Trump Losing It as Epstein Scandal Fractures His MAGA Base

The Washington Post reports that President Trump is infuriated that the Epstein files are still dominating headlines, even as he throws distraction after distraction to the public.

Two sources close to the president also told the Post that the rift between the Justice Department and the FBI is just as bad as it looks.

“This is a pretty substantial distraction,” said one person close to the situation. “While many are trying to keep the unity, in many ways, the DOJ and the FBI are breaking at the seams. Many are wondering how sustainable this is going to be for all the parties involved—be it the FBI director or attorney general.”

This is all of course completely self-inflicted, as the Trump administration has failed to deliver on massive promises on the Epstein files and then angering its base even more as it attempts to cover its tracks.

“They completely miscalculated the fever pitch to which they built this up,” former Reagan Justice Department official Stephen A. Saltzburg told the Post. “Now, they seem to be in full-bore panic mode, trying to change the subject and flailing in an effort to make sense of what makes no sense.”

In the midst of the chaos, Trump is hesitant to fire people like Attorney General Pam Bondi or Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, even as both have badly contradicted themselves on Epstein, because he “does not want to create a bigger spectacle by firing anyone,” a source close to the situation said.

The diversions have been clear and obvious. A rushed Martin Luther King Jr. files release against the will of his family, a trade deal with the European Union, unsubstantiated accusations of treason lobbed at his ultimate nemesis, former President Obama—none of which have succeeded in actually getting his base off the trail of one of their most important issues.

“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week, one of many questionable posts he made about the deceased sex offender and financier with whom he was close with.

The wagons are beginning to circle now, as the House is expected to subpoena the Epstein files when they return next month, and have already subpoenaed imprisoned Epstein accomplice Ghilaine Maxwell to testify before Congress in August.

Republican Texas state Representative Giovanni Capriglione co-authored the law that bans nearly all abortion in the state. And on Friday, the District 98 representative was publicly accused of having “funded several abortions for his own personal gain.”

The accusations against the legislator, who earlier this week ended his bid for an eighth term in office, come from Alex Grace, a former exotic dancer. On Friday, the right-wing publication Current Revolt published a video interview with Grace, in which she reportedly claims she had a yearslong affair with Capriglione, with their relationship beginning in 2004 when she was 18 years old.

Grace said Capriglione’s hypocrisy on issues like abortion contributed to the end of their fling. “He is someone that portrays himself to be so anti-abortion, yet he has funded several abortions for his own personal gain,” Grace alleged—though she refrained from providing further details, saying, “you’re just going to have to go with my word.”

Capriglione was the author of Texas’s “trigger” abortion ban, which outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The law makes performing an abortion, at any time from the moment of fertilization, punishable with life imprisonment or a civil penalty of $100,000. He has also, per The Texas Tribune, backed laws making it a civil offense to pay for someone to receive an abortion.

Capriglione on Friday issued a statement admitting to infidelity, without mentioning whom it was with, but denying having ever funded an abortion: “Years ago, I selfishly had an affair. I’m not proud of this. Thank God my wife and family forgave me, and we moved past it and have the strong marriage we do today.… The rest is categorically false and easily disproven.… I have never, nor would I ever, pay for an abortion.”

The lawmaker chalked the revelation up to “blowback” for “holding the wealthy, the powerful, the corporate elites, and the Austin insiders to account.”

Capriglione also vowed to pursue “legal remedies,” and Current Revolt publisher Tony Ortiz says he received a legal threat from the lawmaker on Wednesday evening. The day prior, Capriglione had announced the end of his reelection campaign.

Since the story broke, The Texas Tribune reports, Republican Representative Briscoe Cain, another prominent anti-abortion lawmaker in Texas’s House, called for Capriglione’s resignation, and urged the body’s Committee on General Investigating to probe the matter.

“I just signed the largest trade deal in history, I think maybe the largest deal in history, with Japan,” Trump boasted Tuesday. But a new report from The Financial Times demonstrates that U.S. and Japanese officials don’t see eye to eye on what exactly the countries agreed upon.

According to Trump and his administration, in return for a reduction in tariffs, Japan would invest $550 billion in certain U.S. sectors and give the United States 90 percent of the profits.

But Japanese officials say profit sharing under the agreement isn’t so set in stone: A Friday slideshow presentation in Japan’s Cabinet Office, contra the White House, said profit distribution would be “based on the degree of contribution and risk taken by each party,” per The Financial Times.

