Category: Political issues

What a woke dog whistle sounds like

Paul Krugman links to this video in his Substack dispatch this morning — America will not die in darkness. The video has been watched almost 13 million times. Krugman writes about the video, “A few commenters on this video called it ‘woke propaganda.'”

It must be a terrible thing to be the kind of person who feels threatened by a group of happy young people singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But they hear the subtext, I think, and even a slow and illiberal mind catches on to the implication that the lion is going to wake up. It’s a woke dog whistle.

Until now I thought that the original of this song was the 1961 version by the Tokens, which reached No. 1 on U.S. charts. But actually the song was composed in 1939 by a Black South African, Solomon Linda. The subtext, I think, has always been there. Linda grew up desperately poor under apartheid.

The theme of Krugman’s dispatch is that fascist blacksliding in the U.S. has been remarkably fast compared with other fascist backslidings. Krugman quotes Steven Levitsky on Hungary: “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.”

The upside, as Krugman points out, is that the backlash in the United States has been huge and took the White House by surprise. We know now, months in advance, that Trump will try to stop or steal the November mid-terms. We also know now what will happen if he tries. It won’t just be Minneapolis that MAGA will have to reckon with.

Good riddance to you and your derp, David Brooks


Source: Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks, in his column today at the New York Times, writes that he is leaving the New York Times after twenty-two years of conservative derp-mongering.

One of the reasons that Brooks galls me to the bone is that he is incapable of ever doubting that he holds the moral high ground. No matter how wrong he turns out to be, he never questions his conviction that he has the standing to school the rest of us on the righteousness of derp, and to complain about moral decline without a trace of irony.

Yes, Brooks turned on Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But never for a minute did it occur to Brooks to doubt his reams of derp. Ever an elitist, he never imagined that 77 million non-elites would fall for what he himself had helped sell them for years. The Republican Party would restrain extremists, he said. The sublime moral fiber and righteous judgment of conservative leaders would prevent castastrophe, he said. As it turned out, Trump didn’t hijack conservatism. He only took it to where conservatism will always go unless something stands in its way. The institutions and elites that Brooks thought would make Trumpist extremism impossible in America instead collapsed instantly, and then submissively carried water for Trump, the law and the Constitution be damned.

The work of center-right discourse is a lot like money-laundering. Brooks’ entire career was about laundering the doings of the cunning and deceitful movement that got us to where we are today. He didn’t do that because he is corrupt. He did it because he is foolish.

Oh sure, his tone was always civil. Many fell for it — the idea that good prose equals good judgment. Over and over again, he got away with normalizing the right-wing movement, providing it moral cover, and scolding the left while ignoring the radicalization of the right. To Brooks, moral rot and moral danger were always to the left and never to the right. He probably was genuinely surprised upon finally seeing that it was just fascism all along.

And it’s not just Brooks. The entire center-right project, in all eras, has been the same, from Buckley to Kristol to Douthat. They all met the ongoing need for flattering self-interest and privilege with high-flown language. One could as easily program a center-right derp generator as a postmodern jargon generator.

In fact I asked ChatGPT to generate a David Brooks New York Times column. The first run sounded so much like Brooks that it probably would have made it through the New York Times’ editors with no changes. I asked ChatGPT to please include just enough parody that even a dense soul like David Brooks would recognize that somebody is making fun of him.

Center-right derp generator, David Brooks version

We are once again at an inflection point, which is to say a moment when everyone feels aggrieved and no one is entirely sure why. The left believes history is a spreadsheet; the right believes it is a vibe. Both are missing the deeper truth, which lives somewhere between a well-run PTA meeting and a pickup basketball game where the rules are politely enforced.

In recent years, we have developed an unfortunate habit of blaming “systems” for outcomes that are better explained by the quiet disappearance of virtues like self-restraint, neighborliness, and reading the room. Yes, economic forces matter — I’ve read at least three books that say so — but no society has ever tax-credited its way out of a character deficit.

What’s striking when you travel the country, as I do between airport lounges, is how hungry people are for moral coherence. They don’t want another policy white paper. They want to know why everyone is yelling and whether it’s still possible to raise a decent child without a graduate seminar in trauma-informed parenting.

