JULY 26, 2025 – For the record, everything I know about the lurid tale of Jeffrey Epstein is derived from very cursory familiarity with reporting in mainstream media. This hardly qualifies me as an expert on the subject, but given the information I have encountered—correct, incorrect, and everything in between—I have no desire to be much more informed (or misinformed) than I am.
A free press, for as much as it gets things “wrong” and for all of its inescapable biases one way or another, is the best and by far and away the most practical alternative to submitting every single dispute pertinent to a public issue or personality to the equivalent of a full-on jury trial governed by the Federal Rules of Civil (or Criminal) Procedure and Federal Rules of Evidence.[1] In any case, we must form our judgments based on incomplete information and often misinformation. Often depending on our predispositions, we feel intellectually and certainly emotionally comfortable in jumping to conclusions that conform to our consistently held worldviews, which, let’s face it, are rarely subject to change except around the margins, or when aspects of our “worldviews” are rather fickle to begin with.
With the foregoing as background, here are the conclusions I’ve drawn about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, particularly as it pertains to our sitting president:
- Bad stuff—really bad stuff—was perpetrated by Mr. Epstein; stuff as bad as the pedophilia that has rocked the Roman Catholic priesthood and church hierarchy since . . . when, the beginning of time?
- As so often accompanies industrial-gauge sex trafficking, big big big dollars were associated with the really bad stuff.
- Given the way money, power and politics work, lots of powerful people were ensnared by the really bad stuff.
- Given the way most corruption works, many of the powerful people so ensnared exercised some degree of furtiveness in their involvement.
- Given his life-long pattern of lurid behavior and indecency, not to mention his personal insecurity and penchant for relevance, irrespective of its praiseworthiness or lack thereof, Trump’s name and participation are “all over the scandal.” “Furtive” and “subtle” are never part of his modus operandi or modus vivendi. Absent strict application of the Rules of Evidence, how can I be confident in this fifth conclusion? Unlike most public figures, Trump is an Olympian when it comes to creating and broadcasting very direct self-incriminating evidence. In my mind, decades of public statements, news conferences, and social media posts constitutes overwhelming proof of a lurid mind. Number one. Number two—no pun intended, is Trump’s—long-established pattern of denying or ignoring facts, and dodging accountability for anything negative, coupled with insistence on one-way loyalty among his minions.
As I said at the outset, since our judgments about Trump and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal cannot (yet, anyway) be subjected to the strict standards of evidentiary admissibility afforded an accused in a criminal court of law, we must form our assessments on the next best thing: an often deficient and defective “free press.” But I submit that when it comes to the political sphere, all of us do this all the time—irrespective of our political leanings. Because we are forced to play our hands before the full deck has been revealed, we give the “thumbs up” or the “thumbs down” based on what we know . . . and feel.
What always shocks many of us is how standards change. Remember how the second presidential candidacy of Senator Gary Hart, Democrat from Colorado, was torpedoed when a photograph surfaced of him and his alleged girlfriend aboard a friend’s yacht named, “Monkey Business”? The (married) man wasn’t even tossed a face-saving life jacket. His own party threw him out with the bath . . . er, sea . . . water. Take your pick from a long list of other high-placed elected officials who were brought down hard by allegations of offenses that made Epstein’s “really bad stuff” look like child’s play. (Oops! Bad choice of idioms.)
Given where we are as a nation, however, and how far our collective standards have plunged in the areas of integrity and character assessment, I have no expectation that Trump or any of his Republican cohorts (who pay extortionate sums) will suffer politically or otherwise because of the Epstein scandal. After all, we’re now celebrating a full decade of gorging ourselves on a daily diet of Trump outrages. If you’re on one side of the fence, each salvo is just another shovelful of wet manure catapulted in your face. If you’re on the other side of the fence, each outrage is either (a) a hoax, (b) another example of the leftwing conspiracy, (c) not sufficiently unsavory to outweigh progressive Democrats’ (ungodly) obsession with personal pronouns and “wrecking the economy” by increasing the amount of wages subject to Social Security Taxes to $250,000[2], or (d) yet another refreshing example of how a long-overdue iconoclast “shakes things up.” The Epstein mess will change little beyond five and a dozen votes, especially after a month or two in the rearview mirror.
One can react to our country’s political mess by yielding to despair. On the other hand, one can seek and find respite in the wonders of nature—wonders that persist despite our best efforts to ignore or destroy them.
Yesterday evening my wife and I took a leisurely pontoon cruise about a half hour before sunset. We had no particular destination. As is often the case, we simply headed away from port and let the fast-changing scenery of that time of day be our guide. Before long at coordinates I later shared with our “loony friends and neighbors,” who, as it turned out, were still enroute to the lake, Beth and I espied a flotilla of waterfowl in waters several hundred meters east. At first we assumed they were the gulls that frequent that part of the lake, but as we motored closer, we could see the distinctive profiles of loons.
Loons usually fish/travel/hang out in pairs, and when you sight a single loon, chances are the mate (presumably) will soon surface from a deep dive nearby—or swim back from a little exploratory “excursion.” In recent years, the loons on our lake have become at ease in proximity with humans—often alarmingly so, I should think. With this in mind, I turned down the throttle to the slowest crawl possible and steered at right angles to the pair closest to us but at a safe distance from the potential intersection of our paths. They seemed unperturbed by our presence, and in fact, kept swimming toward our course, forcing me to turn to starboard.
What happened next was the most extraordinary loon experience I’ve ever had—on Grindstone Lake or anywhere else. The measure of “most extraordinary,” mind you, is the experience we had one summer weekend two years ago aboard the pontoon of our “loony friends’” (aforementioned): On that occasion, we counted a total of nine pairs of loons in turn leading and following a fleet of gulls.[3]
Yesterday evening, as the sun floated toward the silhouetted horizon behind us, we counted—and re-counted several times—no fewer than fourteen pairs of loons. This natural wonder was enough to make us forget for the rest of the evening, the kind of sordid stuff with which I opened this post. And as I thought about it, that sighting of fourteen pairs of loons, Trumped all other news of the day, including the president’s golf outing in Scotland.[4]
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1]Or, in either case, their state counterparts, which are closely patterned after the Federal version.
[2] Far from upending the economy, this adjustment is essential to “righting the SS ship.” If conservatives were serious about salvaging the SS trust fund, this would be a huge step in that direction. Otherwise, demographically and financially, the fund will be underwater in less than a decade.
[3] They are also our resident nature photographers. Below is a photo taken earlier this summer by Nancy. Beth, meanwhile, recently acquired a new fancy schmancy camera for a planned trip to Ireland in September. She is currently in the “experimental phase” in learning its capabilities. In time, she’ll post some superb shots. She has a superb eye.
[4]For someone who took a meat cleaver to the Federal Government, the Golfer in Chief owes the American public a full accounting of the cost of the Scotland trip—planned and executed, as a distraction from the “really bad stuff.”