The FT also reports conflicting messages between Washington and Tokyo as to whether that $550 billion commitment is, as team Trump sees it, a guarantee or, as Japan’s negotiator Ryosei Akazawa sees it, an upper limit and not “a target or commitment.”

Mireya Solís, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Financial Times that the deal contains “nothing inspiring,” as “both sides made promises that we can’t be sure will be kept” and “there are no guarantees on what the actual level of investments from Japan will be.”

The inconsistent interpretations of the deal could possibly be owing to the fact that it was hastily pulled together over the course of an hour and 10 minutes between Trump and Akazawa on Tuesday, according to the FT, which cited “officials familiar with the U.S.-Japan talks.” And, moreover, “Japanese officials said there was no written agreement with Washington—and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”

Some are thus beginning to wonder whether Trump’s avowed “largest deal in history” even technically counts as a deal at all. Brad Setser, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on X: “If something like this is not ‘papered’ it isn’t really a deal.”

As federal immigration agents attacked a U.S. citizen, they warned him: “You’ve got no rights here.”

What began as a simple traffic stop for Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old Floridian, in May, turned into a traumatizing arrest when U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrived at the scene.

Alongside his mother and two undocumented male companions, Laynez-Ambrosio was laughed at, ridiculed, and violently detained by a group of officers, according to video footage secretly captured by the teenager, first reported on by The Guardian.

“Wait, hold up,” Laynez-Ambrosio said when agents opened the door of their company work van. “You guys have no rights to do that.”

“We don’t have rights to do that?” one agent said, laughing.

The video footage, panning upward, then shows the border patrol agents restraining one individual in a chokehold. All three men were forced out of their vehicle and onto the ground. As another companion is manhandled by three officers in tactical gear, the sound of a stun gun is heard going off, sending the man crashing onto the floor as he cries and shakes in agony.

“You can’t be doing that,” Laynez-Ambrosio said.

“Get on the ground,” an officer screams at him.

“I’m not going to get up, I’m going to just stay like this,” Laynez-Ambrosio responds. “Y’all scaring the dude.… I’ve got rights to talk.”

“You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother,” an agent told Laynez-Ambrosio.

“I do,” Laynez-Ambrosio insisted. “I was born and raised here.”

In the aftermath of the violence, the ICE agents can be heard laughing and making light of the pain they inflicted on their arrestees, referring to the Taser use as “funny,” and insulting its target as a “dick.”

“You can smell that … $30,000 bonus,” said another officer.

Later, the officers can be heard claiming that more individuals have started to resist their arrests, anticipating even more extreme uses of force in future.

“We’re going to end up shooting some of them,” an agent said, referencing Laynez-Ambrosio’s attempts to assert his rights. “This kid goes like … ‘No, you can’t do that’; I’m not doing shit. We told you already to get out, you either get out or I’m going to pull you out.”

Federal authorities have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—but actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful residents possessing visas or green cards. So far this year, ICE agents have been caught interrogating children, deporting U.S. citizens, and stuffing uncharged prisoners into America’s very own concentration camp.

As the Trump administration guts and otherwise interferes with federal statistical agencies, nearly 90 percent of economists recently surveyed by Reuters are concerned about the reliability of official government data on the economy.

From July 11 to 24, Reuters polled economists—including “Nobel Laureates, former policymakers, academics from top U.S. universities, and economists from major banks, consultancies and think tanks”—and found that 89 of 100 of them “were concerned about the quality of official U.S. economic data,” with 41 saying they are “very concerned.”

Reuters’ report shows that alarm over Trump’s cuts to key agencies that collect and deliver data, such as statistics on jobs and inflation (to say nothing of other data impacted by Trump, such as that on health, weather, and education), has reached fever pitch.

Erica Groshen, former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, told Reuters, “I can’t help but worry some deadlines [for future data releases] are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff.”

Groshen also noted “another very big risk”: that “all of the current administration’s changes will make civil service employees more like political appointees.”

MSNBC’s Steve Benen observed in an article earlier this month that the prospect of “corruption and political mischief” interfering with federal statistics under Trump is also worth keeping in mind. “Perhaps Donald Trump, the argument goes, might use his influence to tell the Labor Department to manipulate the data and deceive the public,” Benen wrote—though he noted “there’s been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative” to date.

