You Think the Bari Weiss–CBS News Story Is Bad? No—It’s Much Worse.

More ghastly, parallel-universe news this week. The man in charge of America’s public health said he didn’t know how many people died of Covid and added, despite his ignorance, that he is certain that the Covid vaccine has killed more people than Covid itself did (all this while he’s denying Americans access to the Covid vaccine). We committed a probable act of war against Venezuela. The president of the United States was mocked by the leaders of China, Russia, and India. And as of Friday, the Department of Defense is apparently going back to the future and becoming the Department of War, I guess because “defense” is too passive a cognomen for the real men of MAGA-land.

But maybe the most ominous development of the week doesn’t concern the Trump administration at all. It’s the news that Bari Weiss is apparently about to become the head, or something, of CBS News. This is bad for CBS, sure. But it’s a lot bigger than that: It is the securing for the right wing of another key beachhead in the American media landscape, which, as I’ve warned repeatedly, will within a generation (or sooner) consist of a lot of large, noisy, avowedly right-wing outlets and a small handful of mainstream outlets that are too weak and feckless to defend what remains of our democracy—and will thus be acting as the handmaidens of their own destruction, if they aren’t already.

This is certainly an “only in America” story, but I do not mean that in the normal, heroic sense. I mean it in the creepy, corporate, it’s-all-about-profit sense. CBS began life in 1927 as a radio network, expanding into television as that medium grew. It had entertainment and news divisions, and later sports; its news division was considered the best in the United States, and, along with the British Broadcasting Corporation, a model for mainstream media standards in democracies. It wasn’t being “liberal” when Edward R. Murrow helped take down Joe McCarthy. It was acting in defense of democracy against a sinister and dishonest demagogue.

Over the decades—and this was a natural-enough progression—CBS became a huge corporation, expanding into movies, amusements, even musical instruments (it was said to have ruined Fender guitars for about 20 years, although today those guitars—I own one—are considered vintage, go figure). But even this wasn’t so horrible, until the age of megamergers brought on by what was essentially the end of antitrust enforcement in the U.S. Fade in, fade out: CBS formed Viacom, then they split, then they remerged. Paramount, which had owned part of CBS back in the 1930s, came back into the picture. In 2009, Paramount announced a partnership with this new thing called Skydance, which had been created in 2006 by David Ellison.

In July 2024, Skydance and Paramount, now CBS’s parent, announced their intention to merge. You will recall what happened next. That fall, as the merger was under governmental review, and during the presidential campaign, 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. With no evidence, Donald Trump charged that it was edited to make Harris look good.

And so, exactly 70 years after CBS (and Murrow) took down one demagogue, it cowered and crumbled when confronted by another. The reason was obvious: Ellison and others wanted Trump’s Justice Department to approve the merger. In other words, profit was put ahead of the journalistic reputation of CBS News’s crown jewel program. CBS—actually, Paramount Global—decided to pay Trump $16 million (toward his “library”). It was an implicit admission that maybe Trump was right; that their most venerated news program perhaps was guilty of liberal bias, even though Trump never produced one lick of evidence that 60 Minutes had done anything wrong, anything that wasn’t part of standard broadcast practice. But Trump was clearly appeased, and, lo and behold, two months ago, the Trump administration approved the merger.

On August 7, Ellison gave a press conference in New York, where he swore that no favors had been promised Trump. “We are not going to politicize anything today,” Ellison said. “We want to entertain first.”

One can call Bari Weiss many things, but “apolitical” is not among them. She’s undoubtedly smart, and, with her wildly successful Substack publication The Free Press, she cunningly saw a market niche in identifying private-school wokery—rather than, say, the fact that one of our two major political parties is descending into fascism—as the gravest threat to the American way of life. I readily concede that what we call “wokeism” contains some excesses, some illiberal manifestations that run counter to the values of tolerance and open-minded debate. But the idea that students and administrators at a handful of universities are a bigger danger to democracy than Donald Trump and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is absurd and dangerous.

That is the view, however, of a certain slice of the American elite: wealthy people who tend to have gone to those schools, or who send their kids to them, and who, while not openly racist or sexist in most cases, nevertheless get the heebie-jeebies from all those Black and brown and trans people screaming about their rights—and who, more than anything else, in fact far more than anything else, want their tax cuts. And soon, CBS News will reflect their priorities and tell them the stories about the threats to the U.S. that they want to hear.

In doing so, it will join not only Fox News and Newsmax and Sinclair, which increasingly controls local media. The Washington Post too appears to be traveling in that direction. In a few years, there just won’t be much mainstream media left.