Our public life has become performative, our discourse shrill, our certainties strangely certain. Social media rewards the dopamine hit of indignation while punishing the old-fashioned virtues of hesitation and mild confusion. We are all experts now, especially on subjects we encountered twelve minutes ago.

History reminds us — gently, but firmly — that flourishing societies depend on mediating institutions: schools, churches, bowling leagues, and whatever it was people did before streaming services. These spaces teach the essential lesson that freedom requires limits, preferably exercised voluntarily and by someone else.

The way forward will not come from radicalism or reaction, but from recommitment: to norms, to decency, to the radical idea that adulthood involves obligations. Progress begins not when we win arguments, but when we remember how to behave at hotel breakfast buffets.

Jonathan Rauch finally calls it what it is

Jonathan Rauch, in a piece posted this morning in The Atlantic, finally — finally! — has forced the mainstream media to say that, yes, Donald Trump is a fascist.

I regret that this piece is behind a paywall, because it’s something that everyone should read. And probably everyone in Washington will read it. If you have a subscription to Apple News, The Atlantic is included.

Here I must hasten to add that Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. We go back forty years and have always remained in touch. In fact he’ll be a visitor at the abbey in early March when he is in North Carolina for a speaking enagagement in Charlotte. My micro press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two older books by Jonathan that had gone out of print — Denial and The Outnation.

Jonathan is considerably more conservative than I am. We’ve had our tense moments in political discussions, but that has never impaired our friendship. I will admit that I recently said to Ken that Jonathan is always right — it’s just that he’s always ten to twenty years behind. Conservatism does that to people. (Jonathan has described himself as center right.) Jonathan and I have the same journalistic DNA. We worked for the same newspaper many years ago, the Winston-Salem Journal. Jonathan was one of the many ivy league graduates who flocked to the Journal for their first jobs after the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize. I was a whippersnapper copy editor and soon saw that Jonathan wrote perfect copy that needed no editing. He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and is the author of ten books.

His piece should get a great deal of traction, partly because of The Atlantic‘s reputation, and partly because everyone in Washington knows who Jonathan is, and they know that he is no leftist.

I hope Americans are now ready to go into full resistance mode, horrified and energized by Trump’s recent outrages, from Greenland to Davos to Minneapolis. Jonathan’s piece, I hope, will increase the confidence of Democrats in Washington and shame those Republicans in Congress who are still capable of shame. In her Substack dispatch this morning, Heather Cox Richardson quotes G. Elliott Morris, who pointed out that it would take only 23 Republicans to get Trump out of the White House — three in the House and twenty in the Senate. It seems pretty obvious that anyone who has the power to actually stop a fascist president, but doesn’t, is also a fascist.

Must Americans be taught a lesson?


Thomas Mann. He warned Germany, but they didn’t listen. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

If Trump stays on his current course toward global catastrophe, then he must be stopped. If Congress, the courts, and the American people fail to stop American aggression, then who can, other than Europe?

The 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump have no understanding of how what is happening in the world today recapitulates what happened in Germany not that long ago.

With Trump’s threats against Greenland, his obvious intention of ceding Europe to Putin, and his also obvious intention of putting down the Western democracies and divvying up the world for rule by autocrats, Europeans are in a terrible bind. They have been there before, and they have not forgotten it.

Are we getting dangerously close to a situation in which the world must defeat Trump because Americans won’t?

According to ChatGPT in research-assistant mode, half a million people left Germany between 1933 and 1945 when they saw where Hitler was taking Germany. Many of those were Jews. About 30,000 were political and intellectual exiles. Thomas Mann was one of them. As early as 1933, he moved to Switzerland. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States.

From America, Mann wrote a series of radio addresses to the German people that were broadcast into Germany by the BBC. Twenty-five of those radio addresses, from 1940 to 1942, are available in the public domain. As far as I can tell, the complete set of radio addresses in an English translation are available only in book form, recently published by Camden House: Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945.

Here is an excerpt from Mann’s address to the German people in May 1941. We Americans are now in the same predicament.