Even setting that worrisome possibility aside, Trump’s war against trustworthy federal data already threatens to wreak real havoc.

During a press conference last month, Fed chair (and MAGA persona non grata) Jerome Powell explained why we mustn’t take for granted “having good data” on the economy: This information, he pointed out, “doesn’t just help the Fed. It helps the government, it helps Congress, it helps the executive branch. More importantly, really, it helps businesses. They need to know what’s going on in the economy.”

For years, Powell noted, the United States has prided itself on being a leader in “measuring and understanding what’s happening in, in our very large and dynamic economy.”

“I hate to see us cutting back on that,” he continued, “because it is a real benefit to the general public that people in all kinds of jobs have the best possible understanding of what’s happening in the economy.”

President Trump is using $10 million of our taxes to market his new golf course in Scotland.

The president traveled to Scotland on Friday for the grand opening of an 18-hole golf course in Aberdeen. He’s expected to stay for four days. His appearance will likely generate positive revenue and publicity for the course—money that will flow right back into the pockets of the Trump Organization.

HuffPost has estimated that the trip will likely cost at least $9.7 million dollars due to Air Force One operations, motorcades and helicopters, Secret Service overtime, and more. Trump has framed the international vacation as a “working trip,” and has instead emphasized his plan to meet in Aberdeen with U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer. But Aberdeen is not the capital of the United Kingdom, or even the capital of Scotland, making it clear this meeting was just randomly added in to use as an excuse for the golf course.

Trump has grown more and more comfortable completely blurring the lines of his private businesses and his public office. This trip will make his second-term golf tab at least $52 million in just six months, according to HuffPost. His first term was $152 million over four years.

“We’ve reached a point where the Oval Office is an extension of the Trump Organization, and American taxpayers are footing the bill,” Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told HuffPost. “A president should not be spending time trying to make money in a foreign country while in office, but if they do, at the very least they could pick up the tab for their business trips.”

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show is apparently a sign of what’s to come for America’s media industry.

Speaking with CNBC Friday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blamed the comedy show’s demise on a lack of profitability, and warned that the “media industry across this country needs a course correction.”

“The American people simply do not trust the mainstream media,” Carr said, likening the current field of late-night comedy shows to genuine news outlets.

He has a point: Media trust has never been so low in this country. A February Gallup survey found that trust in news had fallen to a five-decade low, with just 31 percent of polled Americans claiming to trust the mainstream media a “great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36 percent said they didn’t trust traditional news sources “at all.”

But threatening to forcibly curtail content via the heavy hand of the federal government—à la some Russian- or North Korean–inspired trajectory—is not the solution.

“For broadcasters, they have a federal license and they are obligated to operate in the public interest,” Carr said. “In the extent that we’re starting to see some changes, I think that’s a good thing.”

Some of the most prominent news companies in the country have already been pressured into changing their coverage of Trump. The longtime head of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, quit after Paramount executives attempted to interfere with the show’s content, reportedly pressuring him to change how the show reports on the president. The former president of CBS, Wendy McMahon, resigned under similar circumstances shortly afterward.

Colbert’s show—the most popular show in its time slot—was canceled three days after the comedian claimed that Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over his groundless lawsuit targeting Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview looked like a “big, fat bribe.”

In his first show back following the announcement, Colbert didn’t deny that it was possible the show was hemorrhaging money. However, he said he couldn’t work out the $40 million loss that an unidentified Paramount source leaked to The New York Post—until he considered another possibility.

“$40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million. But where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh yeah,” Colbert said.

The FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Thursday.

Asked on three occasions Friday morning whether he would consider pardoning convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump first said he didn’t “want to talk about” it and, later, made a point to note he is “allowed” to do so.

“Well, I don’t want to talk about that,” the president responded to the first query about a potential pardon.

Later, Trump said: “It’s something I haven’t thought about. It’s really some—it’s some. I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”

“But you wouldn’t rule it out?” a reporter followed up, but Trump did not reply.

Later still, the president told reporters, “I certainly can’t talk about pardons right now.”

While the president’s response wasn’t a “Yes,” it certainly wasn’t a “No,” either. (And recall that, in 2019 and 2020, Trump said he hadn’t thought about pardoning Roger Stone, whom he pardoned in December 2020.)

