Trump’s Epstein Explanation Makes No Sense

The president still doesn’t have a clear explanation for his own recent claims about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Thursday, Trump reiterated that he had thrown the child sex trafficker out of Mar-a-Lago after he learned that Epstein was grooming underage female employees, but failed to elaborate on his understanding of why Epstein had, in Trump’s words, “stolen” the young girls.

“At the time, did you know why he was taking those young women?” asked a journalist in the room.

“No, I didn’t know,” Trump said. “But no, I don’t know really why, but I said if he’s taken anybody from Mar-a-Lago, he’s hiring or whatever, I didn’t like it. We threw him out, we said we didn’t want him.

“I didn’t like it, that he was doing that,” Trump added.

Trump’s comments barely address his stumble aboard Air Force One earlier this week, when he admitted that he knew Virginia Giuffre—one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers—was one of the “stolen” girls. His remarks on Tuesday partially corroborated Giuffre’s account of being abducted in 2000 by Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, at Mar-a-Lago, where Giuffre worked at the time as a pool attendant.

Trump and his allies have alluded to multiple Epstein victims having come into the alleged sex trafficker’s orbit at Mar-a-Lago but only named one: Giuffre. She met Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in 2000—and Trump’s close friendship with Epstein continued for years after. If Trump really was furious, as he now claims, he certainly didn’t show it. Indeed, their friendship didn’t fracture until 2004, when the two found themselves competing for the same glitzy Palm Beach house—and Epstein remained a Mar-a-Lago member until 2007, only being kicked out after a reporter called about his status following a Florida sex crimes conviction.

Donald Trump is finally getting his wish to turn the White House into the gaudy resort he calls home by adding a $200 million ballroom. 

The White House announced that it would begin construction in September on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that can seat 650 people. 

Yes, Trump is laser focused on the issues that matter most to Americans: replacing the “large and unsightly” tent that typically hosts guests just 100 yards away from the building. 

During a press conference Thursday afternoon, Trump confirmed that he wouldn’t spend any taxpayer dollars on the $200 million project. “It’s a private thing, yeah, and we’ll probably have some donors,” he said. 

“They’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” he added. 

Trump said the expansion would not “interfere” with the White House. “It’ll be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building,”  

Trump’s mission to add a gaudy event hall to the White House didn’t come out of nowhere—he claims that he pitched it to the last two presidents. During a press conference in February, Trump said he’d asked Joe Biden about building a ballroom in the White House, offering to have it built himself. 

“I was going to build a beautiful, beautiful ballroom like I’ve done before,” Trump said. “It would cost $100 million. I told them again and again. They didn’t know what to do. They had no idea.”

He made a similar claim on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, telling his supporters that he’d offered to have a ballroom built for the Obamas. 

Trump has already begun a massive decor overhaul at the White House, gilding the Oval Office with gaudy gold detailing and ornate crown molding, plastering a golden Trump crest above the door, and shipping in golden cherub statues straight from Mar-a-Lago, according to The Daily Beast. 

It’s clear that Trump much prefers the luxury aesthetics of his resort home, and with the dismal report card he’s received in office so far, the president should feel free to pack his bags any time. 

In 2024, Trump was so protective of judges who ruled in his favor that he claimed it’s illegal to publicly criticize them.

Not so when judges rule against him, apparently. In recent months, as judges serve as bulwarks against his administration’s lawless actions, the president has lashed out, leading his supporters to inundate them with threats.

At a virtual event held by Speak Up for Justice on Thursday, judges spoke up about the vitriol they’ve faced of late.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell, who blocked Trump’s federal aid freeze earlier this year, said his court has received four or five hundred “vile, threatening” voicemails.

“We’re going to come for him,” said one voice message, which was played at the meeting. “You know what, motherfucker? Your ass is going to go to prison. OK, son of a bitch? And I wish somebody would fucking assassinate your ass. Somebody needs to fucking wipe his ass out.”

McConnell has received six credible death threats, he said, recalling one instance in which “someone was on the dark web searching for my home address, because, this is a quote, he wanted, ‘Smith & Wesson to pay me a visit at my home.’”

McConnell said of the threats: “I’ve been on the bench almost 15 years, and I must say it’s the one time that actually shook my faith in the judicial system, in the rule of law, in the work that we do with the Constitution.”

McConnell and others also said they received threats in the form of pizza deliveries to their home addresses to indicate that they’ve been doxed.