***

I tell you at the moment of your greatest — or perhaps not yet greatest — exuberance, that it will not be accepted, not permitted. Do not believe that you only have to establish iron facts before which humanity will bow in due time. It will not bow before them, because it cannot bow before them. However scornful, bitter, and doubtful one’s thoughts may be about humanity, there is, underneath all wretchedness, a divine spark in it, undeniable and inextinguishable, the spark of the spirit and the good. Mankind cannot accept the ultimate triumph of evil, untruth, and violence — it simply cannot live with them. The world resulting from a Hitler victory would be not only a world of universal slavery, but also a world of absolute cynicism, a world which would find it totally impossible to believe in the higher and better in man any longer, a world which would belong completely to evil and be subject to evil. There is no such thing; it will not be tolerated. The revolt of humanity against a Hitler world filled with the utmost despair of spirit and good — this revolt is the most certain of all certainties; it will be an elementary revolt before which the ‘iron facts’ will crumble like plaster.

The desperate revolt of humanity against Germany – must it come to that? German nation, how much more must you fear the victory of your leaders than their defeat!

Are you feeling the 1960s vibe?

Minneapolis is becoming a preview of what Americans will do if they have to. The video of what the people of Minneapolis did to the right-wing “influencer” Jake Lang ought to show Trump and MAGA what decent Americans think of their ideology, and what decent Americans will do if that ideology goes beyond the toleration of free speech to violent troops in the streets:

The right-wing comments on the New York Post video are interesting. For example: “Ah yes … the peaceful and tolerant left at it again.”

They still don’t get it if they think that there is no limit to what Americans will tolerate.

The true believers in the White House don’t seem to see the risks in Trump’s threat of new tariffs to punish Europe over Greenland. Greenland increasingly looks like the red line. Buy Greenland? They’re not selling.

If Trump actually sends American troops into Greenland, then how does he expect to stay in power with all the forces that would then be allied against him? — the American people, in the streets; Europe and Canada, with damaging economic sanctions; and, if we’re lucky, the American Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court actually enforcing the Constitution.

What would it take for the American military to stop taking orders from Trump? The true believers in the White House have already shown that they’re terrified that the American military might not take illegal orders.

I was just a young whipper-snapper journalist when I read Wallace Carroll’s Persuade or Perish (1948). The book was based on his experience as head of the U.S. Office of War Information from 1942 until 1945. The book’s theme is that even wars cannot succeed without persuasion.

I don’t think that we Americans have forgotten what we learned from the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. People in the streets can do a lot, but there’s also a lot of persuading to be done. Think Woodstock. And today we have more options than just protest songs. The Greenland video below is a fine piece of persuasion — both persuading people that they have the power to resist, and warning Trump and MAGA that trying to impose fascism and own the hemisphere definitely will not be a cakewalk.

‘One of ours, all of yours’

Social media, I understand, is buzzing with interpretations of just what it was Kristi Noem meant by the words “One of ours, all of yours” on the podium during a news conference in New York on January 8, after Renee Nicole Good was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

Some social media posts say it’s a Nazi phrase related to the Lidice massacre. Some say the phrase has something to do with the Spanish Civil War, and some say the phrase originated with Q-Anon. Neither I nor ChatGPT can find any good evidence for any of those citations.

Still, there are two important questions: Just what did Noem mean? And why did the mainstream media ignore it?

I think I can guess why the media ignored it. It was just another act of sanewashing. That such a phrase was actually used by an American cabinet secretary who commands thousands of men armed to the teeth should have provoked dozens of op-eds asking what it means, especially since pretty much everybody took it as a threat. Instead, crickets.

Noem, you’ll remember, is the person who wrote in a memoir about killing a puppy and a goat.

The phrase is intentionally vague. That’s to provide deniability. Is there a way to interpret it other than as a veiled threat of disproportionate retaliation?

Let’s try to game out the consequences


Greenland is getting warmer, in more ways than one. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

After what Trump just did in Venezuela, and after the unspeakably vile and repulsive Stephen Miller said that the U.S. has the right to take Greenland, it suddenly appears that the Trump White House might actually do something as stupid as to try and seize Greenland.

Politico has an interesting piece this morning: How Trump gets Greenland in 4 easy steps. It starts with a political move: propagandizing the 57,000 people who live in Greenland to declare independence from Denmark. That could be doable, because the people of Greenland like the idea of independence. But the second step would be much more difficult: getting the people who live in Greenland to become part of the United States. That’s not what they want. They want independence. Step 4 in the Politico scenario is a military invasion of Greenland.

