How the spirit wearies under this all!
I shouldn’t complain—I have made a deal with the entity that I call God. I will devote my time and energy to Donald Trump and the current mess for a limited time each day. I try to keep it to half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. I write about it so that I can forget about it. I choose my battles carefully, and yesterday had to force myself out of Washington D.C. and into the Faure Requiem, from the BBC and the Royal Albert Hall.
I’m happy to say that England still keeps producing kids, seemingly unchanged for centuries. There they were, in the chamber version of the Faure, which featured boys singing the soprano parts and a kid who nailed the Pie Jesu. This child was unnervingly blond and innocent. This kid was a rock star.
So Faure was just what was needed, after I got YouTube to stop pulling me back into the affair of Epstein and Trump. New developments—read, another drip—have occurred. The Senate just released a trove of emails that the Epstein estate has very happily provided. The House has just confirmed the final vote needed to force the release of the Epstein files; the Trump administration is holding a meeting in the Situation Room to try to deal with the situation.
One email is particularly troublesome, since it came from Epstein, was addressed to Ghislaine Maxwell, and stated that Trump had spent hours alone in Epstein’s house with one of the most outspoken victims of the sex trafficking scandal, Virginia Giuffre. (The Epstein files redacted the name, but the British press and later the White House provided it, and so do I.)
Virginia Giuffre died of suicide six months ago. Her book, Nobody’s Girl, was recently released, and it was so awful that King Charles III had to strip his brother of his “styles, titles, and honors.” His brother went from prince to commoner, got booted out of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Castle and into Sandringham Estate.
Is there an adult in the room?
Do I want there to be?
The adult, if there is one, would be smacking his lips. Everybody is perfectly in place. We have a demented psychopath in the White House. He did his job, which was to win, let Elon Musk in with the wrecking ball, decimate the entire Federal Government, and pave the way for troops in the streets and the suppression of protest / free speech.
Trump did his job.
Now he’s gotta go.
Fortunately for the moguls who are waiting to run this country, Trump mishandled the Epstein mess. Or perhaps he did the only thing he thought he could do, and that he ever does. He lied and distracted, and it certainly worked for everything else. Nobody woke up this morning thinking about the East Wing of the White House, which is now being used for the fill of a gulf course. Nobody (except me) woke up thinking about Cecot, which is the El Salvador prison that is holding a whole bunch of people from several countries (including possibly the United States) that we rounded up and sent on planes down to El Salvador. Nobody is wondering about the 300 people ICE picked up in Chicago that the judge said had to be released on bond.
Nope.
We’re wondering what Trump and Virginia were up to in the hours they spent alone together in Epstein’s house.
Chess?
The spirit wearies. The magnitude of the crimes of Donald J. Trump—and we worried about the pedophilia? It was cool to send Abrego García and the Venezuelan makeup artist Andry José Hernández and hundreds of other illegally detained immigrants to a place that the Human Rights Watch called “hell?” It was all right to put troops on the street to fire bullets at the foreign and domestic media, handcuff and detain US senators and mayors, take revenge on his enemies like Robert Mueller and James Comey?
The onslaught of assaults on the laws and the norms of our country has been horrendous. Everyone is overwhelmed, myself included. And I have, if I may say, the additional burden of ancestors who came to this country willingly (thank God), created the first democracy in modern times, adopted ideals that were in large part honorable. My people fought for this country and died for this country.
True, Henry Herrick was there, hanging his witches in Salem one year and apologizing the next. Nothing about Herrick is particularly instructive, morally speaking, since his defense (he had fallen victim to the Devil) was the same as the charge against the plaintiffs (they had fallen victim to the Devil). I might call it a bit self-serving; a more balanced viewer might detect blatant hypocrisy.
The devil had run through Salem Town in 1670. The devil may be running through Washington DC, and it may be that we / they have all fallen victim to it. At some point, we are all going to have to answer the question: what were we doing when the great American Experiment (Adventures in Democracy was the title of my High School history textbook) got blown away by a corrupt, stupid, demented and very cruel man?
What were we doing when Trump came down the escalator in 2015?
What have we been doing for the last decade?
How did we let this happen?
If there are any questions in any mind of any descendant I may have—those are the ones I flinch at being asked. Because I won’t get the easy way out, which is to pretend that basically Trump was fine the first term around, but nuts and demented the second time around. Shoot—if we’d only known.
We knew, and we voted.
I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to bind a copy of the report that the Human Rights Commission just issued about Cecot—that prison we sent our prisoners to and then forgot about.
I’ll put it up on the website I want to have, along with the other documents that may well disappear, if Trump’s extends his authoritarian reach. I’ll talk about it to a bunch of poets in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
And I’ll leave you with this:
