pivot.

We agree with MTG. We know you’re ravenous.

Here at the Freakshow, we don’t have the FBI vault’s stash of Epstein filet mignon. But we’ve been serving up some well-done steak nibbles – a Jeffrey-Donald bromance history and reasons why it’s not improbable to think Melania Trump, née Knauss, could have met Epstein before she met Trump.

We have some more meat this week: a close look at the claque of dirtbag lawyers buzzing around Epstein, Trump, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Ruthless lawyers abusing the American legal system for purposes of political manipulation and private gain are a hallmark of Trump’s career. So, of course, he could find men to engineer the probably illegal move of Ghislaine Maxwell – the woman who holds “the key” to the Epstein story, per no less a source than implicated Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz – to a luxury minimum security prison.

Remember that the Trump White House reportedly thinks the “birthday book” that the Wall Street Journal got its hands on came from Maxwell’s side. We may never know for sure, but if she has stashed her “keys” with anyone, now, when Trump’s feet are to the fire and she wants a pardon, would be the time to rattle them at him.

Enter the cleanup crew. The plumbers of Epsteingate.

Start with Timothy C. Parlatore, the lawyer who handled Trump’s classified documents case in Florida. Just two months after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and seized a hoard of purloined documents, Parlatore hired Epstein’s lifelong attorney, Darren Indyke, into his firm.

Parlatore never had to win the documents case. The feds and Jack Smith had Trump dead to rights, but a Trump-appointed lackey of a federal judge slow-walked and then killed the case in time for last year’s election.

Parlatore next sailed to DC on his client’s coattails, savagely defending Pete Hegseth during his nomination fight and threatening the California Republican who accused him of roofie rape in a police report with legal action if she spoke out during the hearings.

He is now at the Pentagon, one of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s top advisors. Such a relationship in the Before Times was considered a conflict of interest since he is also Hegseth’s personal attorney. Now, of course, conflicts are the way we do bidness.

If a man is the company he keeps, then Parlatore, and by extension, clients Hegseth and Trump, are all tainted by Parlatore’s formal association with Epstein’s personal Better Call Saul, the Long Island-born and raised Darren Indyke. Parlatore’s law firm website launders Indyke’s history from the get-go: “For more than 20 years, Mr. Indyke served as general counsel to family offices, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and other ultra-high-net-worth clientele.”

Nice try. The “family office” Indyke worked in was Jeffrey Epstein’s, in a building on East 66th Street where Epstein routinely housed foreign and underage models (including “sex slave” Nadia Marcinka, at age 15), girlfriends, models, employees, and even French pedo and fellow “model agency” mogul Jean Luc Brunel.

The work was lucrative, even with a dead client. Indyke and Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, are the two executors of Epstein’s fortune. As such, they reportedly stood to reap $145 million last year in tax refunds from what was left of the estate. Some Epstein victims sued Indyke and Kahn claiming the two men helped Epstein build “the complex financial infrastructure” that enabled Epstein to sexually abuse hundreds for decades. The case was quietly dismissed in April of this year.

Another taxpayer-funded Trump personal lawyer on the case is Todd Blanche. Blanche tried and lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He is now Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, empowered to do double duty for his formerly personal client by, against all procedural norms, personally and without a transcriber or video camera present, meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, someone Trump might like to pardon for – ahem – personal reasons. (AUTHOR NOTE: After we posted this, CNN reported that the administration is considering releasing a transcript - redacted to “protect victims” of the conversation between Blanche and Maxwell. )

Before we move on, let’s absorb the lawless depravity here: According to the New York Times, Maxwell was ineligible under Bureau of Prison regulations to be moved. Inmates designated as sex offenders are generally supposed to be held in high-security prisons, like the facility in Tallahassee where Blanche met with Maxwell, and not in minimum-security facilities, like her new digs in Texas.

Last but not least, let’s have a look at Maxwell’s current lawyer David Oskar Markus, whose chief mentor in law and in life was none other than Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and OJ lawyer who flew frequently on Epstein’s jet, and who litigiously denied allegations from victim Virginia Giuffre that he participated in Epstein’s smorgasbord of nubile sex.

Markus has been defending not just Maxwell but Epsteinians in general for years: besides Dersh, he wrote a Miami Herald op-ed arguing that Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who cut Epstein’s infamous 2008 sweetheart deal, was getting “unfairly criticized.”

As Maxwell’s lawyer, Markus sat in on the meetings between his client and Todd Blanche. He has insisted she deserves clemency because the Alex Acosta Palm Beach Epstein plea deal gave immunity to all Epstein’s co-conspirators.

It is possible the lawyers will have gone a bridge too far with Epstein. Maxwell’s own lawyer and some rightwing media are testing a rebrand of Maxwell as a victim. Anyone wondering why this will fail needs only glance at the harrowing testimony at her trial.

Meanwhile, Trump, his saurian eye always keen to danger, tried a new tack, claiming he “never had the privilege” of going to Epstein’s island. And he accused Epstein – for the first time ever – of “stealing our people” from the Mar-a-Lago spa, including, apparently, former locker room attendant, the late Virginia Giuffre.

One can easily imagine the faces of the cabal of lawyers as they listened to this clip of the president, digging himself into the briar patch.

A third of Republican voters disapprove of how Trump is handling the case, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. A Washington Post survey of over 1,000 Americans found a significant majority, including a large minority of Republicans, are actually paying attention and growing ever more uneasy about the legal sleight of hand and Trump’s dodges. These polls show Americans aren’t buying what Trump’s trying to sell – which is perhaps why he’s pivoted to threatening to arrest former President Obama and menacing Russia with nuclear subs on social media.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow. Please consider subscribing here.

A 'Model' Immigrant: Did Melania Know Epstein Before She Met Trump?

A 'Model' Immigrant: Did Melania Know Epstein Before She Met Trump?

New York journalist Michael Wolff has five years' worth of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, up until shortly before his death, in his possession. He is now releasing his bombshells with the regularity of a metronome. This week’s drop: he was quoted in a now retracted Daily Beast story saying that Epstein took credit for introducing Melania and Donald.

If true, the official story of their meetup is false. If not, it’s interesting that Number One litigation terrorist Trump has not gone after Wolff, whose unflagging courage in reporting on the President’s past and present sets him in a league of his own. Yesterday, when the Daily Beast asked the White House for comment on Wolff’s reporting, all they got was the predictably surly Steven Cheung insult-laden ad hominem denial. The Beast took the story down, after Melania’s attorney sent a letter “challenging the headline and framing of the article.”