Politico says that step 1, Trump’s propaganda campaign aimed at the population of Greenland, started as soon as Trump got back into the White House.

The Politico scenario looks all too plausible, almost as though Politico based the piece on sources inside the White House.

I have not seen a single story so far on what would happen next if the U.S. actually does seize Greenland. That there would be retaliation is obvious. Members of the NATO countries would immediately impose sanctions on the U.S.

I asked ChatGPT 5.2 to help me game out how the world would retaliate and who would join the opposition.

We should expect: Coordinated tariffs on U.S. exports, suspension of existing trade agreements, deliberate exclusion of U.S. corporations from trade negotiations, licensing delays or export controls on high-end products that the U.S. sells abroad, regulatory retaliation against U.S. banks and corporations doing business abroad, restrictions on investments in the U.S., non-renewal of existing contracts, suspension of intelligence sharing.

Who would join Europe in retaliation: Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia. Other countries might retaliate in milder or more cautious ways: India, Brazil, Mexico, other Latin American democracies.

Russia and China are wild cards.

This economic retaliation would cause an immediate financial shock. The market would sell off. Investment would be frozen. Interest rates would rise. Unemployment would rise.

The longer the sanctions continued, the worse the damage would become as the world economy builds supply lines that work around the U.S. The damage would start immediately, but readjustment inside the U.S. would be slow. Eventually a point of irreversibility would be reached.

To quote ChatGPT: The world can pull away from the U.S. almost overnight; the U.S. can only rebuild trust and integration slowly, if at all.

Suddenly we are describing a world in which the economic chaos and hostilities set the stage for the kind of counter-retaliations and miscalculations that would set the stage for World War III.

We can cling to such hopes as the idea that Trump is only trying to distract from the Epstein files. I have no idea. We might hope that Congress would see the danger and do something. But until there is a new Congress on January 3, 2027, that seems unlikely.

Wherever we are and whatever our circumstances, we’re all exposed to the folly of a Trump move against Greenland. We Americans would not be the first foolish population in history to be brought to ruin by madmen. We’ve always thought that it can’t happen here. I think we instantly knew after the November 2024 election that things would get worse before they get better. But now it seems that things could get much, much worse, and that unless these madmen can be stopped it will be a long, long time before things will ever get better.

There’s another very important thing that we will need to game out if things break bad around Greenland. That’s the American domestic situation. If the American economy goes into a tailspin, who will Trump blame? Scapegoats will be required, and those scapegoats must always be people who are within reach so that they can be slapped around. Would the Trump White House try to soothe the turmoil? Of course not. They’d do everything possible to inflame it. We don’t need to ask ChatGPT where that would lead.

The right-wing rage machine is sputtering


Trump rally, Manchester, New Hampshire, January 2024. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The fuel that sustains MAGA is right-wing rage. When right-wing propaganda can’t deliver enough rage, Trump’s popularity and approval ratings drop. Fox News viewers in the age 25 to 54 bracket were down 61 percent in November 2025 versus November 2024.

The job of the right-wing media is to constantly fuel the rage and demonization that it directs at anyone who stands in the way of the right-wing agenda. No ugliness is too ugly, and no lie is too great, if it generates rage. The corrupt moral nature of right-wing rage is such that it now even teaches that empathy is morally dangerous. That is, empathy for friends and family is virtuous. But empathy toward the wider world, because it leads to concerns about equality, fairness, and equal justice, is the very moral snare that liberals fall into. And liberals, of course, are evil.

But liberals are now out of power. Generating right-wing rage was easy when there were liberals with power who could be demonized — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. But a movement built on manufactured partisan rage runs out of fuel when the enemy disappears from view.

Some blame “outrage fatigue.” I don’t think that’s it. MAGA types are energized by rage rather than tired by it. Rather, this is a serious propaganda problem. If Democrats are powerless, then whom is the movement fighting? If Republicans control government, then why is life not magically improving? If Trump is president again, then why aren’t we great again? Without Democrats to blame, the rage machine becomes an ouroboros — a snake eating its own tail in search of the emotional intensity that its propaganda can no longer produce. The movement is starting to fragment as leaders who are addicted to rage and the politics of rage inevitably turn on each other.

