NOVEMBER 17, 2025 – Over the weekend, Trump reversed his intense effort to prevent, derail, and deflect release of the now infamous Epstein Files for Congressional scrutiny. Now, he says by his latest imperial fiat, he wants House Republicans to vote for the discharge petition that seeks disclosure of the files by the DOJ. Hmmm. Am I the only one who smells a rat? The question is purely rhetorical.
Perhaps I’m ignorant and naïve—along with the many other people who would agree that my question is rhetorical—but consider the following:
FIRST: To become law, the House petition will require Senate approval by at least 60 votes, which means that 13 Republicans must join the Democrats. By count of more serious and credentialed observers than I, that will be a push. So, first question: why didn’t Trump include Republican Senators in his weekend directive?
SECOND: Since Trump has demonstrated boldly and consistently that he believes he is the law, that his wish, however far-fetched and beyond the rule of law, has the force of law, and that his sycophantic minions in all government offices are his personal servants, retainers, and executors; that the Department of Justice is in fact his personal Department of Vengeance . . . WHY, THEN, does he presume that release of the Epstein Files requires an act of Congress? Why doesn’t he simply speed dial Blondie Bondi and direct her to fork over the files?
THIRD: What’s the rationale for Trump’s 180-degree flip-flop—after his previous 180-degree flip-flop in the opposite direct from his campaign promise? What’s to explain Trump’s sudden about-face after he’d spent so much political capital on pathetic appeals to Republican House members to vote NO on the discharge petition?
Nothing in Trump’s career as a pseudo businessman, a corner-cutting real estate developer, a blustery TV show host, a blathering purveyor of hyperbole, a serial womanizer, a professional litigator who uses the courts not to seek justice but to dress up a classic mob-boss shake-down tactic . . . nothing in his record gives the hint of a chance of a scintilla of a possibility that anything he says is tethered to truth or integrity. In other words, given all that we know about Trump and all we know (so far) about the lurid kingdom of Jeffrey Epstein, we must be hugely skeptical of Trump’s turnaround—especially when it’s accompanied by his go-to defense, which is deflection, to-wit: “It’s a Democratic hoax and I’m ordering Attorney General Bondi to go after [a list of prominent Democrats].[1]. During the Watergate Scandal, which began with a burglary, one word wound up describing the crime that brought Nixon down: COVER-UP.
In most political scandals, in fact, the cover-up is where the rats run . . . for cover. In the Epstein matter we can hope for reliable transparency, but until such materializes, there will be lots of rats on the loose, sniffing, scratching and scurrying inside the West Wing, the Department of Justice, Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere—among all the people who have lots to lose if the truth is fully exposed. I rather suspect that much of the scurrying will involve the Art of the Deal as never imagined.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1]To be perfectly clear, the Epstein mess is a non-partisan issue; a question of right vs. wrong. The prominence or party affiliation of any given perpetrator of sex crimes should never provide immunity from condemnation.