I spent a good deal of time researching Melania for my book on the Trump family women, The Trump Women: Part of the Deal. Anyone who has tried to learn what Melania Knauss was up to in the years between leaving Slovenia around 1990 and washing up in New York City a few years before she says she met Trump in 1998, finds a lacuna, a blank slate on which there is almost no record. Mary Jordan, a Washington Post reporter and author who wrote a 2019 Melania biography, noted in her preface that she had an easier time reporting on national security spooks than on Melania.

I made some headway: I interviewed denizens of the New York fashion world who suggested, at the very least, that she was never a “supermodel.” I went to Slovenia, found a few sources who talked, and much fear, including in a powerful businessman who told me he was backing out of talking to me about Melania’s father’s legal problems after he was visited in his office by thuggish men in business suits.

In my reporting on Melania, I never ran across an Epstein connection. But it was 2018, and he wasn’t on my radar. I did discover a discrepancy in the official story of how Trump and Melania met. Melania says she met Trump in 1998 at a Victoria's Secret party. But fashion photographer, Jarl Alé de Basseville (who shot her in the nude scenes for a French men’s magazine that the New York Post published during the 2016 campaign) told me he and his team recalled her telling them in 1996 – two years before the official story – that Trump was her boyfriend.

Melania, of course, denies this.

The truth is that Melania was an Eastern European beauty who came of age in a formerly Iron Curtained-off country, Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like her predecessor, Ivana Trump, she grew up looking longingly over at the luxuries of the West, from plentiful Coca-Cola and Swiss chocolate to Italian jeans to Mercedes cars. As soon as the Berlin Wall fell, two things happened to women like her: one, they saw an escape hatch in commodifying their beauty, and two, they were ripe for exploitation by men like Epstein, whose business model involved trafficking Eastern European women – and girls.

One person who talked to me at length about this – and about Melania – was the man who claims to have brought Melania to New York: Paolo Zampolli, a jolly Italian businessman and sometimes model agent. Zampolli’s Milanese family had become wealthy making toys, including the Italian version of the Easy-Bake Oven (marketed in Italy as Dolce Forno). At the time I met him, he was a U.N. ambassador representing the Caribbean island of Dominica and a welcome guest at Trump’s first White House.

Here’s the story he told me, as I wrote in my book:

In the 1990s, beauties from the former Soviet Union were flooding the New York market. Books and articles have been written about this era and the rampant exploitation of these women.
Zampolli told me that there were so many gorgeous photogenic women looking for work that the value fell and pretty soon they were doing other things, things that maybe weren’t supposed to be captured on camera. He doesn’t deny this was true—although he has never included Melania in this category.
“At the time, once a month, I would have some guy calling me, putting pressure on me, saying his girlfriend should’ve been a model. And most of them, they were from Eastern European countries, because they had a visa problem. And you know, the girls would be beautiful. But they’re not model material, you understand. It’s a very different thing, is to be model material, or to be a girl you take out, or do other things. Okay. And in the nineties, New York was overflowing with these—those things—you might say. But this is not what happened in model agencies. Because in model agencies, we wanted to make money left and right.”
To accommodate the influx and see whether he could make money off it, Zampolli opened a division for the nonprofessionals.
“They’re not models, they can get little jobs, but they have to understand, they’re not models, they’re not fashion models.”
His People division was roughly equivalent to what other agencies called a Showroom division—basically lower-tier models who were contracted to designer showrooms. But Zampolli girls were also sometimes employed by what he called “party promoters”— tall, glamorous human decorations.
“But these are not models. They are beautiful girls with a stunning body that fits the clothes and their face is okay, but nobody gives a shit about the face because you just need somebody to wear the clothes.” He called them “clothes hangers.”
Sometimes he would send a dozen of his showroom girls to an “event,” Paolo recalled. That didn’t mean he expected them to stay out all night, he said. He chalked those incidents up to the “party promoters.” Zampolli described the party promoters as like Uber drivers with second jobs stocking nightclubs with lissome babes. “Remember this was before Uber. I had drivers driving them around in SUVs.”

Zampolli now holds a Trump appointment as “special envoy to Italy.” Melania is America’s mostly absent First Lady. And Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost haunts them all, but chained in a vault of 100,000 pages of FBI files that, we now know, a thousand agents were detailed to flag for mentions of Trump. We don’t know what’s in them, and the not knowing threatens to crack the MAGA coalition.

One thing is certain: Epstein was a capo in the global community of men who profited off the commodification and exploitation of Eastern European women. Much reporting exists indicating he was one of the most prolific movers of women out of Eastern Europe through New York. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that, through his involvement with that community, Epstein met Melania Knauss before she met Donald.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.



Jeffrey Epstein

'Best Friends': A Two-Decade Timeline Of Trump And Epstein

The story of the long, tight relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein involves shared accusations from multiple women and frolics at social events, rides on each other's planes, and many salacious blind items in tabloids. The President wants this history to disappear. According to Sen. Dick Durbin, Pam Bondi ordered a thousand FBI agents to scour 100,000 pages of Epstein evidence and “flag” mentions of Trump.

We don’t know – and now may never know – what the agents flagged. But those dusty old public records barely scratch the surface. Back in the day, the British tabs* were also catching glimpses of Trump while tracking Prince Andrew’s escapades with Epstein.

Because Trump and Epstein were tight. How tight? More than half of all the photos of Epstein in the Getty Archive between 1987 and 2004 seem to be with Trump or at Mar-a-Lago. People thought they were best friends. They are linked by women, or groups of women, some of whom have accused Trump and Epstein of sexual abuse.

In April 2000, for example, the Mail on Sunday quoted a neighbor of Epstein’s: “I often see Donald Trump and there are loads of models coming and going, mostly at night.”

In late 1997, according to one report in the Daily Mirror, Trump dated and even housed a young woman introduced to him by Ghislaine Maxwell, who later went on to tell NBC that she’d been raped by and trafficked by Epstein for several years prior. Around the same time, Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell flew on Trump’s plane from London to Florida, where Randy Andy was consorting with a Boca Raton “sexologist” and spotted at what the Mirror called “a club frequented by gays.”

Now Bondi is racing down to a Florida prison to meet personally with Epstein’s convicted procuress. The U.S. House is adjourning early to avoid further discussion of the Trump-Epstein connection. The President of the United States is calling people who believed him when he said he would reveal all of the Epstein story “fools.”

To borrow a phrase from one of the great Republican Masters of Disaster, there are many Unknown Unknowns in the Trump-Epstein story. This week’s Freakshow is a compilation of the Known Knowns of the 20-year friendship between Donald and Jeffrey.

