Bluesky

The president of the United States of America has been accused of rape. Again. The president of the United States has been accused of rape in a report issued by the Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee, as part of their ongoing investigation of Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The president has been accused of raping two women, one when she was as young as 13, and sexually assaulting three more. They are among 11 women who provided evidence or testimony that Trump “abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most infamous sex trafficker in history.”

I have been made to understand that many people do not know about the Judiciary Comittee report—and the fact that five women have accused Trump of sexual assault while in or near the presence of noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. I have been made to understand that this is because the mainstream media finds former president Barack Obama’s comments about the [checks notes] Cheesecake Factory more worthy of their attention than the current president’s abuse of multiple women.

If asked, mainstream media types would no doubt argue that the lack of coverage of these latest rape allegations stems from the fact that previous rape allegations failed to “move the needle.” Trump’s sexual misconduct (both alleged and litigated) is “baked in” to people’s understanding of the man. People either won’t believe the charges or won’t care—or else they do believe the women and do care and vote accordingly—but everybody knows what he’s been accused of, generally speaking at least.

I find this line of argument unadulterated bollocks that reveals the deep failure of our mainstream media. It is news when the president is credibly accused of rape. It is important news. While I, too, don’t think these latest sexual assault accusations will materially change the national conversation about Trump or his presidency, that is not an excuse for ignoring, downplaying, or skipping over brutal allegations that he repeatedly assaulted women, including minors.

Journalists cannot decide what other people think is important. Their job is to illuminate what they think is in the public interest. I think reporting on rape allegations levied against the president of the United States is in the public interest. And since I think that, it really doesn’t matter if the public agrees with me.

With that in mind, I, unlike people who work for Bari Weiss, read the Judiciary report. Here are some of the allegations:

• Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, accuses Trump of raping her at the Plaza Hotel in November 1993. She describes the rape as “brutal.”
• Stacey Williams says that Trump groped her at Trump Tower while standing next to Jeffrey Epstein.
• Jill Harth claims that Trump forcibly kissed her at Mar-a-Lago; her allegations are corroborated by her former spouse. Harth also claims that Trump assaulted another woman, Lauren Petrella.
• “Katie Johnson,” not her real name, claims that Trump and Epstein repeatedly raped her at Epstein’s New York residence in 1994, when she was just 13.
• An unnamed Jane Doe claims Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was 13. She says Trump forcibly moved her head to his exposed penis and hit her when she resisted his assault. She reported these allegations to the FBI.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. 

The Bad and the Ugly

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, to secure a fourth term as president of Brazil. Lula won despite a diabolical effort, across a number of states, to shut down mass transportation, seemingly organized by Bolsonaro supporters determined to rig the election for him. Bolsonaro refused to concede defeat. Fearing imprisonment like his father, Bolsonaro then fled Brazil and landed in Miami on Wednesday. I would like to offer a deal to Lula: We will keep Bolsonaro if you agree to take Trump in 2029. Sound fair?
• The French Senate passed a bill making student protesters liable—to the tune of €10,000 per protester—for the damage they’ve allegedly caused during the protests. My suggestion to the protesters is to not give the French government a single centime. I’m of Haitian descent and well understand that the French definition of “debt” should not be respected.
• The FTC has sued Dollar General for (wait for it) “repeatedly charging customers higher prices than advertised.” I don’t know what a dollar buys in Trump’s economy, but I’m pretty sure it’s not something that’s sold in any for-profit store.
• Neil Young is suing Trump for $10 million for his continued use of the song “Rockin’ in the Free World” despite a 2020 settlement in which Trump agreed to stop using it. I swear, if Trump tried to play the lyre at one of his rallies, Apollo would pop out of a temple to sue Trump for copyright infringement.
• I like football. I know I’m not supposed to, but I do. A new study shows that 75 percent of NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 likely had CTE, compared to just 1 percent of the population overall. Football should be banned. I’m sure I would have liked gladiatorial combat. In fact, I bet I would have really liked it and spent money on Maximus merch. But just because I would have enjoyed watching slaves fight and die for my amusement doesn’t mean the barbaric “sport” should have been allowed.

Inspired Takes

• In The Nation, Emmet Fraizer writes about how fears about the long reach of Trump’s vengeance destroyed Scientific American. That publication was what I used to read in the pre-Internet days, when something I read in National Geographic sparked enough interest to make me want to know more. But it failed the test of the Trump era.
• A new report from Demand Justice (disclosure: I’m a board member) reveals that Trump-appointed judges who denied the results of the 2020 election will preside in 53 of the 60 “battleground” races in next week’s midterms. Remember that when the lawsuits start rolling in.

Worst Argument of the Week

Next week, the Republicans are going to lose. I don’t know precisely which ones or by how much: I suspect that Democrats will retake the House; there’s certainly a chance they will retake the Senate. But no matter how things shake out, it’s very likely that the Republicans will emerge from the election with less political power than they went in with.