Trump’s decline in approval ratings is partly emotional. Trump no longer provides the catharsis that MAGA types felt during the fuck-your-feelings and liberal-tears days. Trump is yesterday’s rage, warmed over, feeble, and increasingly unappealing.

None of this bodes well for MAGA’s future. But Republicans continue to have an enormous amount of power, and they will not hesitate to use it. They have two kinds of options. They can try to stay in power illegally with most of the country against them. Or they can smash a lot of furniture in an attempt to generate new themes of hysteria, rage, and fear that they hope will help them. They probably will do both.

An obstinate ostinato in a time of oligarchy


Yamaha P-225 digital piano

Though in my younger days I had a piano for many years, it had been 20 years since I owned a piano. A rather large organ console now occupies all the musical space downstairs (not to mention the ten speaker cabinets upstairs). To have a real piano again was out of the question for lack of space. But I finally acquired the next best thing to a real piano — a pretty good digital piano. I put it in my bedroom, the warmest and best-lit part of the house during the winter because of the big gothic windows.

Even when I was well practiced and at my best, I was a humble intermediate-level musician. My limit was in technique, not so much my musicality. That is, I can hear better than I can play. Many times in the past I’ve gone several years hardly playing at all, and my keyboard skills fall apart. Still, there is something to playing an instrument that is like riding a bicycle. The skills never completely go away. A few months of diligent daily practice will bring it back. Recovering rusted technique is much quicker than developing that technique for the first time. I went up to the attic and found my piano music. After a few weeks of playing scales, over and over, for at least an hour a day, I should be able to once again relearn the pieces that I learned years ago.

Computer nerd that I am, I’m very interested in letting a computer (or just an iPhone) play the piano, using the magic of MIDI. MIDI files are easy to find on the internet. However, most of those MIDI files are computer-generated. They sound mechanical and lifeless. They hurt the ears. There are MIDI files played by human beings, though, if you can find them. The MIDI files are created on special pianos that record what the pianist does with great precision. When played back on an instrument such as the Yamaha P-225, it does indeed sound like a real person is playing the piano.

Between 2002 and 2018, Yamaha had annual piano competitions in which the players’ performances were recorded on a special Yamaha grand piano. Those competitions produced thousands of human-played MIDI files. The MIDI files disappeared off the internet, though. But with some digging I found that the files still exist in an internet archive. Also, a few dedicated souls retrieved all the files and organized them. I was able to find them, and I now have the entire library on my computer. Those who might be looking for those files can start here, at the internet archive.

I made another very useful discoverty. ChatGPT can read, edit, and write MIDI files. For example, in the Yamaha archive is a performance of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat Major, Op. 90, D. 899. The pianist — probably a young one — pretty much murdered the piece by playing it too fast and much too heavy with the hands, particularly the left hand. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when a pianist has great technique but mediocre musicality. I had a fascinating discussion with ChatGPT about improving this performance. ChatGPT and I went through about ten iterations, in which ChatGPT made the MIDI changes I requested, and we ended up with a performance that is at least 75 percent as good as this performance by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

Many people have written about how to try to stay sane while the world is spiraling downward into fascism. Pretty much all agree that keeping civilization alive — even in small ways in our own homes — is an act of resistance.

Trump

Every day, the horrors seem to get worse. The Trump administration is trying to sell out Ukraine to Russia, with scum such as Jared Kushner in the middle of it, with plans to get rich off of looting Ukraine. Apparently Pete Hegseth gave a war-crime order to kill the survivors of a ship that had been blasted out of the water. Now they’re denying that Hegseth gave such an order, and they’re trying to throw an admiral under the bus for it. The new outrages have been so outragous that the media have temporarily forgotten Epstein.

There may be an upside. Republicans are starting to think about their political survival after Trump is gone. Trump has more than a year for more atrocities before a third impeachment becomes an option. Republicans seem to be learning that the political gains from ignoring Trump’s atrocities are starting to diminish. If Republicans have a brain, they’d support impeachment as soon as a new Congress convenes in 2027, and get rid of Trump for good. I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, how about a sonata or two.