1987

Trump and Epstein strike up a friendship around 1987, based on Trump’s own reckoning, having said in 2003, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years.” Jack O’Donnell, president of Trump’s Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel from 1987-91, has said he saw Trump and Epstein together so “frequently” he told The Independent that he thought Epstein was Trump’s “best friend.” O’Donnell also described an incident where Trump brought Epstein and a 19-year-old girl to the casino gaming floor.

May 17, 1989

Trump shows up on Robert Maxwell’s yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, at a party in New York harbor. Ghislaine Maxwell is among the guests. Epstein is not listed in the society column about the event, but by 1989, he had become close with Robert Maxwell in London, where investigative journalists have claimed he helped the media mogul and sometime spy hide money he was pilfering from his company..

1990s

Throughout the ‘90s, Trump was a master modelizer. He hosted contests and parties in private suites at the Plaza, which he owned at the time, at which “young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men,” per a fashion photographer source, who said the girls were as young as 15. The girls were lured to New York for competitions and pageants, some of which Trump sponsored and judged. It’s not known whether Epstein was present at these events. But per testimony at Maxwell’s trial, at some point in that period, Epstein took a pseudonymous “Jane” to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old.

December 1992

Epstein introduces Sports Illustrated model Stacey Williams to Trump at a Christmas party. “It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams has since said. Three months later, Epstein took Williams to Trump Tower, where she says Trump groped her while laughing with Epstein, an activity she has said she thought was “a twisted game” between the men.

January 1993

Between 1993 and 1997, Trump flew on Epstein’s plane eight times, according to flight logs, usually between New York and Palm Beach, and sometimes with his family members

On January 23, 1993, Trump and Epstein were the only guests at a “Calendar girls competition” at Mar-a-Lago arranged by pageant promoter George Houraney. Houraney’s then-girlfriend and business partner, Jill Harth, says Trump assaulted her that evening, forcibly kissing and fondling her in Ivanka’s bedroom and even restraining her from leaving as she protested. Harth has also said Trump later crawled into the bed of a 22-year-old contestant uninvited.

December 1993

Epstein attended Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples and is seen there clad in white pants and a bow tie, in photos recently uncovered by CNN.

1994

At some point between June and September 1994, a pseudonymous woman calling herself

“Katie Johnson” in court documents has alleged that Trump and Epstein repeatedly abused and raped her over the course of four months when she was 13 years old. Trump has denied this. In 2016, before the election, Johnson was for a time represented by lawyer Lisa Bloom, who arranged an interview with Johnson, which Johnson cancelled at the last minute after her car was vandalized. Bloom has said that she found “Johnson” credible, but her whereabouts today are unknown.

1995

Epstein and Maxwell were photographed at Mar-a-Lago with Epstein's assistant Gwendolyn Beck. (The precise date of the image is not known.)

Also in 1995, Epstein accuser Maria Farmer, at the time a young New York artist whose work Epstein was supporting, says Epstein summoned her to his offices late at night, where Donald Trump soon arrived. According to her account in the New York Times: “Ms. Farmer said she recalled feeling scared as Mr. Trump stared at her bare legs. Then Mr. Epstein entered the room, and she recalled him saying to Mr. Trump: “No, no. She’s not here for you.”

The two men left the room, and Ms. Farmer said she could hear Mr. Trump commenting that he thought Ms. Farmer was 16 years old.”

According to Michael Wolff, who has released some of his five years of interviews with Epstein, Trump and Epstein competed to date the hottest models, and sometimes shared or traded girls between them, engaging in what Wolff described as a kind of rich man’s cruel sport.

January 5, 1997

Trump flew on Epstein’s plane from Palm Beach to Newark with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, brother Mark Epstein, the Glenn Dubin family, and Epstein’s chef. (Dubin and the chef would later be identified in the depositions of victims and others as witnesses to trafficking). A month and a half later, Trump and Epstein were photographed together at the Pro Am tennis Tournament at Mar-a-Lago.

April 8-9, 1997

Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria’s Secret Angels event at Club Duvet on 21st Street in NYC. The photo is unposed, and Epstein’s signature smirk is visible right beside Trump’s profile.

April 29, 1997

Ghislaine Maxwell attends a “Gucci Envy” party to celebrate the design house’s new perfume, hosted by Trump at his Trump Tower penthouse. Maxwell is in attendance, and the party-goers include what appear to be several very young, quite possibly underage models.

November 23, 1997

The Daily Mirror reported Trump was dating a 20-year-old British model, Anouska De Georgiou, who Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced to him at a party in New York. In 2019, De Georgiou accused Epstein of raping her at age 19, in a NBC Dateline episode.. According to the Mirror, “after their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the sunshine state, where they enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, Anouska was installed in one of Donald’s many apartments there.”

October 1998

According to a report in the Miami Herald, Epstein associate Jean Luc Brunel’s model agency sent a busload of paid models, some underage, to a Mar-a-Lago party, at which former model Zoe Brock says she was given a spiked drink.

1999

In a video unearthed by CNN, Trump and Epstein are together, laughing and talking, at a Victoria’s Secret party (Victoria’s Secret was owned by Epstein’s main benefactor, Les Wexner).

April 1999

Epstein and Maxwell invite Trump to a party with Prince Andrew, according to Craig Unger in his book, American Kompromat.

Early 2000s

In his book, Unger details the ways that Trump, Epstein, and Epstein’s sometime associate in the trafficking world, Jean Luc Brunel, relied on each other as they each set up model “agencies” that served as trafficking nodes.

In 1995, Jean-Luc Brunel moved to the US and founded MC2 Model Management, with financing from Epstein; the younger models were allegedly part of Epstein’s trafficking operation. “In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have fostered, as a ‘model scout’ he also allegedly hired ‘scouters’ to identify, procure, and transport underage girls, many fifteen years of age and under, hire them to give ‘massages,’ and train them to give sexual pleasure,” Unger wrote.

Unger quotes a sworn deposition from 2010 by MC2 bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez, who claims directives about contracts for these “scouts” came “from the office of Jeffrey Epstein.”

February 12, 2000

Trump, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell are photographed together at Mar-a-Lago during an evening reception for the Pro-Am tennis tournament. Prince Andrew and Epstein associate Gwendolyn Beck were also at the event. Two days later, Trump announces that he is withdrawing from the presidential race in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show.

Late summer 2000

Ghislaine Maxwell recruits locker room attendant Virginia Giuffre at the Mar-a-Lago spa.

September 18, 2000

Trump, Melania, and Ghislaine Maxwell are photographed together in the front row at the Anand Jon fashion show in New York. Maxwell and Trump are photographed sitting together front row.

October 2000

Trump is photographed at Heidi Klum’s “Hookers and Pimps” Halloween party with his arm around Ghislaine Maxwell’s waist.

