First of all, it was absolutely the right thing to do for the House of Representatives to overwhelmingly vote for the discharge petition ordering the Justice Department to release all the Epstein Files, and it was an even better thing to do for the Senate to deem the bill passed without debate or a vote. However, that was an entirely pro forma exercise; we can take some comfort that it was done, because it would have been heartbreaking if were not, but it won’t mean anything.
The vote came, of course, only after Trump reversed his desperate attempts to keep it from happening at all costs, and said that his Republican cult members in Congress ought to go ahead and vote for the bill after all. It may be that was enough for some of his enablers to breathe a sigh of relief that they wouldn’t have to cross a horrible line and condone pedophilia and human trafficking, but for others it was undoubtedly simply a matter of doing what Trump told them to do, as is their usual practice. Doesn’t matter, really; the outcome was the same.
We can draw two conclusions from this. The first one is that Trump is so narcissistic that he cannot bear the thought of losing under any circumstances, even to the point of risking losing just to be able to say it was his idea, and the vote didn’t go against him. The second conclusion is that, even as defective as that shows Trump is, there are enough people who, while as equally evil as he is, are smarter and far less deranged, who have hung their fortunes onto his continued existence as president, and who would have absolutely not let the vote happen if there was not a fair degree of confidence that it could be thwarted another way.
Trump could veto the bill; that would surely be overturned...or would it? I’m not so sure; the line taken by Grindr Mike and the few others who obviously voted against their wishes, i.e., that the bill violates victims’ and others’ privacy in some ways seems to be laying the groundwork for second thoughts. It takes more to overturn a veto than it does to pass a bill in the first place, so that might be an opportunity to kill it, from the Trump regime’s point of view.
Another thing that has been widely mentioned is that the Department of Justice could simply refuse to comply, on the grounds that the files are part of an “ongoing investigation.” Personally, I think that is the more likely thing to happen; Trump and his cabal have had close to a year of being almost completely unchallenged in straight-up ignoring laws and court orders, there is no reason for them to think this time will be any different. Even if public outrage and Congressional annoyance somehow force the DOJ to comply eventually – which will almost certainly require getting the question past Trump’s servile Supreme Court – the delay will be long, long enough even for the crude solution of just running everything through the shredder.
I hope I’m wrong. I would like nothing better than to wake up one morning to a headline that announces Trump has resigned in shame, and is being held without bond on child rape and sex trafficking charges, among other things. Double bonus if he gets stabbed to death in the shower of the jail by some other piece of human garbage who has a big problem with kid-fuckers. None of that is going to happen, nor is anything even remotely close to it going to happen; this scandal is not going to stop Trump, or even slow him down, and the only way we’ll finally see an end to the global nightmare he represents is when he leaves the White House feet-first in a body bag. God willing, that happens soon. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in God.
As a final note, if you Americans on the continent are curious about how this drama is being played in the rest of the world, the sad answer is that it is not. I see a bit of brief news about it off the wires from some of the European media, particularly those who have a bit of an anti-Trump bent anyway, but otherwise not a word. Especially not here in Asia; it’s a non-existent story, and even if it was a story, it is highly unlikely anyone in this part of the world would even care. It’s not that they condone sexual perversion and abuse of minors, on the contrary, they’re very sensitive to that; it’s just that America is such a monolith that the fact that a vicious madman happens to be in charge at the moment is kind of incidental. Sad!
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