A musical note: The words ostinato (Italian) and obstinate (English) come from the Latin obstinātus. The Italian word dropped the “B” as Latin consonant clusters were simplified. In music, ostinato refers to a musical pattern that keeps repeating, obstinately, even though the rest of the piece may have moved on — for example, an ostinato bass note or bass line.

One of the best known examples of ostinato pattern is the bass line that repeats over and over all the way through Pachelbell’s Canon in D. Listen to the cello:

And here you can see these notes in the score:

And here is something from Philip Glass, the patron saint of ostinato, in this case obstinately repeating arpeggios:

What just happened? Is there a fix in the works?

The media malpractice this morning is shocking. Yesterday the entire Congress voted almost unanimously to release the Epstein files. There is no way that such an event won’t end up as a major moment in American history. And yet, the New York Times’ web site this morning has the story way down below the middle of the page, with a small headline. Not only that, but the story is completely cowardly, all about politics in Congress without a word about what this means for the Trump presidency. The Times’ lousy, cowardly columnists, at least as of 7:30 a.m., were silent.

As usual these days, we have to look somewhere else for any helpful analysis. Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack post this morning was one of her history lessons, about Gettysburg. I had to do some digging around to discover that she posted a video late yesterday, before the Senate made its move. She pretty much covers what can confidently be said at this point.

I am a person who reads for information. It annoys the daylights out of me that the trends these days are more and more toward video. I detest video as a source of information. It moves too slowly. It can’t be quickly scanned for whether it contains anything relevant, the way text can be. Don’t people read anymore? It’s possible to download YouTube videos (with some special software), isolate the audio with an app such as VLC, then generate a transcript from the audio with an app such as MacWhisper — an awkward and time-consuming process. But at least it’s possible.

Anyway, in the video, Richardson discusses the question of whether it would be possible for Trump and his appointees to suppress or strip the Epstein files, if they actually are delivered. Her bottom line is that it would not be easy, because so many people know what’s in the files and because a unanimous Congress seems to be in no mood to tolerate any funny business. There probably are few people willing to be part of a cover-up for a president who is guilty as sin, who is weaker by the day, and who just might go down because of what is in the files. They can gamble on a Trump pardon, but now they know that a unified Congress (on the matter of the Epstein files, anyway) will subpoena as many people as necessary if there are any signs that the Epstein files have been tampered with.

I keep hoping that something of major importance happened yesterday. And yet Trump has slithered away from the law and the facts time and time again. Richardson says in the video that whatever happens, it’s going to take time. How sick are we of being patient for the spectacle of Donald J. Trump utterly destroyed, because of his own crimes?

Epstein aside, MAGA political calculus clearly is changing. Once the members of Congress calculate that Trump is more likely to cost them votes than to gain them votes, it will be every scumbag Republican for himself, every one of them. They don’t care whether Trump is a pervert and rapist. They’ve known that all along. All they cared about was riding the Trump wave — as long as that wave carried them up rather than down.

Update:

It took a while, but I transcribed the audio from the Heather Cox Richardson’s video (above) and asked ChatGPT to summarize it. Here are the results.

Summary of Heather Cox Richardson on the Epstein Files Bill

Heather Cox Richardson explains how the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill (427–1) to require the Department of Justice to release the FBI’s Epstein files, and what this reveals about Donald Trump’s weakening grip on the Republican Party and the difficulty of fully burying the Epstein story.

1. What the House just did

Shortly before Richardson went live, the House voted 427–1 to require the DOJ to release FBI files related to Jeffrey Epstein. These are not the same as the roughly 20,000 documents already released from the Epstein estate, which came via subpoena. The new bill targets the FBI’s investigative files, created after renewed scrutiny of Epstein around 2018.

2. How the bill got to the floor: the discharge petition

The key procedural tool was a discharge petition, which forces a vote once it has 218 signatures. After Democrat Adelita Grijalva was sworn in, she added the crucial signature, bringing the petition to 218.

Four Republicans signed the petition:

  • Nancy Mace
  • Lauren Boebert
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene
  • Thomas Massie

Trump and his allies put intense pressure on these Republicans to withdraw. They refused. Once a discharge petition is filed, it cannot be withdrawn, so the House was obliged to hold the vote.

