Trail Notes
Epstein's back! / Trump loves inflation / Cage match coin con / Trumps win, investors lose / Mail-in ballot bout / Trump unchained / Ballroom bonanza / No Justice justice
Epstein’s back!
Just when you thought he had retreated to a dark corner of the Hall of Villains, voila, here comes Jeffrey Epstein, rising like some pedo Phoenix from his massage table happy place. His resurrection in the news comes courtesy of bizarre revelations in an excerpt from “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The pair are known for being particularly plugged into White House intrigue, and one or more members of Donald Trump’s inner circle shared with them stories of high anxiety and infighting over how to deal with the Epstein powder keg.
While publicly the administration tried to sell the idea that there is nothing more to see in the Epstein files—after some in the inner circle, including FBI Director Kash Patel and his former deputy Dan Bongino, had built lucrative podcasting followings by claiming there was so much to see—privately it was a very different story. According to the Times’ excerpt, top people in the White House and the cabinet met on multiple occasions without Trump in the Situation Room, the crisis management complex in the West Wing usually reserved for top secret military and intelligence matters, to thrash out an Epstein strategy.
Some, particularly Vice President JD Vance, argued for taking the transparency route. Release everything, he reportedly asserted, and point out that much of what might be said about Trump was uncorroborated. That included a mention of Trump’s supposed obsession with women’s nipples. No way that should go public, responded Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. She, perhaps more than anyone, knows how much the president wants the whole mess to go away. Bottom line, there’s new angst in the White House, now over who’s leaking this juicy stuff.
Trump loves inflation
Then there’s the inflation thing. In May, it climbed to a rate of 4.2 percent, the first time it’s been higher than 4 percent in three years. It’s now well above the average increase in wages of 3.4 percent. Nearly 50 percent of the inflation spike was driven by the high cost of gas and energy.
At one point Wednesday, Trump actually said “I love the inflation,” which probably has more to do with his cognitive decline than any affection for seeing Americans go deeper in debt. But he couldn’t have loved how the news about higher inflation, along with renewed bombings in the Middle East, tanked the stock market, his favorite barometer for the state of the economy. Dow Jones stocks plunged 950 points Wednesday, while the Nasdaq plummeted more than 500 points, or nearly 2 percent.
Cage match coin con
The Trump Organization has begun selling Donald Trump-branded souvenir medallions commemorating the Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House this weekend on the president’s 80th birthday. The “We the People” silver coins start at $250, but the gold version of the medallions are going for $11,999. The website promotion proudly notes that the coins were “designed” by the president himself.
Trumps win, investors lose
Meanwhile, a new analysis by Reuters concludes that the Trump family, with little risk, has made $2.3 billion from its four cryptocurrency projects. But investors in Trump crypto haven’t done so well. As of the end of April, they had lost roughly $2.3 billion.
Mail-in ballot bout
Trump’s federal government is trying to take another step in wresting control over elections from state and local governments. The U.S. Postal Service is now proposing that it won’t deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t hand over voter lists to the Trump administration. That’s a follow-up to an executive order the president signed that’s designed to dramatically restrict mail-in voting. So far, 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia are suing to block what would be an unprecedented federal power grab over authority granted to the states by the Constitution.
Trump unchained
As shocking as it was to see the White House East Wing tumbling down pretty much overnight, it was simply a preview of Trump unchained. He is now plunging ahead to tear down historic buildings and make reckless political appointments with the understanding that it will always be too late to stop him.
That questionable viewpoint was laid out bluntly in court the other day by a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney defending the construction of the president’s proposed ballroom. When asked by an appeals court judge if it’s too late to stop Trump’s pet project even if it’s found to be illegal, the DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said it probably was. Then Judge Patricia Millett asked if the courts would be helpless if Trump started dismantling the Statue of Liberty. Roth replied, “I think that’s right.”
Ballroom bonanza
Speaking of Trump’s proposed ballroom, an analysis by the nonprofit Public Citizen has found that more than half of the identified donors to the $400 million project, including Amazon, Lockheed Martin and Palantir, have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months. Most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration.
No Justice justice
Donald Trump has made no secret of his love of what calls “beautiful clean coal.” Apparently, that affection and generosity of spirit extend to coal magnates who don’t take environmental laws too seriously.
According to a new report by ProPublica, the Justice Department shut down an investigation into the coal empire owned by West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, the state’s former governor and a reliable ally of the president. Agents were probing multiple violations of the Clean Water Act by extensive mining operations now run by Justice’s son, Jay. In fact, Justice family coal mines have racked up thousands of alleged violations of the law. But not long ago, while prosecutors were still fighting in court for Justice coal companies’ documents, government attorneys were told “pencils down” by the office of deputy attorney general, then headed by none other than Todd Blanche, now acting attorney general.
Erasing immigrants
A government whistleblower released a report detailing how last year the Social Security Administration seriously considered classifying 2.7 million people, including some United States citizens, as dead, even though they were very much alive. It was supposed to be part of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.
Ultimately the Social Security Administration abandoned the plan, which would have used a government database to erase immigrants and others from the financial system, making it unlikely they could receive wages, open bank accounts, or obtain government benefits.
The whistleblower, Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s information-technology modernization efforts, said he wanted the public to understand how government data can be misused.
Social Security shortfall
One consequence of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign that doesn’t get a lot of attention is the impact it’s having on Social Security. Although undocumented immigrants can’t collect those benefits, they contribute more than $25 billion a year to the Social Security Trust Fund through payroll taxes. That’s one of the factors behind an estimate released yesterday that the fund will run out of money in 2032. Recipients would still be able to receive Social Security benefits financed through taxes, but payments could be reduced by as much as 22 percent.
National Parks snafu
As many as 1,400 National Park Service (NPS) grants are bogged down in a politicized bureaucratic process at the Department of the Interior. All grants valued at more than $50,000 now have to be approved by two political appointees, creating a huge backlog of projects handled by NPS contractors, such as trail-clearing and prescribed wildfire burns.
Meanwhile, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is launching an inquiry into how the Trump administration is taking money from National Park entry fees earmarked for park maintenance and using it for what Schiff and other Democrats described as “President Trump’s vanity projects” in Washington, D.C. Contracts reviewed by The Hill, a Washington-based political news outlet, show that at least $60 million in NPS funds are funding D.C. renovation projects ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday.
Jet fuel crisis
U.S. airlines spent nearly $6.5 billion on jet fuel in April, according to government data released Monday. That’s 78 percent more than they spent a year earlier, despite the fact that they actually used less fuel this year. To try to compensate, the airlines have been raising fares, but an industry trade group is already predicting that airline company profits could be cut in half.
Consumer gloom
One more gloomy report about how U.S. consumers are feeling. The latest monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the share of Americans who say they are worse off financially than a year ago is the largest it’s been since January 2023. Meanwhile, the share who think their financial situation will be getting better shrank for the fifth month in a row.
Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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Another pungent, comic piece by Mr. Rieland. Clearly, he understands that ridicule is sometimes a form of analysis. (Example:...' rising like some pedo Phoenix.' ) His sharpest ridicule isn't the wisecracks; it's the ability to arrange facts so that the punchline emerges naturally. Thus, the jokes aren't gratuitous decorations hung on top of the reporting; they are part of the argument. The humor highlights the absurdities that a more conventionally "objective" voice might describe without fully capturing. To me, it's almost as if his best satire comes when he recognizes that modern politics often arrives pre-satirized.