Sometimes, in order to make the message clearer and threaten judges’ families, such pizza deliveries are made in the name of Daniel Anderl, the late son of another judge at Thursday’s event, District Judge Esther Salas. Anderl was killed in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer attempting to attack Salas.

District Judge Robert Lasnik, whose family was sent pizzas in Anderl’s name, said he believes over 50 judges have received pizzas.

Salas spoke to the distressing experience of hearing the name of her late son, who “stands for … love and light,” be weaponized “to inflict fear on” judges.

“What we need is our political leaders, from the top down, to stop fanning these flames, to stop using irresponsible rhetoric, to stop referring to judges as corrupt and biased and monsters that hate America,” Salas said.

District Judge John Coughenour, who blocked Trump’s executive order against birthright citizenship, described being swatted.

“The local sheriff’s office received a call saying that I had murdered my wife, and then arrived at my house with weapons drawn,” Coughenour recalled. Soon after, he said, they received a message from the FBI that there was a bomb at their house.

“There wasn’t, but what kind of people do these things?” Coughenour said.

Toward the end of the event, Lasnik recounted the heroism of federal judges who, during the civil rights era, pushed for the enforcement of desegregation “over the objections of Southern governors.”

Such judges faced “death threats, bombings of their family home,” Lasnik said. “They were under tremendous physical intimidation and threats.”

The difference between then and today? “In that period of time, the presidents of the United States—President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President John F. Kennedy—enforced the courts’ rulings and didn’t support defying them,” Lasnik said.

“And we’re hopeful that this administration will do the same thing and support the courts’ rulings and not defy them going forward.”

Senate Republicans voted Thursday to confirm Tulsi Gabbard fanboy Joe Kent to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, despite his known ties to far-right extremists.

Kent previously courted white nationalists as part of his failed congressional campaign against Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler in 2022. Kent was endorsed by white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Oath Keeper Wendy Rogers, and Christian nationalist Joey Gibson spoke at one of his fundraisers. Campaign finance disclosures revealed that Kent paid known Proud Boy Graham Jorgensen $11,375 for “consulting.”

But if Senate Republicans actually had a problem with far-right ideology, then we wouldn’t be in this situation now, would we?

Kent has already been hard at work boosting Gabbard’s latest allegations that the Obama administration concocted the collusion between Russian and the Trump presidential campaign in 2016. Gabbard has claimed that former President Barack Obama ordered a rewrite of an intelligence assessment in 2017 to seed the narrative that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election. (Putin later admitted openly that he did want Trump to win.)

While Gabbard’s findings showed that Obama ordered an assessment to review their work to date, they did not show that he ordered a so-called “rewrite.” But in May, Kent did order a rewrite on an intelligence memo finding that Venezuela did not control the Tren de Aragua gang. The memo directly contradicted Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants.

“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Kent, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together.

Kent was sworn in Thursday afternoon by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, for whom Kent has demonstrated a surprising amount of fan behavior, posting fan edits of his new boss on X. Maybe the two have bonded over their favorable views of Russia—Kent having called Putin’s demands for Ukrainian territory after the 2022 invasion “very reasonable.”

Texas Democrats are facing a potential lockdown as they oppose Donald Trump’s legislative redistricting effort.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested Thursday that the state legislature could “lock the doors” on liberal-minded party members, trapping them into participating in a forced restructuring of Texas’s congressional maps.

“The House rules and the Senate rules both allow for these people to be arrested if they leave and ... they try to break the quorum,” Paxton told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast Thursday. “The challenge is if they go out of state, we lose jurisdiction.”

Texas Republicans have dutifully responded to Trump’s demands that the party create five new right-wing seats ahead of the midterm elections. State conservatives unveiled their new House maps Wednesday, proposing to practically eviscerate historically Democratic districts.

State Democrats have planned to abscond from the state in order to avoid the vote. The party began fundraising earlier this week to offset the $500-a-day fines they’ll incur as a result. (Texas House rules prevent lawmakers from using their campaign funds to cover the fines, which were imposed in 2023 after an unsuccessful attempt to stop a Republican-led overhaul of the state’s election laws.)

“Well, when we say that, can’t you get to Texas Rangers?” Bannon asked Paxton. “How are we letting these guys, if they’re leaving the state specifically for the purpose of not coming in for their elected duties, can’t you stop them from leaving the state?”

“If I were the speaker of the House, if I were leading the Senate, I’d put rules in place, depending on which group they think is going to leave,” Paxton said, adding that he believed the House was the more likely group to skip town. “I’d put rules in place that basically lock us in until we get a vote because the House map is up on Friday.”

