Item one: We’re four weeks into the current iteration of the Epstein scandal. And there is no way it’s going away. |
It’s exactly four weeks ago today that the Jeffrey Epstein story broke, or re-broke in its current form. On Friday, July 11, the world learned of the tense meeting that took place at the White House that previous Wednesday, in which FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino clashed with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files. Bongino was so incensed that he didn’t go to work that Friday and threatened to resign. He has, at least for now, backed off that threat, but the episode revealed the deep intra-MAGA divide on the matter, and it’s been in the news every day since.
What have we learned in the past month? Consider the following five developments, and ponder what common sense tells us they probably add up to.
|
| 1. |
|
Bondi, after telling Fox News in February that the Epstein file and seemingly the alleged client list were sitting on her desk, flip-flopped and said there was no client list and nothing would be released. |
| 2. |
|
On July 23, The New York Times reported that back in May, Bondi had told Donald Trump that his name appeared in the Epstein files “multiple times.” In June, an ABC journalist had asked Trump if Bondi had told him his name was in the files, and of course, he lied and said no. |
| 3. |
|
Meanwhile, Trump sent his former defense attorney, now number two in the Justice Department, to go interview Ghislaine Maxwell. I wrote last week about how fishy it was that Todd Blanche conducted those interviews. It’s also crazy that we still don’t know the substance of those two sessions. |
| 4. |
|
Then, suddenly, Maxwell was transferred to a country club prison where, sources have told reporters, sex offenders aren’t supposed to be eligible to go. Trump has also repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon for Maxwell—a convicted sex trafficker who, according to the testimony of four victims, participated in the sexual abuse. |
| 5. |
|
Finally, Representative James Comer, who can always be relied on to choose the stupidest and most obvious course of action, subpoenaed a lot of people to get to the bottom of the Epstein matter, but he did not subpoena the one person who likely knows more of the truth of the matter than anyone: Alex Acosta, the Florida prosecutor who cut that shameful deal with Epstein’s lawyers back in 2008—13 months in a work-release program that enabled him to go out and rape more children. |
|
|
|
What do these five developments tell us? Let’s answer that by imagining a counterfactual. Let’s imagine that Bondi had released the files, that Trump’s name did not appear in them multiple times, that Maxwell was given no special treatment, and that Comer had subpoenaed Acosta—the one person who obviously had to be subpoenaed.
Those moves would have shown us an administration, and a president, that didn’t have anything to hide.
Instead, we got the opposite of all those things. You don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to suspect that somebody is hiding something.
Acosta’s involvement in the matter is particularly intriguing here. If the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ allies like Comer really wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein matter, they’d all be demanding that Acosta come forward and tell us everything he knows. He was the prosecutor! (A very bad one, but he was.) Think about it: If Trump genuinely knew he was innocent of any wrongdoing, why wouldn’t he personally demand that Acosta step forth and spill? What cleaner exoneration could there be than the personal word of the man who presumably has read every Epstein-related document the government has?
Acosta has been a hot topic ever since Comer announced his subpoena targets and Acosta’s name didn’t appear on that list. So where is he, right now? Good question. He hasn’t surfaced anywhere that I’ve seen. Interestingly, though, he did do one thing worth noting this year: He joined the board of directors of Newsmax (and chairs the propaganda network’s audit committee).
Justin Baragona of The Independent flagged on July 22 that this has created an embarrassing situation for the network because one of its hosts, Greg Kelly, keeps talking about how great Acosta is without revealing that he’s on the board.
Beyond that, we might well wonder why, of all the people Newsmax could have chosen for its board, it landed on Acosta. That was in March, though his appointment wasn’t officially announced until June. Then, in July, Newsmax announced a deal with—get this—the Trump Media and Technology Group to be partners in a new global streaming platform called Truth+. In other words, a network that covers the president is now in business with the president. And the one person in the world who knows more about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes than anyone else is on the network’s board, and thus could quasi-plausibly claim, if pressed, that he is “ethically” barred from making public utterances that would hurt Newsmax’s position. Convenient, eh?