December 2000

Melania appears in British men’s magazine FHM. The photo spread includes a poem titled “Melania’s lingerie poem” that, in syntax and language, is similar to the “bawdy” Epstein birthday message that Trump currently says is part of the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”.

January 2003

Trump’s “secret” card is included in Maxwell’s bound book for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

March 2003

Vicky Ward’s Vanity Fair profile of Epstein mentions Trump as among the “businessmen who dine with [Epstein] in his home.”

April 2003

A New York magazine piece on New York dinner parties names Trump as among the guests at Epstein’s East Side townhouse, along with Ghislaine Maxwell and Les Wexner.

2006

Trump says on Howard Stern's radaio show that the sexual age limit should be above 12.

October 2007

Epstein’s membership account is closed at Mar-a-Lago, per club records; Trump has denied that Epstein ever was a member, but author James Patterson says he spoke to the woman who ran the spa, who said Epstein used to come in and behave inappropriately with girls there.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

Trump's Trophy: A Message From An Unhappy Old Man

Trump's Trophy: A Message From An Unhappy Old Man

On hallowed military ground, Stars and Stripes whipping in the upstate New York breeze, an old man in a red hat toddled on stage and shared some wisdom.

"He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife," El Presidente said, referring, non sequitur, to the late New York real estate developer Bill Levitt. "But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work."

Trump emitted this ramble to a West Point student body that is about 21 percent female. Would “trophy wife” be on their list of career goals yet? Maybe! God only knows what they think their job prospects are in a military currently presided over by an accused roofie rapist, who is on record speaking against women in the military, and an administration that sacked top female military leaders as its first order of trolling-the-libs business.

The West Point trophy wife riff was a tangent off another tangent – about the U.S. military’s job being not to “host drag shows,” but to “dominate any foe, anytime, anyplace.”

There is a certain logic to Trump’s tangents sometimes. Trophy wife. Goals. For both MAGA genders. The transactional relationship ascendant. Everyone has a price. Sugardaddies.com. Young beauty attached to the arm of a rich, powerful old man, pampered in exchange for being value-added in business and politics, submitting occasionally to the desiccated paw.

The freaky gym rat who goes by “Bronze Age Pervert” (eventually outed as poor little rich kid and Ivy league PhD Costin Almariu) blames all Western Hemisphere’s problems on the ascendance of supposedly feminine attributes – encapsulated in what he calls an “obese Mammy” HR overlord policing language – in his bestselling book, Bronze Age Mindset, which calls for the return of Agamemnon, Hercules worship, and widespread slavery.

BAP’s world view, widely shared in Trumpland, assumes that women do not need, want, or naturally exercise agency. It presumes that women are constitutionally, genetically, mentally, physically, in every way, not as capable as men of self-reliance or living with a purpose or a mission beyond childcare. Such creatures, given power and influence, clearly must drag down the rest of society, including the he-men they try to police out of their God-given right to authority.

BAP and his male fans like to refer to the current supposedly egalitarian enforcement system, also labeled by them as “wokeness,” as “the longhouse.” Here is how “L0m3z” (another former online anon, outed as California creative writing instructor turned neo-fascist literature publisher Jonathan Keeperman) defined the term in an article published in the trad-Cath, anti-democratic “First Things” magazine:

More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. ….

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

Those tiny gains — two percent here, ten percent there …. unacceptable! Think of all the worthy white males with dreams deferred.

BAP and his fans must know that American society is more unequal than ever, and that white men still, by orders of magnitude, run everything from America’s major companies to all of Silicon Valley to the global financial sector to federal and state governments.

But still, women, learn your place.

We are living in a time of Orwellian erasure of women, as Anna Funder recently wrote in Time. Artificial Intelligence is literally hunting for and eradicating government web pages and documents with the word “women.”

This is nothing new. George Orwell himself – and his biographers – managed well to erase the contributions and influence of his accomplished wife, according to a new book, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Funder. (Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines has a more extensive list of modernist writers who used their disappeared wives for literary material.)

At the heart of the anti-feminist effort to convert younger women into trophy wives and nothing other than trophy wives is the notion that a viable route to success – or perhaps the only viable route, in MAGA men’s perception – is to serve rich, powerful men who need assurance that women are playthings with no agency. This model has been held up by Trump and Melania since he first screamed, “Where’s my supermodel?” as she picked her way onstage and said… literally nothing the whole time.

Melania is clearly the trophy Trump was rather wistfully thinking of when he blurted that it sometimes doesn’t work out. The East Wing is supposedly unstaffed for the first time in modern history. She served a political purpose for sure – the “supermodel” on the arm, value-added.

The late Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley said that Melania Trump was “the most exquisitely moisturized” person he’d ever met. “Melania is very moisturized, groomed, lacquered to perfection. She can stand on those 4-inch heels…“

And that’s it.

The top echelon of the MAGA right is packed with women who – like Melania – are openly engaged in transactional relationships. And now, younger MAGA women have lined themselves up with this model. Steve Bannon’s "War Room" White House correspondent Natalie Winters, who is 23 years old, proclaims she is looking forward to leaving her career so she can get down to the work of finding a husband “to be submissive to.”

If they’re not serving the regime in Washington, young women like Winters, who came of age with this look and lifestyle ascendant, are LARPing on social media as never-been-happier Betty Crocker 1950s tradwife influencers. But, in the case of influencers in particular, the joke is kind of on their guys: Follow the money home and see who really wears the pants.

The greatest difference between Gen Z and the Boomer-Gen X-Millennial cohorts is that while younger women may have been taught the lessons of feminism as children – girl power! – the real world in their living memory has not upheld that promise. Younger women don’t remember the very real restrictions that second-wave feminists eradicated, so feminism seems impotent and useless against new challenges. Submission seems like a viable choice.

A lot of this is camp, theater, and shock jock-ing, a new version of the “female chauvinist pigs” Ariel Levy chronicled in her book in the aughts. But in a time of performative erasure of women’s records of achievement, of purposeful diminishment of women’s cultural relevance, and of state power directed at women’s bodily autonomy, surrender really might seem preferable to struggle.

The White House is busy purging transcripts of Trump’s public verbal rambles from its websites, so you must catch him when you can. At West Point, Trump blurted out the unhappy old man’s truth about the trophy-ization of women.

Hopefully, both male and female cadets were listening.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow

Trump and MBS Saudi

One Thousand And One Nights Of Trump Grift

For generations, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been crafted with willful ignorance by people who see the region through the lens of Israel and oil. From the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s Iraq war folly – arguably the event that destabilized the entire planet by creating tens of millions of refugees, leading to rising fascism in Europe and the U.S – our history in the region is one of murder, mayhem, fecklessness and greed. Major and deadly decisions are routinely made without any appreciation of the history or understanding of the many, heterogeneous communities that live there. Ay-rabs, Eye-rack. In the 1990s, a purge of the “Arabists” in the State Department was even underway. It took 9/11 for the DOD and State to bring back a few Arabic speakers.