But Paxton’s vision was more akin to morphing the Pink Dome into a prison than initiating a genuine democratic exchange.

“You could lock them in for the rest of the session—two weeks—and just serve them food there, and they sleep there, and that’s just the way it is because we got to get these maps passed,” Paxton added.

A lawyer who had a starring role in Donald Trump’s first administration—and his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election—is learning that actions have consequences.

The D.C. Bar’s disciplinary arm has recommended that Jeffrey Clark, a longtime Trump ally who currently works in the Office of Management and Budget, be disbarred for his efforts to help the president try to subvert the 2020 election.

“While dishonesty is always intolerable, the facts here are significantly aggravating to warrant disbarment: [Clark] was prepared to cause the Justice Department to tell a lie about the status of its investigation of an important national issue (the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election),” the Bar’s board wrote in its recommendation. “Lawyers cannot advocate for any outcome based on false statements and they certainly cannot urge others to do so. [Clark] persistently and energetically sought to do just that on an important national issue.”

Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general in the environmental division of Trump’s Department of Justice, was a key player in the president’s attempted coup. Trump unsuccessfully tried to install him as acting attorney general in early 2021, and Clark then tried and failed to pressure Georgia lawmakers into overturning the election results (for which he was briefly indicted, before being deleted as a co-conspirator).

To the D.C. Bar, this behavior is severe enough that Clark should lose his legal license. “He should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated,” it wrote.

This recommendation will trigger Clark’s automatic suspension, and will head to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final determination.

During a Thursday Fox Business appearance, Alabama Senator and gubernatorial candidate Tommy Tuberville announced that he’s introducing a bill to ban international students from Iran, China, and North Korea.

Tuberville recalled attending a recent graduation ceremony whose program, he said, included “40 Chinese nationals [getting] their degree in engineering and cyber,” leading him to the conclusion: “We are funding our own demise.”

“We have to do everything we possibly can to penalize universities that drop the ball on this agenda because if we don’t do that, we are not going to educate our kids,” Tuberville said.

The senator also claimed that international students are displacing American students, who “apply, but they can’t get in because there’s no slots for them, because of all the foreign nationals coming in.” To that end, he said his bill includes provisions to limit the total number of international students, while the focus is to keep students from rival countries out.

“We want to make sure we limit the number that comes in,” he said. “But we surely want to limit our adversaries. We want to do away with Iran, North Koreans, or Chinese nationals getting into this country and learning how to destroy the United States of America and our allies.”

Tuberville’s proposal to exclude students on the basis of national origin is so paranoid and nativist as to be absurd. A flood of North Korean students isn’t exactly a serious concern for the United States, which has, reportedly, not since the 2015–2016 school year welcomed a number of students from the People’s Republic that exceeds the single digits.

It’s also simply untrue that foreign students impede the education of American students, as evidence indicates that they are a great boon to the U.S. higher education system.

As the Brookings Institution notes, international students constitute a small minority of U.S. enrollment while contributing disproportionately to college and university budgets, namely in paying higher tuition. They also greatly support their surrounding communities. Removing international students, then, would hurt the economy, “add much to the trade deficit, harm many college budgets, and badly damage businesses in many college towns.”

Further, by subsidizing the cost of domestic students, “international students actually raise domestic enrollment,” according to a 2017 study by economist Kevin Shih, who analyzed periods where foreign enrollment underwent significant booms and busts. Shih estimates that when enrollment increases by 10 additional international students, domestic enrollment increases by about eight—a pattern that holds true as well for enrollment decreases.

One day before Donald Trump’s worldwide tariffs are slated to go into effect, an appeals court is scrutinizing his use of an “emergency” law to justify the sweeping duties.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments on the legality of the tariffs—a high-stakes lawsuit, brought by 12 Democrat-led states and five small businesses, which could derail the president’s tariff scheme.

Since February, Trump has justified his tariffs by citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a law from 1977 that allows the president to issue economic sanctions in an emergency situation: specifically, to counter an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Trump’s use of the law allows him to sidestep Congress, which is granted the power to impose tariffs by the Constitution.

He’s the first-ever president to impose tariffs by invoking the emergency law—something many of the appeals judges pointed out.

“It’s just hard for me to see that Congress intended to give the president in IEEPA the wholesale authority to throw out the tariff schedule that Congress has adopted after years of careful work and revise every one of these tariff rates,” said Judge Timothy Dyk. “It’s really kind of asking for an extraordinary change to the whole approach,” he continued.