I hear a lot of people on cable news talk about how poorly the Trump people have handled this situation. Of course that’s true, but it seems to me reasonable for us to conclude that they’re handling it the way they’re handling it because it’s probably the only choice they have: to stonewall and lie and try to put things off.
Even a lot of MAGA people smell it. Candace Owens said recently: “I feel like Trump thinks his base is stupid, or, again … the people around him certainly think that Trump is stupid.… Trump is surrounded by people who hate him and have infiltrated his base, and they think … that Trump was too stupid to be president, that his base is too stupid to see through the lies that they’re telling now.” She added that the Epstein scandal “is definitely terminal cancer to Trump’s MAGA movement.”
Owens reminded her listeners of the core fact we all need to keep in mind: This is about the rape of children. Hundreds or maybe thousands of them. Apparently, enough of MAGA world is repulsed enough by that fact that this is one time in the last decade when Trump’s attempts to wave it all away as a Democrat hoax aren’t cutting it. It looks like we’ve finally found the matter on which plain, old-fashioned morality is more important than trolling the libs. That’s one thing Trump wasn’t counting on.
|
|
|
Join us on August 12 as Osita Nwanevu and Timothy Noah discuss The Right of the People, Nwanevu’s new book on democracy in crisis. In a time defined by political dysfunction, inequality, and rising antidemocratic sentiment, Nwanevu offers a bold vision: a reimagined American founding that can restore faith in democracy. From the failures of our aging institutions to the challenges of the 2024 election, this conversation will explore how we got here—and how we fight for a better, more democratic future.
|
|
|
Last week’s quiz: “Boy, da way Glen Miller played …” A quiz on old TV theme songs. And I mean old.
|
1. The theme song to I Love Lucy was instrumental. However, Harold Adamson did write lyrics (Eliot Daniel composed the music). They just weren’t used. What was the first line of the first verse?
|
A. “My girl’s zany as she can be.”
B. “I met Lucy when we were 3.”
C. “Me and Lucy up in a tree.”
D. “I love Lucy, and she loves me.”
|
Answer: D, “I love Lucy and she loves me / We’re as happy as two can be …” And so on. Here’s a video of Desi Arnaz singing it to her. Kinda sweet really.
|
2. Another famous instrumental theme song had lyrics that weren’t used. They concluded, “But tell him / While he wanders his starry sea / Remember, remember me.” What show was this?
|
A. Lost in Space
B. My Favorite Martian
C. Star Trek
D. Fireball XL5
|
Answer: C, Star Trek. Just reading the lyrics, I have a hard time matching them to the melody (unlike, say, “I Love Lucy”). The reason for that could lie in the story behind the lyrics, which is that series creator Gene Roddenberry wrote them just so he could get half the royalties from the song, actually composed by a fellow named Alexander Courage, whether his words were used or not. So maybe he didn’t try that hard.
|
3. In “The Patty Duke Show Theme,” by Sidney Ramin and Bob Wells, cousin Cathy had lived “almost everywhere,” including from:
|
A. Mozambique to Delaware
B. Indonesia to Bel Air
C. Zanzibar to Berkeley Square
D. Samarkand to Leicester Square
|
Answer: C, Zanzibar to “Barkley” (how the Brits pronounce it) Square. So she’s very worldly, while “Patty’s only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights; what a crazy pair!” When I was a kid, I always thought that was strange; after all, from Brooklyn Heights, one can see Wall Street, lower Manhattan, and the Statue of Liberty, and that’s all pretty worldly too, imho.
|
4. In the first season of Gilligan’s Island, the last verse of the song, which name-checks the characters, actually left out two of seven characters. It named five and then just said “and the rest.” By season 2, this was changed so that all seven were mentioned. Who were the two left out in season 1?