3. Trump’s sudden reversal

Initially Trump fought to stop the bill. Then, on Sunday night, he abruptly announced that he didn’t care if the files were released, claiming he had nothing to hide and just wanted to “get it behind us.”

Richardson argues this is clearly tactical rather than sincere:

  • Trump has done everything possible to prevent disclosure of these FBI files.
  • The previously released estate documents already contain “career-ending” material, and he appears deeply implicated.
  • If he fears the FBI files more than the estate files, then those FBI materials are likely even more damaging.

The real reason for his reversal, she suggests, is that he had lost control of House Republicans. With rumors that up to 100 GOP members might back the bill and constituents demanding transparency, Trump tried to get in front of a vote he could no longer stop.

4. Trump’s weakening political position

Richardson stresses that many Republicans now fear being caught in a cover-up more than they fear Trump himself:

  • His mental acuity appears to be slipping in a way visible to the public.
  • His tariffs are economically damaging and may be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
  • His deportation raids are deeply unpopular.
  • His and his allies’ flirtation with open white nationalism (e.g., Nick Fuentes) is splintering the party.

Republicans are increasingly calculating based on their own political survival, rather than automatically aligning with Trump.

5. The Senate becomes the key arena

The bill now goes to the Senate. To move forward, it will almost certainly need 60 votes for cloture.

  • Democrats are expected to support it.
  • The question is whether enough Republicans will join them.

Some early signals are telling. Senator Tommy Tuberville, for example, has said he will vote for the measure now that Trump has publicly blessed it. Tuberville, eyeing a run for governor of Alabama, clearly fears that voting against the release would hurt him politically.

In short, Senate Republicans face the same dilemma as House Republicans: stay loyal to Trump or avoid being seen as complicit in hiding whatever is in the Epstein files.

6. Trump’s real bet: Senate obstruction and DOJ stonewalling

Richardson suggests Trump’s apparent openness is a stall tactic:

  • He is plainly hoping the Senate will bottle up the bill.
  • If not, he has already signaled he will insist that Congress receive only what it is “legally entitled to,” setting up battles over how much the DOJ actually releases.

His Truth Social language, she argues, is basically a “neon sign” that he intends to fight over the scope of any disclosure.

7. Why a full cover-up is unlikely

Drawing on her historian’s experience, Richardson argues that fully erasing the Epstein story will be extremely difficult, for structural and practical reasons:

  • Epstein operated among wealthy, high-profile elites using modern technologies: bank accounts, flight records, security cameras, digital communications, and so on.
  • The FBI seized many thousands of hours of video from Epstein’s New York mansion.
  • At least $1.1 billion moved through his accounts; bank records exist and are not easily destroyed.
  • There are more than 1,000 survivors, who know names, dates, and events.
  • Members of Congress can read their stories into the record under the Speech and Debate Clause, making defamation lawsuits impossible.

Her broader point: in a modern, highly documented world, powerful people leave trails. Burying a story like this requires silencing a very large number of institutions and individuals. It is possible, but historically the odds favor eventual leakage.

8. Why Republicans fear delay

Richardson notes that many Republicans are terrified of a delayed scandal:

  • The longer the issue drags on, the greater the risk that a major document dump hits in 2026 or 2028, right before key elections.
  • Some believe they must “rip the bandage off” now, rather than face an electoral catastrophe later.

As Trump’s ability to deliver votes diminishes and his toxicity grows, more Republicans begin to see him as an electoral liability rather than an asset.

9. Overall takeaway

Richardson’s core conclusions are:

  • Nobody yet knows precisely what is in the FBI’s Epstein files.
  • Trump’s own frantic behavior suggests that the files contain seriously damaging material.
  • Given the scale of the network, the number of survivors, and the density of modern financial and digital records, it will be very hard to keep the truth permanently hidden.
  • The Senate’s handling of this bill will be a key test of the Republican Party’s willingness to keep protecting Trump versus protecting itself.

From her historian’s perspective, Richardson argues that in a case like this it is ultimately harder to hide the story than to find it, especially once enough people decide they want the truth.