And I hate to say this, but that is partly their fault too. Weiss first became famous at The New York Times, when she expertly parlayed a hullabaloo over a controversial op-ed by GOP Senator Tom Cotton into a victimhood narrative about left-wing intolerance. She published a resignation letter that was praised by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump Jr., among others. All that attention led to her getting the funding to launch and grow The Free Press, for which David Ellison is now reportedly paying her at least $100 million, maybe more.

An American success story, I suppose. But here’s the thing. The Times never should have been hiring someone like Weiss in the first place. She was at The Wall Street Journal editorial page before. Ask yourself: Has the Journal opinion page ever hired a liberal away from the Times? Maybe, although I can’t think of one. But in 2017, after Trump won, the Times hired both Weiss and Bret Stephens from the Journal. And at some point in there, the Times hired yet another young right-winger, Adam Rubenstein, who was the primary editor of the Cotton op-ed.

Well, a Times defender would say, the liberal Times is more committed to diverse viewpoints than the conservative Journal, and that is a good thing. Up to a point, that’s true. And once upon a dear old time, a newspaper like the Times could hire, say, William Safire—hack and propagandist though he was—as an act of magnanimity to give a prominent platform to a conservative voice because conservative voices were indeed underrepresented in the media at the time. But that is hardly the case now. It brings to mind that old joke about some liberals being so open-minded that their brains start falling out of their ears.

That open-mindedness, to circle us back to where we started, is on regular display at the Times these days, as I noted a month ago. The RFK Jr. Senate hearing Thursday was a shitshow. He obfuscated, he lied, he evaded, he humiliated himself. He is dismantling his agency and destroying public health. People will die because of his decisions, if they aren’t already. All of this was on horrid display Thursday.

And the Times’ original headline on its account of the hearing? “A Defiant Kennedy Defends Vaccine Changes and C.D.C. Shakeup.” Great. Kennedy was savaged by senators of both parties for his lies and for shredding American public health to pieces, and the Times rewards him with the adjective “defiant.”

Be assured that Bari Weiss’s CBS won’t be guilty of such equivocation in the name of “fairness.” That’s the difference, and that’s a big part of the reason why this democracy is dying.

Donald Trump has, of course, done a lot of shocking things as president, things even previous Republicans wouldn’t have done. We focus most of our coverage on those things, and rightly so. But on one issue, he’s been a pretty standard Republican president, which is to say to say he’s been horrible and wicked in the standard way. The issue is guns. Before the Minneapolis shooting fades out of the news cycle, let’s look at the grisly Trump record, which has largely passed under the radar.

We begin with his February 7 executive order called “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” It stated in the opening paragraph: “Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.” It then directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to review existing laws and regulations and so on “to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

This has led to a process that seeks to restore the gun rights of convicted felons. And so, on July 18, the Justice Department published a rule to that effect. The press release’s opening sentence reads: “President Trump directed the Department of Justice to address the ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens—all of them.” Further down, the release quotes Ed Martin, the administration’s pardon attorney and a MAGA extremist whose nomination for a U.S. Attorney position was withdrawn because he probably couldn’t get the votes: “General Bondi’s support of the rebooted 925(c) program is consistent with President Donald J. Trump’s promise to the American people to support the beautiful Second Amendment.”

So that’s number one: The DOJ is going out of its way to restore gun rights to convicted felons—a category, of course, that includes Donald Trump himself. But the EO and other actions by the administration go a lot farther. Trump ordered a review of every gun-regulating move made by the Biden administration. For example, on April 7, Bondi revoked a Biden-era rule that allowed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to rescind the licenses of gun dealers that break the law by falsifying records. Ponder that: Businesses that knowingly break the law now have immunity from federal oversight.

There’s plenty more. On May 16, the administration agreed to a settlement of several lawsuits under which the Justice Department would no longer enforce machine-gun ban laws (which date to the 1930s) against guns with forced-reset trigger (FRT) devices. An FRT, which is a recently developed technology, allows the shooter to fire at an increased rate. The NRA and manufacturers say it’s no big deal, the shooter still has to fire each shot separately; gun-safety advocates counter that by mechanically resetting the trigger position after a shot is fired, FRT’s still dramatically increase the fire rate, essentially turning some semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. So these will now be sold again. FRT’s have been after-market devices, but now, they might be installed at point of sale.

