It’s the Epstein Files, Stupid: Using Empire to Distract from Vice

One might be forgiven for assuming that the man in the White House is a lunatic and Donald J. Trump certainly couldn’t be confused with the picture of mental health by anyone with half of a functioning brain in their skull. The man’s pathological ego appears to make him capable of literally believing his own lies with the truth standing naked in front of him, he has been credibly accused of more sex crimes than Albert Fish, and he seems to use the Executive Office as a giant hammer to throw homicidal temper tantrums with.

The last several months alone of Orange Man Mad’s second reign of terror feel a bit like an amphetamine blur of seemingly random war crimes and increasingly dictatorial outbursts. But as tempting as it might be to write all this mayhem off as pure and unadulterated lunacy, I do believe that there is a method to the madness, in fact, there is probably more than one.

Everything that Trump has been pushing at a manic pace this winter holds a place on the deep state’s to-do-list. With the American Empire’s finances and international reputation in tatters from decades of post-Cold War imperial overreach, the mandarins-at-be have been left with little option other than to refocus their war mongering endeavors on our own long neglected hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine while using their phalanx of nebulous forever wars on drugs and terror to consolidate their position domestically and keep an increasingly restless population in line.

All of this makes perfectly rational sense when you read the tea leaves carefully. What feels positively mad however is the pace and downright slap-dash delivery in which the Trump junta is carrying out such edicts. It feels as if Billy Burroughs took a deep hit off the opium pipe and then cut up the master plan with a big pair of scissors before haphazardly tossing the pieces together in random order. The only way to truly make sense of such harrowing disaster porn is to remember that nothing is ever truly random and attempt to read between the headlines in search of a recurring theme. Thus, amidst the madness, I myself have taken a long glance at Donald Trump’s Washington Interzone and this is the narrative that I’ve detected.

After months of empty promises to the toxic online manosphere largely responsible for the Donald’s post-January 6 rehabilitation, the fact finally became inescapable even for the most heavily deluded of MAGAloids that their hero was indeed the dog who didn’t bark and he wasn’t about to release the Epstein Files that prove it. Trump, misdiagnosing this flip flop as just another in a long line of broken campaign promises, essentially told his personality cult to chill the fuck out and get over it. This is when Trump’s approval ratings cratered and the people he had storm the Capitol began to call for his combover.

And then Donald Trump began bombing dinghies in the Caribbean before pounding his chest over the footage of these war crimes on live television while barking “I am not a pedophile!” And then he kidnapped some other broken democracy’s greaseball strongman in a highly choreographed reenactment of Apocalypse Now before declaring that nation’s oil to be American property and barking “I am not a pedophile!” And then he launched a military style invasion of the most annoyingly polite city in America with his orange guard of poorly trained federal goons tipping over small business’ in search of mythical Somalian kidney thieves while declaring the government’s inalienable right to shoot lesbian soccer moms in the face and once again barking “I am not a pedophile!”

Are we detecting a theme here? Is our cut-rate Ceasar’s unconscious perhaps coming in a little more consciously? Donald Trump spent 15 years palling around Manhattan and Palm Beach with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker. What the fuck did you think they were doing between rails of blow? Collecting stamps? The Orange Bastard is already a well-recorded sexual predator in his own right. All the young bros cheered when he bragged about grabbing em by the pussy. He didn’t take the time to get their consent, why would he check their IDs?

I know a thing or two about sexual predators. I learned the hard way by getting preyed on by them as a parochial concubine in the Pennsylvania Catholic school system at a time when that institution had essentially been converted into an open-air marketplace for any fiend with a white collar and a skip in his step. These motherfuckers don’t care about sex; they care about power. That’s their kink. Most of them aren’t even into kids; they just like the thrill of obliterating something so helpless, and when they work in teams, and they often do, they take turns upping the ante; challenging each other to greater depths of depravity, and pretty soon the 17-year-olds become 14-year-olds and the rape becomes pedophilia.

But even pedophiles hate being called pedophiles because it is a word synonymous even in the underworld with ‘bottom feeder.’ So, Trump is doing everything in his frightening power to change the conversation to quite literally anything else while his cronies in the Department of Justice play games with the files he finally agreed to release upon threat of mutiny.

Only half of the six million relevant files in the DOJ’s possession have been released and they were released weeks past the congressionally obligated deadline with hundreds of thousands of pages still redacted, much of which was scrubbed clean by the FBI back in March of 2025.

However, even censored, these pages contain damming information about the wealthiest and most powerful men on earth canoodling with a Mossad connected convicted sex offender. We have Trump’s biggest financier, Elon Musk, begging this cockroach for an invite to his notorious island lair. We have Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, making dinner plans in the Caribbean with the pervert in 2012 with his underage children in tow. We have Qatari sultans trolling for literal torture porn. And we have an unknown Epstein victim telling the FBI about being given a guided tour of Mar-a-Lago by the dog who didn’t bark and his master.

People are going to tell you that all of this shit is just a distraction from bigger issues, but the moral rot of our sainted elites has historically gone hand in hand with the rapid decline of their gilded empires as their crimes against humanity in the Third World are increasingly dragged back home to their boudoirs. People are also going to tell you that the disproportionate right-wing fury over the Epstein Files is just more proof that MAGA doesn’t give a fuck about brown people and they won’t be wrong.

But even the Aryan Brotherhood draws the line on pedophiles, and if we are going to bring our perverted Duce down, we are going to have to destroy the cult of personality he uses to manipulate rural poor people in my red neck of the woods.

We as a country also need to face the fact that rape culture is a menace infecting western society and that its source is not pornography or gangsta rap or even sexism. The source of this systemic wave of elite extracurricular violence is institutional power itself, in all of its forms, from the Nuclear Family to the White House.

We can take aim at both of these targets at once if we simply release all of the files unredacted directly to the public and use them for kinder in a bonfire that begins at the White House and ends on Wall Street.

No more excuses. No more half measures. No more victims. Only survivors with torches. That’s how we make America fucking great again. That’s how we make America fucking break again.

The post It’s the Epstein Files, Stupid: Using Empire to Distract from Vice appeared first on CounterPunch.org.