However, in the last few weeks, it’s started to become clear that the U.S. is taking a strange new tack.

During Trump One, the grift was mostly on in Ukraine and Russia. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Rudy Giuliani reeking of duty-free cologne in first-class seats out of Eastern European airports, hauling suitcases of oligarchy pelf. Now, Trump Two has located far greater pots of gold. The Mother of all Piles, the trillions of dollars controlled by a tiny clan of Gulf oil potentates – wealth, which, it must be said, our gas addiction created.

Ever since Mohammed bin Salman, the millennial de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had his henchmen chop off a Washington Post writer’s fingers and then murder him within earshot of Turkish audio surveillance, it has been clear that the men who control trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds can do whatever the hell they want to any man, woman, child, or beast on planet Earth.

This week, Trump is being feted by that very finger chopper. He is very much in his element, sipping Diet Cokes under “tank size chandeliers” and parking himself on gilded chairs to talk business with the leaders of the three major Gulf oil fiefdoms. In Trump Twos’s pay-to-play, even Israel is out in the cold. Miriam Adelson’s $100 million campaign donation, reportedly handed over to make sure Trump would not object to Israel seizing the West Bank? Sorry, chump change! Trump blew past Jerusalem on his way to sword dances with the sheiks -- causing intense but veiled terror among the Israeli leaders accustomed to carte blanche in the halls of American power.

In the last few weeks, Don Junior has been on a business tour around Europe, and Eric has also preened around the Middle East. The boys are riding on the U.S. Presidency, raking in tens of millions for the family business with hotel projects and condos in Dubai, Jeddah, and Qatar, where one project’s motto is “Challenge Everything Stop at Nothing.” The bros are not the first presidential relatives to cash in on Dad’s position, but they are the first to openly rake in money that directly benefits the Man in the White House.

Besides the projects, they are road-testing Dad’s meme coin and the family crypto bank, World Liberty Financial. WLF, created just weeks before the election, is an untraceable intake valve for influence buying. And WLF is now humming away, having reportedly sucked in $2 billion from the emirs of Abu Dhabi and the crypto firm Binance, which has been linked to money laundering for terrorism and sex traffickers. Few MAGAs understand what WLF does, and neither do most elected officials, who have been asleep at the wheel while the now even less regulated crypto industry runs amok.

The speed with which the Trump family is enriching itself in Trump Two is dizzying. At this point, metaphors, like satire, are increasingly out of reach for your poor Freakshow scribe. A swarming of termites, hogs at the trough, Coney Island hot dog eating contest? “Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest,” wrote the New York Times reporter dispatched to cover Zach Witkoff’s and Eric Trump’s press conference in Dubai. “There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, historian and author of books about U.S. presidents, of the Trump Two family financial windfalls.

And that was before the Qatari royal family offered Trump a Boeing 747-8 refitted as a flying palace, a gift that, according to the President, only a “stupid” person would turn down. In the Middle East, gifting is a common form of corruption known as baksheesh. Most U.S. ethics experts consider it illegal.

The gilded plane, though, seems to have woke the gag reflex of some leading MAGAs: Ben Shapiro, Loomer, and a few Republican Senators are making disgusted noises, and the commentariat from

Jennifer Rubin to Rick Wilson predicts that this gift could be the grift that breaks the camel’s back. But will it?

Could it be that a nearly half-billion dollar offering from an Arab potentate is what it takes to cure the so-far incurable Obama Derangement Syndrome, the racist Brown people are coming to get my stuff mind-virus behind the MAGA fever that turns Trump into a hallucination of white Jesus? There seems to be something about the plane, more than the crypto grift and Trump sons raking it in under their dad’s name, that might even get some action from a third branch of government in Washington.

But, so far, no hint of outrage ruffles the alabaster brow of the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Pam Bondi. In Trumpworld, there’s no PR stain that a blonde with a conspicuous crucifix can’t wash away.

Pam was a Tallahassee nobody when she first tangled with Trump, taking a $25,000 donation that she personally solicited in 2013 and then backing off a Trump University civil fraud case her office had filed.

Bondi went on to bigger fry. Besides representing Trump in his first impeachment, and eventually parroting the election Big Lie repeatedly in the media, she signed on as a lobbyist for Qatar with the Trump-connected Ballard firm, pulling down $115,000 a month. That job was public knowledge months ago, but it didn’t bother Republican Senators as they rubber stamped her along with one after another of the wackos, conspiracy theorists, and extremist flotsam and jetsam Trump nominated in nose-thumbing gestures to his civil society enemies. Now, though, it’s treated like big news. Hmmm…

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.

Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, And MAGA's Misogynist Mythology

Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, And MAGA's Misogynist Mythology

I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. The first time I read her name was in the summer of 2019, long after her years as one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of teen girls and young women lured into Jeffrey Epstein’s world and passed around “like a plate of fruit,” as she put it, to powerful men. Her name was prominent in hundreds of pages of court documents from a defamation case Giuffre had filed against Epstein procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell, a wealthy British socialite, had publicly called Giuffre a liar for claiming that Epstein trafficked her around to powerful men, including Prince Andrew. Giuffre took her to court, and Maxwell eventually settled, but the record remained sealed until just a day or two before Epstein died.

The documents were filled with redactions – powerful men had been fighting the release of their names in court for years – but it was also filled with horrifying Easter eggs, like depositions from other teens lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach lair, household staff describing the endless parade of girls paid by Maxwell, some of them lost and terrified.

I sat up all night, glued to the stomach-turning pages, and wrote about the documents for Rolling Stone a few days later. In 2020, I worked as executive producer on a three-part series about Ghislaine Maxwell, still streaming on Peacock.

That’s all to say: I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. As does most of the informed public and the legion of Epstein conspiracy theorists. I know enough to recognize that the MAGA cult belief that Donald Trump was put on this Earth to vanquish “pedophile”* sex trafficker Epstein and his ilk ought to go down in history as one of the greatest branding psy ops in recorded history. Trump and Epstein were close pals, sleazeball, greasy, handsy Manhattan modelizer running buddies in the 1980s, a fact easily ascertained in pictures, and if you don’t want to believe your eyes, listen to recorded tapes of Jeffrey Epstein that Michael Wolff released last fall.