The Republicans’ big, ugly budget bill factors in here, too. A transfer tax on silencers has been part of U.S. law since 1934. The tax was imposed for the obvious reason that silencers tended to be used by the bad guys. You don’t need silencer to shoot a grouse or defend your family from an intruder. It was paid by either the buyer or seller and was set at $200. In all those decades, it was never raised ($200 then would be close to $4,900 today). But at least it existed. As of next January 1, it will be $0.

This is who Trump is: a cynical and strictly transactional person who, once upon a time, spoke reasonably sensibly about guns, but who realized once he entered politics that anyone who wants the GOP presidential nomination has to sell his soul to the NRA, so he sold his (probably wasn’t expensive). This is another thing we kind of stopped paying attention to, because he does so many other things that are, or appear to be, so much more outrageous. But I take note every year of what Trump tells the NRA. In the summer of 2024, he spoke to the group in person and said, among other things:

• “Let there be no doubt the survival of our Second Amendment is very much on the ballot. You know what they want to do. If they get in, our country’s going to be destroyed in so many ways. But the second Amendment will be … It’s under siege. But with me, they never get anywhere.”

• “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain. Crooked Joe has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.”

• “They’re going after the ammunition. When the radical-left Democrats tried to use Covid to shut down gun sales during the China virus, I proudly designated gun and ammunition retailers as critical infrastructure so they couldn’t touch it.”

This April, the group convened in Atlanta, and Trump addressed the assemblage via video, bragging about all the above and more, saying: “There is much more to come. Americans are born free, and under the Trump administration, we will live free—always live free. With me in the White House, your sacred rights will not be infringed.”

Now, after Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance and Melania Trump are out there trying to shift the topic from guns to mental health. It’s a total dodge, an attempt to talk about anything but guns; but okay, we have an obvious five-alarm mental healthcare crisis in this country, so to the extent that this administration really wants to do something about that—great.

But as usual, the rhetoric is completely the opposite of the reality. The drastic Medicaid cuts in the big, ugly bill will impact mental health services in a vast array of ways. MindSite News, which covers mental health policy, wrote after the bill became law: “The previous five years—including the final year of Trump’s first presidency—had seen the renewal of a federal commitment to mental health. Over those years, federal funding for mental health services increased. New programs like the 988 hotline were created and funded. Funding streams were established to boost crisis response services and to support school-based mental health. Tough new health insurance regulations were enacted to improve access to coverage for mental health services.”

That last point is especially key. Insurers don’t cover mental health the way they cover physical health (this, by the way, is an issue the Democrats should seize; mental health doesn’t interest the media much, but I guarantee you it is of keen interest to parents everywhere, of all political stripes). But this bill, the site notes, signals that “the days of a federal commitment to addressing the U.S. mental health crisis are essentially over.”

So they’re even hypocrites on the one issue on which they’re showing “concern.” But let’s conclude by going back to gun policy.

The guns purchased by the Minneapolis shooter were bought legally. Press accounts note this and then quickly move on, as if to say there’s no point in discussing gun laws here. But there is. There always is. Authorities haven’t revealed what kinds of guns, beyond saying there were three—a shotgun, a rifle, and a pistol. Maybe they’re not even in the categories of weapons we debate. I’d still like to know how someone with such obvious mental health issues passed the background checks. Minnesota strengthened its background check law under Governor Tim Walz in 2023, but someone somewhere still decided that Robin Westman could own guns responsibly, and we deserve to know more about who and why.

In the meantime, Trump 2.0 so far shows every sign of doing anything the NRA wants it to do. They can offer all the thoughts and prayers they want, and they can prattle on about mental health until the sun sets. But it’s their actions that matter, and their actions say they’re perfectly content to let more children die.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here

You may not know the name Lindsey Halligan. She’s not a scholar. Not a Ph.D. She hasn’t written any books on history. She has, however, worked as an insurance claims lawyer. Her most celebrated achievement, apparently, was defeating a 2019 claim seeking $500,000 in damages from her client over a damaged roof. How she managed to join Trump’s defense team remains unclear, but she was called to Mar-a-Lago the day the FBI came in with its warrant to collect those classified documents. Once on the team, she did what they all do, namely, grovel—she made an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast where she vowed to sue CNN for claiming that Trump was lying about the 2020 election results. Trump sought $475 million in damages in that case, but in July 2023, a federal judge dismissed it.

