By Kenneth Tiven
Let’s get real! Donald Trump thinks he’s the Capo di tutti capi (Boss of the bosses in Mafia lingo), involving the USA in two wars he cannot win: eliminating religious extremism in Iran while imposing Christian theology as a component of national policy in the USA.
Neither the world nor the American public have rallied to support his belief that a negotiation is measured by the degree of humiliation someone suffers. Trump’s humiliation is lurking in critical unreleased Epstein files. But for now, this war with Iran is an expensive and deadly distraction from the Epstein Files.
Trump’s core support comes from MAGA believers, mostly white Christians, reflected in the behavior of Defense chief Pete Hegseth asking Americans, “Pray for victory in battle and the safety of the troops. Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Nearly 40% of the 330 million people in the USA are not Christian, a reminder of the Constitution’s ban on a state-imposed religion. While the US and Israeli militaries are dropping thousands of bombs on a Shia-majority Muslim nation and Iran’s response is to stop oil shipments to Europe and Asia.
Trump’s supporters, primarily, believe the USA would be better with fewer immigrants, especially ones who don’t look like the portraits of early settlers from Europe and Great Britain. The anti-immigrant movement is “offended” by the number of Asian-origin people who have prospered in America through education and hard work, such as the estimated 5.4 million people of Indian descent, about 1.6 % of the USA population.
Trump’s threats often change multiple times in a day reinforcing the image that our constitutional democracy is led by a person with diminished physical and mental capability. This behavior has prompted an acronym: “TACO– Trump Always Chickens Out”. He most recently threatened the illegal massive destruction of Iran’s civilian electrical system demanding an unconditional surrender. Iran basically laughed at him, saying we aren’t talking to you, recognizing that Trump is a dreamer who can’t be trusted. Like clockwork he changed the next day, postponing his deadline a week.
His ideological advisors have become de facto presidents in a performative presidency. His weekend golf excursions, cost millions in travel and security, but are fake efforts to sell vitality. Trump is a master of the art of distraction: he merely drives a golf cart, waggles a club in warm up strokes, plays one or two holes for the cameras then heads to the clubhouse and a burger.
Inflation is felt at the gas pump and the grocery store. Americans are alarmed. Trump won his second term in the electoral college states by state count, but lost in the popular vote. Republicans have been losing recent elections to fill vacancies at the state level in safe GOP states. Polls by organizations that usually lean Republican confirm the trend. University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers writes, “The cost of the war measured as the impact on the US economy is hundreds of billions of dollars, not just the billons of dollars a day in military costs. Hard to ignore the benefits flowing to Russia, which it now can sell oil at the top price per barrel while it had been giving it away to India and others at roughly an 80% discount because of embargoes related to its war with Ukraine.
The world sees a high-tech war machine that can drop specialized bombs, but it also sees that concurrently US prestige has been decimated by its president’s behavior. Geography gives Iran an advantage and its asymmetrical response has been long in the planning and preparation stage. Trump claims the US is talking with Iran but Tehran tells the world the US is negotiating with itself. Trump’s exasperation is obvious, urging oil tanker crews to “show some guts” by sailing into harm’s way. NATO members failed to answer his call correctly by not sending naval help to break the Strait of Hormuz blockade. He doesn’t wear impotence very well.
Destroying both America’s self-respect and its global reputation are a price Trump accepts to distract from the realities that no amount of redaction can disguise within the Epstein Files. It seems fair to believe that the 20% held back are the most incriminating of the entire trove into how the rich and famous behave when they think no one can see what they are doing.
We are experiencing an inhumane charade while the Trump Gang mugs the US Constitution, the Treasury, sidelines Congress, creates a secret police force one step removed from a street gang, plans to destroy the regulations and stability of the US dollar for crypto currency, all the while demanding the mineral and petroleum assets of other nations. (That’s just a partial list.)
Call this the Entitlement of Wealth. The figurehead for this has spent his life trying to dominate others for wealth and power while disregarding legality and any ideals of conscience. Racism and citizenship played major roles in his attacks on Barack Obama before and after he won the presidency in 2008. Nevertheless, Donald Trump presented himself as a man of courage, with a loud voice and a claim of great wealth.
He said aloud what voters had heard Senator Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society preach years earlier, urging Fascism was better than Communism during the Cold War period in the 1950s. These issues were verboten after World War II but are staging a comeback globally in the hands of today’s authoritarian leaders. Donald Trump’s first term was a practice run, a marketing test. Winning was a surprise. Unprepared, he had a rocky term, incredibly difficult because of the global Covid pandemic. Trump discovered being president wasn’t as easy as being the supremo of a family-owned real estate business, but the airplane was bigger!