I might have liked to talk to Virginia someday, but now she’s dead, reportedly by suicide, after long battles with physical ailments and depression. Virginia, like many girls lured into the sex trade, had already endured a difficult childhood: she was from a poor family, abused by a family friend at age 11, and in and out of foster care. Maxwell, always cruising for fresh teen flesh for her sometime boyfriend Epstein, found Giuffre (then Virginia Roberts) at age 17, working as a “spa attendant” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

Maxwell and Epstein soon groomed Giuffre into a plaything under their control, a young woman without agency. And that is not good for any woman’s mental or physical health.

There is a cherished lie that many men – and some women – tell themselves that women like Virginia are naturally pliant and happy to service men for money as part of “the oldest profession.”

This myth of the happily pliant and transactional female is not just resurgent but increasingly enforced in the Trump years. We are now witnessing increasingly brazen applications of raw state power over female physical autonomy, reduced public authority for women including electoral disenfranchisement, forced marriage via legally limiting divorce options, public humiliation and threats of violence toward women in power, social and cultural marginalization and erasure of women, and the reduction of women’s roles from economic agency to isolated baby-maker in abject dependence on a man.

You hear it in public statements – utterly unthinkable just five years ago – that maybe women shouldn’t vote because husbands know best, that no fault divorce should be rescinded because it’s too easy for women to leave their household duties, and that women should not have jobs. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh and others have even started to attack their own prominent working women on the right as de facto feminists.

You see it in Mark Zuckerberg’s latest project, revealed in the Wall Street Journal - a sex-playing AI chatbot that can pretend to be a “Submissive Schoolgirl” pretending its interlocutor is a middle school principal. Zuck is so pissed he missed out on Snapchat, he whined to colleagues, he wants to get out ahead on the AI sex bot.

You see it in Elon Musk’s insane harem of an untold number of women paid to incubate IVF embryos selected for male chromosomes.

You see it in porn that suggests girls and women like to be choked – which we now empirically know causes violence against women in the real world.

The Silicon Valley authors of our virtual world have been setting this up for a long time. It’s all around us. Online, we swim in a miasma of sexism. Ask AI Google what women want. I did this recently, looking for the famous Freud quote. AI will tell you that what we women want is empathy, love, and affection from a man, and nothing more than a relationship. Ask it the same question about men, and it adds an entire section about what men want beyond a partner, all of which have to do with worldly accomplishments.

This is exactly the crap that Christian nationalist pastors like the utterly mad and yet influential Doug Wilson (one degree separated from open affiliation with Vice President JD Vance) preaches, besides arguing that marital rape is impossible by definition, that women are constitutionally incapable of having a “mission” or “purpose” in life beyond marriage and childbearing, while men require the chance at least to aspire to greatness through worldly accomplishments. (The sermon is here, titled “The Natural Use of a Woman”.)

This age-old mythology was born in the eons before contraception, modern medicine and rape laws, in the dark ages when women were denied even a glimmer of economic independence and died often in childbirth. It has survived the epochal changes that modern science and feminists have managed to achieve for women over the last several decades, and is now the framework on which the whole MAGA enterprise with respect to women lies.

The primary plank of the Trumpist anti feminist movement is the notion that a viable route – and perhaps the only viable route – to success as a woman is to have children and serve men who need assurance that we are nothing more than sexual playthings with no agency.

This is, of course, a lie – both that women could or should ever be reduced to that and that it’s any kind of path to real success. The sad childhood and adolescence, the slow physical decline, and now death by suicide of Virginia Giuffre – if it means anything, and it should – reminds us that the myth of the naturally pliant woman is evil and damaging. And it is absolutely at the core of MAGA politics with regard to women.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.


With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

On Roman streets and the worldwide web, a half-joke was making the rounds yesterday: Catholic convert JD Vance, emissary of America’s empathy-challenged hard right, was the last visitor to Pope Francis before he died and somehow… did him in.

Here at the Freakshow, we disregard conspiracy theories like these until shown hard proof. But it is a fact that a cabal of powerful right-wing American Catholics is not at all sorry to see Francis pass away – on Easter Monday, no less. These men have been licking their chops for more than a decade for a chance to conclave and install a man more of their ilk, someone who might help persuade millions of Catholics that Jesus was really a social Darwinist.

“The ultra-conservative wing of the US Catholic Church – a group made up of cardinals, bishops, priests and wealthy individuals – has spent years preparing for this precise moment,” says British investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who last year published a book on the strange and secretive Opus Dei cult, including its growing power in the heart of Washington. (I covered it for New York Magazine).

Pope Francis was one of the more progressive church leaders in recent Catholic church history. He acknowledged the effects of manmade climate change and made small – but, to the far right, significant and alarming – statements about market capitalism and the poor. Those positions are clearly aligned with Jesus’ actual teachings, but ultra conservatives have abandoned them in favor of the prosperity gospel and drill baby drill.

Francis’s support of social justice made him anathema to hard-right American Catholics like Leonard Leo and billionaires like California real estate attorney Tim Busch. Busch’s Trinitas Cellars produces red wines named after the Virgin Mary. Many Opus Dei-affiliated and other hard-right Catholics in Washington (JD Vance and Leonard Leo among them) have boarded jets west to attend gatherings at Busch’s Napa Institute School of Business.

Last year, Busch hosted a conference on “woke capitalism,” and in the past, he’s invited speakers questioning the authenticity of the civil rights movement. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops cut ties with Busch’s Napa School in part because event agendas include praying the Patriotic Rosary, a devotion invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – that specific cause, of course, being the perpetuation of slavery.

In addition to annoying rich MAGA extremists, Francis had asked church officials to live more modestly. “We pastors must not be men with a ‘princely mindset.’” he once said. This did not sit well with rightist clergy who live for cosplaying royalty. American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke was among them. He insisted on continuing to wear trains of watered silk, scarlet gloves, and jeweled red hats – all while calling gay marriage Satanic and accusing Obama of being a totalitarian because of the ACA.

Some of the kookiest hard-right Catholic clergy are American or are operating in this country. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former pontifical vicar to the U.S. under the arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a wildly nutty letter in support of Trump in 2020, calling the election a battle between the forces of light and darkness. He also publicly called Pope Francis a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan.”

Cardinal Burke, discussed above, defied the Pope and refused to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. He had considered serving as honorary president of a “gladiator school” for white religious nationalists that Steve Bannon was building in Europe. (He backed off when Bannon said he might make a documentary about pedophile priests.)

During his tenure, Francis demoted Opus Dei and expelled some of the more extreme bishops aligned with Christian nationalism and alt-right conspiracy theorists. Last year, the Pope excommunicated Vigano for “schism” citing his "refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff.” Francis had removed Burke from the Vatican’s highest court and then revoked his salary and Vatican quarters.