Today, Halligan holds something few others in government probably do: a very fancy title that runs to a full 19 words (Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary). She is overseeing the … what’s the right word here? There are so many to choose from … “reimagining” of the Smithsonian Institution. That’s right. An insurance claims lawyer is now in charge of making sure that the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, 21 libraries, 14 research centers, one zoo, and 157 million items and artifacts are brought into line with the wishes of the Mad King.

I see, looking back over them, that the tone of the above two paragraphs is a bit jocular. But this is no laughing matter. Forget Halligan. Maybe she’s smarter than I think, maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s a hardcore racist, maybe she’s not. But she’s not the point. The point here is Trump. He is not smarter than I think. I suspect he’s never read a history book in his life, and chances are pretty decent he’s never been to a museum, except to galas Ivana dragged him to back when. And about his hardcore racism, there is utterly no question.

But we don’t talk about it enough. Trump long ago established to the satisfaction of everyone outside of MAGA world that he’s a racist to the bone. He and his father wouldn’t rent to Black people. He said those sick things about the defendants in the Central Park jogger case (they weren’t guilty). He said, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” He said some white supremacists in Charlottesville were “very fine people.” I could go on and on.

Being long-established, Trump’s racism is not “news.” Regular readers of mine will know this is one of my longtime complaints about the nature and structure of the media. There are lots of things that aren’t “news,” per se, but are true, important, and defining of our reality. Trump’s racism is one of those things. It hovers over everything. It defines nearly everything he does. And it is making the United States of America a cruel, sick, mean place.

His racism is what’s propelling this edict over the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” he whined Tuesday on Truth Social. When he talks this way, he’s sending a much broader message that is widely understood, by both his political foes and (especially) his supporters. Each group knows it’s part of a broader attack that is designed to keep certain Americans “in their place.” It’s just that the latter group approves.

His racism is what’s driving the presence of these National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. His motorcade, traveling from the White House to his Virginia golf club, passes a small greensward along what’s called the E Street Expressway where there are (or were) a few tents, and that’s probably how he got his entire impression of D.C. crime, along with the background knowledge that D.C. is a heavily Black city (Black residents are no longer a majority, but still a plurality). The troops aren’t even fighting actual crime. They’re mostly around the National Mall, where it’s as safe as Mayberry in the 1960s. The troops are just a symbol for white MAGA world that he’s cracking some Black heads.

His racism is behind this sick redistricting madness in Texas. Nonwhite people make up 60 percent of the state’s population. By the time the Texas legislature is finished, the Texas congressional delegation will likely be more than 70 percent white and Republican. In Missouri, the redistricting under consideration would slice a Black Democratic district in Kansas City into maybe three different pieces. Republicans have done this sort of thing long before Trump, but under Trump, of course, it’s being taken to extremes because Republicans now know that anti-Black extremism on such matters is the only thing that gets the boss’s attention.

His racism is behind his talk about mail-in ballots and early voting and all his phony allegations about fraudulent voting. Everybody knows very well what, and whom, he’s talking about when he talks about such things. He means Black and, to a slightly lesser extent, Latino people.

His racism is the fundamental reason for these mass detentions. Would Trump, and the right wing in general, be this worked up about illegal border crossings if it was mostly white people doing it? Of course they wouldn’t. There would be no rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

Finally—although surely there’s more—it’s racism that animates a lot of his rhetorical attacks on individual Americans. It’s no accident that his recent targets prominently include Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King (her close friend), Beyoncé, Al Sharpton, Letitia James, and Charlamagne tha God. He goes after lots of people of all races, but Black people are disproportionately targeted, and it’s not an accident.

I have no idea where Lindsey Halligan fits in here. She’s spent most of her adult life thinking about hurricanes. She’s interchangeable with any other Mar-a-Lago sycophant who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But the fact that Trump put someone in charge of remaking the Smithsonian who’s totally unqualified is what’s important here because it tells us that the person is there solely to follow his orders. Trump’s orders will be based on his worldview. And his worldview is the most blatantly and openly racist worldview that’s been held by an American president since Woodrow Wilson. We need to remember this—even, or especially, when the media forgets.

Republican Representative Bryan Steil thought it would be a good idea to go have a meetup with constituents Thursday night in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Steil represents Paul Ryan’s old district and in fact used to work for Ryan. He’d had a rocky week: A few days before, some protesters plopped some flowers and a coffin on the doorstep of his Janesville home, an act meant to symbolize the ill effects of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill on the most vulnerable.

Things didn’t get much better Thursday night. Steil was booed repeatedly, particularly on immigration, with one woman saying, with reference to Alligator Alcatraz: “The difference between a prison or a detention center and a concentration camp is due process.” Asked another, about ICE agents, to robust applause: “Why are they wearing masks, and why are they unidentified?”