After losing his bid for a second term in November 2019, he organized an insurrection the week before his term ended in January 2020. More than a thousand people were prosecuted for invading and trashing the US Capitol. However, the Trump Administration people involved were not charged, except for Trump with a second impeachment trial in his final week as president. That failed because Senator Mitch McConnell, despite being in the Capitol when it happened, led enough Republicans to cause it to fail. Joe Biden became president for four years.
In 2023, these two very elderly men ran for US president and the least frail won. Trump masked his failing mental and physical state far better than opponent Biden. Much of the planning for this election was managed by the Heritage Foundation, the ideological leader of the Republican Party. It took control of just about everything and issued Project 2025 as a pseudo platform document. Its dominant theme was a hit parade of Christian nationalism, racism, and birtherism in a mixture best described as American Fascism. Pardons for all those convicted for offences related to the attack on the US Capitol were issued by Trump on day one of his new term. While campaigning Trump promised to release the Epstein Files as some MAGA supporters demanded, basically all the material gathered by prosecutors in two trials involving Epstein. Of course he opposed it, denying all of it.
Carlyn Beccia, an award-winning author writes that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines pedophilia as a sexual desire and attraction, “yet fails to account for attraction by personality, entitlement, impulsivity, low empathy, high risk tolerance, and a strong orientation toward dominance”. These individuals target children not because children are the center of their erotic worlds, but “because children are maximally vulnerable, maximally controllable, and maximally unlikely to be believed.”
Epstein apparently recognized that helping rich people meet the same needs he felt would protect their desire for secrecy from family, friends and business associates. She writes that for dominance-oriented personalities, sex functions less as a pursuit of pleasure and more as a delivery system for something else entirely: control, transgression, and the confirmation of status. The body becomes a medium. “The real object of desire is the internal state produced by the act – the feeling of being above consequence.”
An asymmetrical relationship provides a psychological advantage, Beccia writes that one person can speak; the other will not be believed. “One person controls the situation; the other is trapped inside it. A billionaire can operate above legal accountability because a powerful adult who sexually violates a child – someone who is physically small, cognitively dependent, trained to defer to authority, and possessing almost zero social credibility – isn’t punished, disadvantaged by the most extreme asymmetry available in human society. The erotic charge, in these cases, is not coming from youth. It is coming from total dominance.”
Obvious since he was a teenager is that Donald Trump is focused on Donald Trump. In his first term the Department of Justice, DOJ, the government’s theoretically non-partisan legal office, became the Department of Donald, DON, to protect the president against his worst instincts. One of the things it apparently kept was a tight lid on was that Drug Enforcement Agency probe that began in 2010 and suggested that Epstein was a drug dealer. For both Trump and Epstein, the media has helped launder their images as did bankers, politicians, scientists, judges, presidents, billionaires, Silicon Valley executives, socialites, traffickers, handlers, and government officials. Public figures and royalty all appeared in their world, most famously the former Prince Andrew, the younger brother of British King Charles, who turned him into a disgraced commoner.
When federal prosecutors in New York arrested Epstein in July 2019 on sex trafficking charges, it crossed paths with the secretive Operation Chain Reaction run by the DEA. The DEA’s map of Epstein’s financial network included, $50 million in sketchy wire transfers across nine bank accounts in five countries: Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, France, and New York. They identified 15 targets, including 13 people and 2 shell companies, and compiled it all into a 69-page memo that was stamped “UNCLASSIFIED” on every single page. While the Table of Contents is promising, most pages are completely redacted.
When US Senator Ron Widen demanded the DEA explain its files on Epstein, it was revealed that that Epstein was trafficking girls and bankrolling the distribution of ketamine, ecstasy, and meth. Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic that causes amnesia and physical incapacitation, it’s a date rape drug. Federal investigators had evidence that Epstein was systematically drugging victims, many of them minors, to make them compliant and unable to testify later. This is similar to what his good friend Jean-Luc Brunel in France had done. In 2016, Brunel quietly began negotiating with US prosecutors, to testify about Epstein’s trafficking operation.
Epstein apparently found out. In the millions of pages of files there is an email referencing a $3 million fee to guarantee Brunel would not cooperate. Brunel was found dead in his cell in 2022, ruled a suicide. Three years after Epstein was found dead in his cell, also ruled a suicide. So the two men who knew everything used death to avoid public trials.
The DEA group investigating Epstein’s network was downsized. Its 5,000 open cases were transferred to DHS. Now loyalists in a completely politicized DOJ control who gets investigated and who doesn’t. Cartel-connected rich guys who donated to the right people can sleep easier. The obvious conclusion is that Epstein was NOT a single monster, but rather the access point to a much bigger network of monsters, many of them wealthy and capable of influencing the federal government to maintain their immunity and freedom.