Gareth Gore has reported that a secret cabal long schemed to get rid of Pope Francis. They used some of the same opposition research tactics to investigate rising left-leaning leaders within the church that (Opus Dei-affiliated Catholic) Leonard Leo and his Judicial Crisis Network have applied in media and influence campaigns to stack the Supreme Court with far-right Catholics.

“While Francis was alive, the [right-wing Catholic billionaires and clergy] actively sought to discredit his papacy with smear campaigns, leaking unfounded accusations that the late Pope had covered up cases of sexual abuse – and then using the right-wing Catholic media to spread those rumours far and wide,” Gareth Gore told me. “At the same time, they were financing a campaign to influence the next Conclave, hiring former CIA and FBI agents to dig up kompromat on liberal cardinals who might follow him. Their aim was clear: to discredit Francis and his progressive agenda, and to ensure that the next Pope is a man aligned with their world view - someone who agrees with their ultra-conservative reading of the Bible. That plan is now cranking into action.”

These same men are busy today and in the weeks to come, plotting to ensure the Catholic Church gets back to the business of the Inquisition and witch burning.

Ok, I jest.

But the Catholic hard right and their allies in Washington are not too sad today. They have waited a while for this opportunity. When Gore interviewed Tim Busch for his book, the Californian was explicit about the far right outliving a progressive Pope. “I think something important is happening, something not so good,” Busch said. “I think he’s tightening the noose, but I don’t think he’s going to have enough time.”

But Gore also believes the rightists face an uphill struggle. “The ultra-conservatives, while wealthy and powerful, are a tiny proportion of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world,” he told me. “The Conclave to elect the next Pope will be largely made up of cardinals appointed by Francis himself. While they may not necessarily share all of his views, they will see the positive impact that his progressive agenda has had on the Church, and will likely want to build on his legacy.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.



Why Trump's War Against Women Doesn't Really Disturb Bill Maher

Why Trump's War Against Women Doesn't Really Disturb Bill Maher

Last week, HBO comedian Bill Maher waxed effusive about Trump’s graciousness and charm at a White House dinner the president hosted for him, Kid Rock, and UFC head Dana White. On his Real Time show, Maher said: “You can hate me for it, but I’m not a liar. Trump was gracious and measured. And why isn’t that in other settings? I don’t know, and I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.”

I’m usually a Bill fan. I was on his show once, and I like that he brings together opposing views but also pushes back on lies and bullshit –unlike Joe Rogan, for example. Communicating with people whose politics differ from ours is good for a healthy democracy: D.C. dinner society once included people from most of the political spectrum – I wrote a book about it.

That Washington waned and then disappeared roughly around the time Newt Gingrich rolled into town on the coattails of the long game the right had been playing to foment public distrust and loathing toward the entire government. Now, while one side still plays by the old rules, the other mounts a fascist insurrection and hangs “Fuck Biden” flags on the lawn for school children to see.

But all the vileness Trump and the MAGA cult have unleashed in American political discourse pales compared with the damage done to women. The dreadful things happening to American women and girls in the abortion ban states are some of the most dramatic stories in the country today. Women are getting sepsis and losing their reproductive organs. Some are dying.

Every one of those individual horrors was caused by one man: The leader of the greatest misogynistic backlash in modern U.S. history is Donald Trump – yes, that gracious dinner companion.

This is the man who crafted a Supreme Court that has set women’s health back into the Stone Age. This convicted sexual abuser and famous public denigrator of females packs his cabinet with accused predators and sex pests. Accused rapist Russell Brand recently posed with White House officials Peter Navarro and RFK Jr. at some tropical hideaway. The Trump regime just invited into America – and granted safe haven, literally – to the rape-accused domestic abuse propagandists that are the Tate brothers.

More than any single man or woman in my lifetime, Trump ushered in the ongoing and vicious legal and cultural assault on women and girls. Banning abortion was only the beginning. The fanatic MAGA misogynists who engineered this situation want the Jezebels to suffer more. A lot more.

States are passing “fetal personhood” laws giving embryos more rights than the women carrying them and enabling hundreds of arrests already. States are considering and passing laws to make abortion data public. Many are considering and some are passing laws to imprison women and doctors over abortion. A few are even trying to institute the death penalty.

Feminist journalist Jessica Valenti publishes a phenomenal compendium of the maniacal proposals and new woman-hating laws, Abortion, Everyday. I consult it for my daily dose of rage. Here you will learn, for example, that state legislators in Texas want to start testing the water for birth control hormones because they might be harmful. These are the same legislators, of course, who seem to be opposed to federal clean water regulations).

Remember, this is not just a legal assault, it is cultural: Peter Thiel’s conservative women’s magazine Evie routinely spews nonsense about the dangers of hormonal birth control. Anti-abortion propaganda (in the form of a movie called “Baby Olivia” produced by anti-abortion fanatics) is now mandatory in North Dakota, Tennessee, and Idaho schools and is being considered in Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

And the Trump administration recently yanked NIH funding for the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient behind a major longitudinal study that examined the effects of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. The research found that abortion does not harm women’s health and well-being, in contrast to points made by anti-choice fanatics, but being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health, and family outcomes for women.

We are living through a time of truly crazy cultural assault on women’s agency rights, in addition to the violations of our bodily autonomy. Trump’s first election made misogyny cool again. His second regime is cementing that success into law and culture. Ideas that once festered in the incel basement chatrooms are now common currency in the mainstream. Maybe divorce is too easy for women. Maybe women shouldn’t vote (since they overwhelmingly do not prefer Trump).

The House recently passed a law that potentially disenfranchises 80 percent of married women by requiring voter IDs to have birth names, not married names. And states have been considering laws to repeal no-fault divorce, which has repeatedly been shown to reduce domestic violence.

Bill Maher was charmed by Trump, a disgusting oaf and abuser, who spent a full decade pal-ing around with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein per Michael Wolff’s tapes, competing for sexual access to pretty women before falling out, not over Epstein’s predations, as the deluded QAnon cult believes, but a real estate deal.

There’s a good reason why Maher is charm-able. Predations against women don’t trouble him too much. Like many left-ish cads, he’s not too bothered by “the woman stuff.” In fact, as Sophie Gilbert writes in her essay on women and porn in The Atlantic today, liberal - libertine - men in entertainment always promoted the hard-core sexualization of women and girls that preceded this Trumpy-Tate bro era.