Congress is in recess now for the new month, so we can be sure that Steil’s fellow Republicans took note and will spend the month hiding from constituencies and hanging out at country clubs where tax cuts for the rich are popular and nobody needs Medicaid (or at least they think they don’t).

Donald Trump, it is said, is frustrated. He wonders why he’s not more popular. He complains, we read, that he’s accomplished a great deal and that he’s keeping his campaign promises, and looked at a certain way, these statements are true, to a point. So he can’t figure out why he’s at 37 percent.

I could tell him why. Two reasons, and they’re both obvious. First, his policies are horrible, and people don’t like them. If you’re “accomplishing” things that large majorities of people don’t want, do they count as accomplishments? Film director Uwe Boll somehow manages to keep making movies. But he’s a punch line. Most of his movies have been commercial flops and critical train wrecks—a career so lame that he once promised to quit the business if a petition demanding that he do so garnered a million signatures (alas, it fell short).

That’s Trump: the Uwe Boll of policy.

The recent polls have told us over and over and over. The big, ugly bill—unpopular. Rounding up poor guys hanging out at Home Depot looking for work—unpopular. Putting people in, yes, concentration camps—unpopular. Cutting his Palm Beach pals’ taxes—unpopular. Imposing these absurd tariffs—unpopular. I could go on. There is literally not a single important item on the Trump domestic agenda that polls well.

Then there are the promises he’s broken. He said he’d lower prices on day one. Which, you’ll recall, was the same day on which he was going to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. And bring peace to the Middle East. It’s a pleasant surprise here lately that he’s talking smack about Putin and Netanyahu because they’re gumming up his glide path to the Nobel Peace Prize. But his criticisms don’t change the fact that the crises in both Ukraine and Gaza have gotten worse, not better, since he took office. Look, I’m glad that he’s flip-flopped on aid to Ukraine. But still, it’s a flip-flop. I remember when Republicans thought flip-flopping on a matter of war and peace was a sign of weakness.

So that’s number one. He has either (1) executed his policies as promised, but people hate them, or (2) blown them off or reversed himself, exposing his campaign statements as nonsense. That the Harris campaign couldn’t figure out how to mock his obvious bullshit—don’t get me started. One thing I’m not celebrating this summer is Kamala Harris’s reemergence on the public stage, and I pray she’s not delusional enough to think she ought to run again in 2028.

Number two is also simple. He’s a sleazeball, and more and more people are finally coming to realize it. The Jeffrey Epstein matter is Exhibit A, of course, but there is much more. The way he and his family are getting rich from the presidency is just obscene. Have you ever gone to TrumpStore.com? If not, have a look. It’s relentlessly garish, of course, but more than that, it’s relentlessly and proudly, defiantly overpriced. Yet these idiots buy this crap by the millions.

But it’s Epstein that is catching up with him. And that story is a long, long way from being over. We cannot of course at this point state that Trump is guilty of anything. But allegations are out there. Have you read the testimony of “Katie Johnson”? You might want to familiarize yourself with it. Obviously, I have no idea whether it’s true. If a third of it is, and it’s ever corroborated, it will be by far the biggest presidential scandal of all time.

And even if none of it is true, we’re still dealing with a president of the United States whose best friend for 15 years was a serial child rapist. Let that sink in. Again, why the Democrats couldn’t make this an issue last year—aarrgh. I know. I’m sure they have all kinds of reasons. But you know what? If Donald Trump were running against someone whose best friend for 15 years was a serial child rapist, he’d have made sure America knew. In any case, they’re figuring it out now. And if he pardons Ghislaine Maxwell or commutes her sentence or anything like that, millions of Americans will jump to the obvious conclusion.

It all leaves Bryan Steil and his GOP congressional colleagues ducking their constituents, because God forbid they have to explain to voters why they voted for a sick bill that punishes working people and lines the pockets of the megarich and will shove many billions of dollars into the creation of a police state no one wants. That would be accountability, which would be uncomfortably close to democracy. Can’t have that.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

So Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime abettor of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, is meeting Friday for a second time with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. OK, first of all, let’s just stop right there. Why Blanche? Well, gosh, you say, he’s a deputy A.G.; seems legit. Actually, no, not by a long shot. Blanche was Trump’s personal defense attorney—on a sex case. (Technically, it was a hush-money case—the one involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which Blanche and Trump lost—but it was really about sex, in this case between consenting adults.)