Trump’s glaring nonanswers come as his allies appear increasingly open to embracing Maxwell as a way out of his Epstein mire. The administration is facing an uproar over its lack of transparency and Trump’s personal ties to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse minors. (When she was arrested by the FBI in 2020, Trump had said, “I wish her well.”)

Despite Maxwell’s crimes, as Rolling Stone reported Thursday, “the Trump administration and the president’s allies in Congress seem to think that if they get Maxwell to attest that Trump did nothing wrong,” it will solve everything. MAGA media has also begun cozying up to the convicted sex criminal.

In recent days, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Maxwell and will depose her next month. Meanwhile, Todd Blanche, Trump’s deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer, has met with Maxwell and will meet again Friday, purportedly to gain information “about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.”

The potential for corruption in Blanche’s closed-door sit-downs with Maxwell, who has everything to gain from aiding the president, is plain, as has been much observed by Democratic lawmakers and other critics. The observation was even made by Trump toady House Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently told reporters that he backed the House Oversight Committee’s move to subpoena Maxwell while noting an “obvious concern”:

Could she be counted on to tell the truth? Is she a credible witness? I mean, this is a person who’s been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts, and acts against innocent young people. I mean, can we trust what she’s going to say?

Palm Beach County Attorney Dave Aronberg and former aide to Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, has speculated that the DOJ’s talks with Maxwell could presage a “hidden pardon” deal.

And of course it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Trump to flagrantly abuse the pardon power.

This story has been updated.

President Trump suggested on Friday that Israel should “finish the job” and “get rid of it,” when asked about Gaza, which is now suffering from mass starvation due to Israel’s blockade.

“Gaza, they pulled out of Gaza, they pulled out in terms of negotiating. It was too bad, Hamas didn’t really wanna make a deal. I think they wanna die. And it’s very, very bad,” the president said on Friday before departing for Scotland. “You’re gonna have to finish the job … don’t forget, we got a lotta hostages out. So now we’re down to the final hostages and they know what happens after you get the final hostages. And basically because of that they really didn’t wanna make a deal I saw that. So they pulled out, they’re gonna have to fight, they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of it.”

The Trump administration has been explicit about its horrifying vision for Gaza, as the president clearly views it as potential property for an Israeli beach resort rather than an area that human beings call home. The genocidal language he casually uses here, saying that Israel needed to “get rid of it,” only reinforces that.

While leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the U.K.’s Kier Starmer have this week finally decided that the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—for throwing rocks, for waiting for aid, for doing journalism, for simply refusing to leave their homes—has become too much, Trump has tripled down in his dismissiveness. All signs point to him allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s butchering of Palestine to continue uninhibited.

A weak dollar is better than a strong dollar, according to Donald Trump.

The dollar hasn’t fallen this fast since 1973. Over the last six months, the dollar has declined more than 10 percent against America’s most prominent trading partners, bringing the value of the world’s reserve currency to a three-year low.

“Why has the dollar fallen so much, and are you concerned about that?” a reporter asked Trump outside of the White House Friday.

“Well, I’m a person that likes a strong dollar, but a weak dollar makes you a hell of a lot more money,” Trump said. “I don’t know if you study, but I study it.”

“I went to Penn and Wharton,” the reporter said, referring to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious business school. “So I know this.”

“Then I know you’re smart,” Trump said. “So when we have a strong dollar, one thing happens—it sounds good. But you don’t do any tourism, you can’t sell tractors, you can’t sell trucks, you can’t sell anything.”

But tourism is booming everywhere but the U.S. A study from the World Travel & Tourism Council last month found that the U.S. was the only country in the world forecast to have less international travel spending, with the potential to lose as much as $12.5 billion in the category compared to last year, a figure that has rattled the hospitality and aviation industries. And Trump hasn’t made it easier: Prospective visitors might have to contend with more red tape to enter the country, paying a $250 “visa integrity fee” in addition to the $185 price tag on the nonimmigrant visa itself.

“It is good for inflation, that’s about it. But we have no inflation, we wiped out inflation,” the president noted Friday, further explaining his “strong dollar” ideology. Yet his administration did not actually eliminate inflation—it’s still a major concern, fueled in large part by Trump’s roller-coaster tariff plan.

“It doesn’t sound good, but you make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar—not a weak dollar, but a weaker dollar,” Trump said, claiming that America’s trading partners, including China and Japan, were “fighting” for their own weaker currencies.

“And it’s good psychologically, it makes you feel good,” he added.