The act has forced Trump to create so-called emergencies that his tariffs must mitigate. In March, Trump said that the fentanyl emergency was the reason behind his tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico. In April, he upped the ante and levied a 10 percent global baseline tariff, naming the emergency in question as the trade deficit.

But one judge, Raymond Chen, pushed back on that reasoning: “Can the trade deficit be an extraordinary and unusual threat when we have had trade deficits for decades?”

Overall, CNN reports that 10 out of 11 judges on Thursday were skeptical of the president’s use of the act, questioning why Trump is leaning on a law that makes no reference to tariffs and has never before been used to levy them.

Judge Jimmie Reyna asked, “But IEPPA has been rarely used, hasn’t it? It’s been over 50 years since it’s been used?”

He continued, “IEEPA doesn’t even say tariffs, doesn’t even mention them.”

The U.S. Court of International Trade sided against the president in May, and the administration quickly appealed. The appeals court has allowed Trump’s tariffs to remain in place while the case is being challenged. Depending on the court’s ruling—which, as of now, is not looking too good for Trump—the tariffs’ future could be left in the increasingly partisan hands of the Supreme Court.

Alan Dershowitz has fought many battles over the course of his legal career. He has fought on behalf of O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump. Now he will fight for himself—against a pierogi seller at a Martha’s Vineyard farmers market who was mean to him.

During Wednesday’s episode of the Dershow podcast (that’s what it’s actually called), the constitutional attorney announced his intent to sue a pierogi vendor at the West Tisbury Farmers Market in Massachusetts after the man refused to fork over the dumplings.

“I don’t approve of your politics, I don’t approve of who you’ve represented, I don’t approve of who you support,” Dershowitz recalled the man saying.

Dershowitz recounted that he’d earned strange looks from the same man when he’d visited the stall the week before wearing a T-shirt identifying him as a “Proud Zionist.”

“The clear implication was that he opposed me because I defended Donald Trump and because I was a Zionist,” Dershowitz claimed.

In a video of the incident posted to social media, a police officer informed a distraught Dersh that private establishments have the right to refuse service. While private establishments are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or religion, political affiliation is not a protected attribute, and neither is defending an alleged sex trafficker with ties to the president.

Three different vendors had made complaints about Dershowitz, the officer said.

On his podcast, Dershowitz said that he would sue the farmers market to adopt a policy to sell to everyone.

He also explained that the insidious bigotry he’d experienced had spread even beyond the farmers market stall: His books had been banned from the libraries, and he’d been  blacklisted from speaking at the synagogue.

“It’s worse than McCarthyism of the 1950s, because McCarthyism of the 1950s went after the people themselves—the communists, the lawyers who represented the communists,” he said. “In Chilmark, they go after my wife, they go after my children, they go after my grandchildren, and they take it out on everybody.”

This isn’t the first time that Dershowitz has claimed McCarthyism has come for Martha’s Vineyard. In 2018, he penned an op-ed for The Hill claiming that he had been shunned from the island’s social scene.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum thinks that solar energy is a bad idea because sometimes it’s night.

During an appearance on Fox Business Thursday morning, Burgum showcased his dim understanding about wind and solar energy while railing against green energy subsidies.

“We’ve had times where, in the last couple of days, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars this country has spent on wind, we only had like 1 percent, or 2 percent of electricity being generated by wind,” Burgum said. “And of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced, and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive.”

It was Burgum’s easy dismissal of the earth’s primary energy source as “intermittent” or “unreliable” that rang particularly ridiculous, leading some online to question whether the failed presidential candidate had forgotten about the existence of batteries.

In North Dakota, where Burgum previously served as governor, renewable energy, including wind and solar, account for more than 40 percent of the state’s electricity, according to recent data from the Energy Information Administration.

While Burgum backs Trump’s efforts to strip renewable energy projects as part of the path toward energy dominance, China has doubled down on its solar power investments.

Earlier this month, Trump issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects, directing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.” That order flew in the face of the president’s own behemoth budget bill, which included an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act until 2027. It’s tough luck trusting the president.

This week, the Interior Department announced that it would end “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” in accordance with Trump’s directives. The department would also conduct a “careful review of avian mortality rates,” following the president’s many rants that windmills kill birds, which they do, but no more than fossil fuel operations—or house cats. Earlier this week, the president also claimed that offshore windmills were driving whales “loco.”