So, no—Blanche, whose actual job entails the day-to-day running of the department, is absolutely not the appropriate person for this task. Wait—let’s stop right there again. Is this “task” even legitimate? Under certain circumstances, it might be. Let’s say a mobster is in the can for some felony. Prosecutors believe he has information about a different crime. So they go to him to see if he’ll talk, and they offer him a deal.

If that’s what’s going on here, maybe it’s OK—although alas, we stop again to ponder the morality of offering a deal to a child sex trafficker (hey, right wing, I thought this was a moral line in the sand for you?). This is not a mobster rat whose information could bring down another made man or even a whole family. This is a woman who was convicted of conspiring to groom minors for Epstein’s pleasure and who, according to at least one witness at her trial, participated in the sex.

So the whole thing shouldn’t even be happening. She was tried, she was convicted, and that’s that. But: If it had to happen; if we are to concede that questioning her at this point is a legitimate enterprise, shouldn’t it be done by a line attorney who is familiar with the details of the case? Of course it should. Someone like, oh, Maurene Comey. Oh. Wait. They fired her last week.

I hope you’re putting these puzzle pieces together with me as we go. The bottom line here is obvious. Donald Trump, I believe, wants to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her silence. Note I said wants to. He might not. A pardon would rip his base in two. He may grasp that and not do it.

But I say there can be little question that he’s thinking about it. In fact, on the White House lawn Friday morning, a couple hours after I wrote this column, he was asked about a possible Maxwell pardon, and he said: “I’m allowed to do it.”

I’m not the only one who smelled this possibility coming. Dave Aronberg, who worked as the Florida drug czar under U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general, made some interesting comments on CNN the other day.

First, he observed how weird it was that Blanche was conducting these interviews: “I can’t overstate it, Brianna [Keilar]. It’s as if the number two executive at CNN was conducting this interview with me instead of you. Like, what? It never happens.”

Then he connected the political dots: “But there are others who could do this, which makes me believe this is a lot about perhaps some politics involved, like maybe to protect the president, to get a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell that she would get some immunity now and maybe a hidden pardon in the future, some sort of implication that she would be pardoned in the future if she comes out and says that the president was exonerated, not involved in any criminal activity.”

Of course, we do not know whether Trump committed these heinous crimes. Like any American, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the mere fact of these interviews being conducted the way they are raises certain obvious suspicions.

Maxwell and her lawyers surely know all this. She has a lot of incentive, in other words, to say what Trump and Blanche want her to say. Oh, and by the way, let’s stop here again. Why should we believe a word she says? There is much-documented evidence of Maxwell showing a “significant pattern of dishonest conduct,” as Merrick Garland’s Justice Department put it in 2022. They spared her (and themselves, and their finite resources) a perjury trial because she’d already been convicted of the big stuff.

Even assuming Trump is personally innocent, he still has a motive to cut a deal with Maxwell that leads to an eventual pardon. She might name prominent Democrats or other people to whom Trump is hostile. Her “pattern” suggests she’ll say anything Trump wants her to say.

If you think Trump wouldn’t do this, that pardoning a child sex trafficker is a bridge too far even for Trump … honestly, wake up. I bet you also thought he’d never pardon 1,200 anti-American insurrectionists.

If Trump is innocent, there’s one simple thing he should do. Order the release of all the Epstein files. Ah, but now we know that his name appears in them “multiple” times and that he lied earlier this month when asked about it. (The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Bondi told him about the multiple mentions of his name back in May.)

How would MAGA world receive a possible pardon by their hero of a woman who did the things Maxwell did? Some percentage, maybe even a substantial percentage, would throw in the towel, finally. But I doubt a majority. They’ll find an excuse. Child rape is bad, sure, but it’s really only bad when Democrats do it. Trump was sent by Jesus, after all, and Jesus teaches us to forgive, so Trump’s joined-at-the-hip, 15-year friendship with Epstein was about as Jesus-like as you can get, right? The sad thing about that joke is that, if it’s ever revealed that Trump did unspeakable things, one of those sick “Christian” preachers will probably say this in all seriousness.

The administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal and the likely coming indictment of Barack Obama, which I’ll write about next Monday, take us to depths we never, ever imagined we could reach in this country. Trump is the law, the law is Trump. I’ve always thought that, as horrible as everything is, if there’s an election in 2028 and the Democrat wins, we can get back to normal fairly quickly. As of this week, I’m not so sure.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.