Last week I heard Clara Bingham read from her best-selling new oral history, The Movement, on women behind the so-called “second wave” of the fight for women’s equality in America between 1963 and 1973. The changes those women were able to effect are nothing short of epochal. In 1963, American women couldn’t open bank accounts or get credit cards without men, couldn't serve on juries, and were generally limited to work in nursing, teaching, or, until the wizened age of 32 or earlier if pregnant or married, flight attendants. Women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Contraception was hard to get, limited to married women and secret terrifying back alley abortions were the norm.

The women in that generation who fought for equality were subject to endless public ridicule - from men on the left and the right. But, by 1973, everything had changed. The lives of those women’s daughters and granddaughters are unrecognizable. Their achievement was epochal, making women and girls first-class citizens for the first time in history.

That didn’t sit well with many men, who spent the following decades relentlessly denigrating these heroines and downplaying their success. Men like Bill Maher -- nominally left-center but well-known habitué of strip clubs and serial dater of young women -- belong to the great cohort of American men who, while not MAGA, are simply not as horrified as they should be by what Trump has inflicted on half the American population.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.

Autocrat (And Felon) Trump Yearns To 'Disappear' American Citizens, Too

Autocrat (And Felon) Trump Yearns To 'Disappear' American Citizens, Too

Hello from Union Station on a cold spring day in DC. Blossoms are out. The Capitol dome rises a few hundred yards away. The “city of magnificent distances,” as a 19th-century Portuguese minister once called Washington, is as elegant as ever. But all is not well.

I started out covering politics in the nation’s heartland: Springfield, Illinois. I was schooled under that smaller Capitol dome, not far from where Lincoln once practiced law, in the varieties of democratic compromise and the inexorable pull of public corruption. Almost all the governors of the state of Illinois during my years there ultimately wore the prison stripes – including, most recently, the man with the great hair, Rod Blagojevich.

One of the first lessons I learned at Springfield was the old saw about how the ingredients of lawmaking, like sausage, are not pretty to look at. Still, things got done. Sometimes, the things seemed unfair and regressive. Sometimes they were good things, improving lives, maybe righting wrongs. Whichever way things went, the framework of the law was not perfect, but it felt solid. And the public lawbreakers with hands in the treasury till or holding out the bribe bag still had to watch their backs.

Now, on this cold spring day in Washington, less than a hundred days into MAGA’s second term, that framework feels very, very shaky indeed.

The governors of Illinois went to prison one after another because the justice system – in most cases, the dreaded feds – had eyes on them as they grifted and grafted. I’m pretty sure they all would have liked to say the law was “weaponized” against them. But juries of their peers found the facts at odds with that assessment – including in the corruption case against Blagojevich, AKA Blago, that Trump erased with a pardon a few months ago.

The pardon of felonious Blago, like almost everything felon Trump does, was, first of all, a thumbing of the nose at the people who uphold norms and the structure of the law. For a man who claims to love cops and offshore slave prisons for the (never even charged with a crime) “alien enemies” among us, and who can’t wait to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic the military on dissidents, he sure hates the law.

MAGA voters empowered this man to wreak his vengeance, and he is peculiarly fit for the task. He doesn’t seem to know how to read three sentences into a law book, but he’s probably put in as many hours in consultations with lawyers as he has doing anything (other than playing golf).

He has a knack for finding lawyers to manipulate the law as a delay-delay-delay defendant, and to weaponize it (yes, it was projection) as a plaintiff. Now, he’s been empowered to systematically break the system.

Of all the unlawful activities we’ve witnessed since the inauguration, the one that chills to the bone is the plucking of un-charged mostly Hispanic, Muslim, or otherwise non-white people off the streets or from inside their homes and “disappearing” them into the tropical dungeon of El Salvador or the for-profit Louisiana prison network, our own swamp gulag.

The Supreme Court just “stayed” a lower court order demanding that these extralegal kidnappings be reversed. As Liz Dye explains in Public Notice, while the ruling is not permanent, it is an ominous signal, a feint to procedural bullshit, suggesting that the justices are ready to bail on due process rather than set up a crisis situation where the fake businessman they basically “kinged” with unlimited immunity last year just ignores them.

The day after that order, Trump’s Olympic Gold medal level lie spewer of a spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that her boss had been musing about a point in the perhaps near future when he might be able to deport not just “aliens” but American citizens.

So sure is Trump of his omnipotence over the rule of law that he has hung his Georgia felony charges mug shot as his official portrait in the Department of Justice. He put his personal attorney, Todd Blanche (who lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case), in charge as DOJ deputy, and appointed anti-abortion MAGA fanatic Ed Martin* in the critical post of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Blanche already won some DOJ toady chest ribbons by dispatching armed marshals to the home of a (female) Justice Department attorney the Trump clan fired over her refusal to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost that right after a 2011 domestic violence conviction. The marshals were called off only because attorney Liz Oyer heard they were on their way and accepted the order by email.

So much plotting, so much lawbreaking, in so little time.

For the last few weeks, Trump’s minions have been drawing up executive orders aiming to restrict law firms that have ever worked for political opponents, individual and organizational, NGOs, nonprofits, or have employed lawyers who worked on any of the criminal and civil cases against Trump. Since Trump has spent most of his life fighting lawyers with other lawyers, the list is long.

Trump only skated away from the various cases against him in the year before the election by manipulating the courts with incessant delays and Hail Mary legal arguments, one after another. Trump’s orders bar targeted firms from federal contracts, strip their lawyers of security clearances, and – outrageously – prevent them from entering federal courthouses. "It sends little chills down my spine," U.S. Judge Beryl Howell said, to hear the government argue that such orders are lawful if the president thinks the firm’s cases aren't in the nation's interest.

Howell and other federal judges have “temporarily restrained” most of Trump's executive orders against the firms that fought back. But incredibly, a number of the nation’s largest, richest, and most powerful firms - “Biglaw” in the industry parlance - took a knee and negotiated themselves out of danger for now - by offering millions of dollars of hours of “pro bono” legal work for Trump’s pet legal projects.

Now the legal community, rather than standing united against these diabolical and patently illegal orders, are cutting deals individually, basically prostituting their lawyers to service the vengeful oaf with countless hours of legal harassment. "They're just saying, 'Where do I sign? Where do I sign?'" Trump bragged after the first ones broke without a fight.

Every American lawyer has taken an oath to uphold the law, both state and federal. What about the Constitution? What about that oath?

The bitter old man counts on one principle above all others in his relationships with everyone, from his wife and children to his political friends and foes: everyone has a price. And here, he didn’t even have to pay them, just threaten their income. They couldn’t bear to lose a few clients while they fought for their rights in court. “They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and ‘money, money, money’ is all that motivates them,” Bernie Sanders said in an interview on CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”

The sheepdogs are leaving the field.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.