|
A. Gilligan and the Skipper
B. The Professor and Mary Ann
C. Mary Ann and Ginger
D. Mr. and Mrs. Howell
|
Answer: B, the Professor and Mary Ann. Here’s the story. In sum, star Bob Denver went to bat for them. And interestingly, there was apparently an original, calypso-tinged theme song that they ditched in favor of the one we know that was by none other than John Williams!
|
5. Notable cover versions of this beloved theme song were performed by Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Hüsker Dü.
|
A. “Movin’ on Up” (The Jeffersons)
B. “Love Is All Around” (The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
C. “Suicide Is Painless” (M*A*S*H)
D. “Best Friend” (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father)
|
Answer: B, the MTM theme song. Here’s Joan doing her version on Letterman. Three verses!!
|
6. An unsung (or unused, anyway) third verse to this theme song began: “Take a little Sunday spin, go to watch the Dodgers win.”
|
A. “Good Times” (Good Times)
B. “The Dick Van Dyke Show Theme” (The Dick Van Dyke Show)
C. “Welcome Back” (Welcome Back, Kotter)
D. “Those Were the Days” (All in the Family)
|
Answer: D, “Those Were the Days.” Although now that I look more closely, it appears that these lyrics were in fact the second iteration of the bridge (“And you knew where you were then …”). The unused lyrics were:
|
Clearly, the top part’s a verse, the bottom part, the bridge. My bad. Still, easily gettable.
|
This week’s quiz: “Oh, I loved that place!” A quiz on defunct (or near-defunct) American restaurant chains. I feel like I’ve done this once before, but hey, it’s not as if six little questions can cover a whole topic.
|
1. Howard Johnson’s restaurants and motels were once ubiquitous across America, identifiable to motorists by the striking roof color, which was:
|
A. Candy-apple red
B. Bright yellow
C. Bright orange
D. Black with pink circles
|
2. This Mexican chain started in Minneapolis in the 1970s. A hepatitis A outbreak at a Pittsburgh branch in 2003 spelled doom for an already declining chain. Salsa under this name can still be found, however, in some grocery stores.
|
A. Chi-Chi’s
B. El Torito
C. Gringo’s
D. Frontera
|
3. In the early 1970s, this burger chain was huge—surpassed only by McDonald’s in terms of number of U.S. locations. But it was bought by the company that owned Hardee’s, which decided to convert them all to Hardee’s outlets; by 1996, it was dead.
|
A. Biggie’s
B. Beefy’s
C. Winkie’s
D. Burger Chef
|
4. The Arthur Treacher’s fish and chips chain flourished for decades after its founding in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio. Today, just four stand-alone outlets remain. But who was Arthur Treacher?
|
A. A pirate
B. A British admiral who fought pirates
C. A British actor
D. A British painter of sea battles and nautical art
|
5. In the 1990s, there were 265 Lone Star Steakhouses across the United States. Today there’s one. What is its rather exotic location?
|
A. San Juan Island, Washington
B. Guam
C. Campobello Island, Maine
D. Kotzebue, Alaska
|
6. This New York City lunch-counter chain was famous for its “nutted cheese” sandwich—cream cheese between two slices of raisin bread. It flourished in the mid-twentieth century and slowly died off. It attempted a comeback in Manhattan in 2010, but tastes had moved on.
|
A. Nedick’s
B. Lindy’s
C. Chock Full o’Nuts
D. Junior’s
|
HoJo’s was once the largest restaurant chain in America. The last one, in Lake George, New York, closed in 2022. Note: There will be no Fighting Words next Friday, so you’ll have to wait two weeks for the answers to today’s quiz. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.
—Michael Tomasky, editor
|
|
|
Zohran Mamdani and Elizabeth Warren know that this is the party’s best chance at taking back power in the 2026 midterm elections.
|
|
|
|
|
Update your personal preferences for _t.e.s.t_@example.com by clicking here.
Our mailing address is:
The New Republic, 1 Union Sq W Fl 6 , NY , New York, NY 10003-3303, United States
Do you want to stop receiving all emails from ?
Unsubscribe from this list. If you stopped getting TNR emails, update your profile to resume receiving them.
|
|
|
|
|