That’s not surprising. This is a midterm election, and the party in power in the White House usually loses seats in the midterms, just as a matter of course. And we can expect those losses to be exacerbated when the president in power is deeply unpopular, the economy is in the tank, and the country is engaged in a pointless war that it’s not even winning. The laws of political physics say the GOP is supposed to lose next week, and quite badly.

But the Republicans, at least the ones most devoted to the Trump cult, likely have no idea they are about to lose. That’s because Trump and the white-wing media have been feeding them a steady diet of lies, priming them to believe that the only way Democrats could win is if there is election fraud. Their reasons for doing this are clear: If Trump’s base thinks their loss is due to fraud, they will likely support the most antidemocratic measures Trump takes to hold on to power over the will of the people. If they really believe Trump, at least some of them will turn to violence to support his antidemocratic efforts.

A new study from The Washington Post illustrates the complete saturation of the white-wing media by this false electoral narrative.  

Nearly 600 high-profile, right-wing social media accounts, podcasts and other online media have published more than 7,000 statements questioning the election’s integrity so far this year, a Washington Post analysis found. That messaging has, in particular, pushed overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud—themes that are twice as prevalent as they were during the 2024 election cycle, The Post’s analysis found.

Look, losing can be a shock in the best of times, but when you are priming your audience to think that a loss could happen only through massive cheating and fraud, and that audience has already shown an appetite for violence when it doesn’t get the electoral outcomes it would like, you are playing with fire.

Trump, of course, wants there to be a fire if his party loses. He needs it. He can’t challenge the election if most people agree that his party lost fair and square. He is trying to sow distrust in the system, because distrust is a crucial precondition to violent overthrow of the system.

One wouldn’t expect any particular candidate to tell their supporters, “Hey guys, we’ll probably get our ass kicked tomorrow, but let’s show up and rock the vote anyway.” Candidates need to engender a sense of hope, even if it’s false, until the end.

But one would expect the media to do the work of preparing people to confront reality. What’s the point of all this inane horse-race coverage if it’s not even going to prepare people for the reality of losing?

Unfortunately, the door swings both ways. There isn’t a nefarious conspiracy about how Trump rigged this election that I’d dismiss out of hand at this point. If the GOP pulls off a series of “close” victories in majority-minority precincts because votes didn’t materialize or vanished into thin air, I’m going to be ready to take to the streets myself.

There is no trust left in the electoral system, on either side. Republicans have been actively trying to undermine it, but I’m not sure what Democrats can do to restore it.

What I Wrote

The Department of Justice preemptively sued Alaska to delay certification of the results in the Senate race there because there are two candidates running with the same name. The New York Times then Columbus’d the story, reporting that one of the candidates was likely a plant from the Democrats meant to cause confusion among Republican voters.

The thing is, the Times had trouble remembering the most important legal fact of the story: that all of this was litigated, in Alaska, in June, all the way up to the state Supreme Court. That’s what I wrote about. I explained that Republicans had already objected to the other guy with the same name as their incumbent and lost. I explained that the only reason the DOJ is bringing this up again, in October, is to cause confusion and sow distrust in the election, as well as ask for a remedy so antidemocratic that it cannot be allowed.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

As I mentioned, the mainstream media is more concerned with President Obama’s comments about the Cheesecake Factory than with the credible rape allegations against Donald Trump. For those who somehow missed it, Obama said, “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

Cheesecakegate has inspired a raft of terrible takes, but none worse than the one from the whole-ass editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, which blared: “Obama Goes Socialist, Scorns Cheesecake.” The editorial criticized Obama for, among other things, being condescending toward Middle America with his slam on the Cheesecake Factory.

I have a couple of points worth making:

• Obama was not making fun of the Cheesecake Factory. He was making fun of a White House that looks like a dictator’s imagination of a Cheesecake Factory.
• I don’t expect a lot from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, but basic fucking literacy is not too much to ask. Being able to distinguish a joke about White House decor from a joke about dining habits should be a core competency of people who produce words on paper for a living.
• Whatever the hell you think of the Cheesecake Factory, it is not “Middle America.”

That last point requires some explanation. The Cheesecake Factory was founded in Beverly Hills, California, which is about as far from “Middle America” as you can get without getting wet. While it now has franchises across the US, it’s mainly an overpriced mall hub that is most popular on the coasts. It’s essentially a diner for people who don’t have access to good diners and don’t mind paying an outrageous premium for diner food. Only a WSJ editor could think that this kind of high-end schlock represents “Middle America.”

I lived in Indiana for 13 months. The chain-store diner-food option was Steak ’N Shake. Applebee’s was another contender. In places I don’t feel safe driving through, the equivalent is Cracker Barrel. There is no place I know of where the Cheesecake Factory’s (shitty) cheesecake represents a thin slice of Americana. 

In any event, Trump allegedly sexually assaulted five people while in or near the company of Jeffrey Epstein. Obama made a joke about interior design. If you cannot correctly order the relative political importance of each of those stories, you deserve to dine at the restaurant of your choice with Saddam Hussein in Hell.

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