Trump's Only Move? Bury Epstein Like Mueller.

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It’s painful to see in real time.

After a decade of hordes, lone wolves, and every white person in my replies screaming “That’s a distraction!” we’ve seen one of the most obvious and, possibly, efficient distractions in modern human history.

The online conversation around the Epstein files was spiking in X, MAGA's favorite online glory hole, until July 18th.

Yep. You guessed it. Coincidentally, that day, Tulsi Gabbard began her attempt to reheat the Durham investigation and pretend there was anything wrong with how President Obama handled the 2016 election, which he bent over backward (too far, imo) to make as fair as possible.

As Marcy Wheeler explained, this was simply another squirrel.

For those Americans who didn't pay much attention to Trump's continued efforts to criminalize the Russia investigation, nearly all of us, this clumsy sleight of hand probably feels unique in its brazenness.

But this is how transparently this whole gold toilet-seated shit show has gone down from the beginning.

It's all birtherism. It's all a clownish concern troll that catches on because it plays into some bigoted angle and is retrofitted into prosecutions or policies or both that match the bigoted aims conservatives and rightists have been pursuing since the Supreme Court said their kids might have to go to school with Black kids.

From the most corrupt first-time candidate in possibly all human history, destroying his opponent over accusations around the crime of using a home email at work to framing the president of the United States and his son for things you and your kids do before every breakfast, without America even noticing what was going on, Trump's cover-ups are always messy, obvious, and gross.

Trump has been pretending for almost a full decade that investigating how Russia interfered in our election, often by wooing Trump guys eager to cash in on their connection to the candidate, was a crime in itself. And it all began with the "dossier."

When I saw this post from Marcy Wheeler, all of Ball of Thread—her series on how Trump used the grievances born out of the Russia investigation to bring us to the brink of fascism—flashed before my eyes.

It made me think that you could remake Ball of Thread over again, told in chapters about each of Trump's associates who were convicted of crimes. And the epilogue would be Maxwell. He's turning his Ghislaine Maxwell problem into an opportunity that bears a striking resemblance to the last lifeboat.

We tried very hard in Ball of Thread to help America understand the unprecedented American history that unfolded due to Trump's mostly ignored fascist war on our institutions, AKA the deep state, that began in parallel to the Mueller investigation and has outlived it by what feels like millennia.

But anyway, I need people to know that this cover-up can work for a simple reason. Trump has the means and magic to do the one thing you need to do to win an argument in America: repeat yourself until the other guy shuts up.

Trump has a plan. HE'S TELLING YOU HE HAS A PLAN. HE'S COACHING YOU IN THE PLAN.

And he's not hiding it in any way because he thinks he doesn't have to. Why does he think he'll get away with it? Well, so many reasons. It's the Norman Vincent Peale in him. It's that he believes we're incidental to his life. It's that he thinks he has us that cooked.

But mostly, it's because it worked before.

Take the crime of the century and replace it with an invented crime that drives your base wild.

And he's using the exact same invented crime on the exact same people!

Will it work this time? Will Trump crush the Epstein furor the same way he erased or reversed the impact of the Mueller investigation?

You could easily argue that this is different in many ways. I believe Trump has broken a lot of brains, and the QAnon stuff toys with the dynamite of untreated trauma in a way that will likely require demolition experts to clear, if we ever can.

The reason I call my newsletter 'THE FARCE is that we're reliving a lot of history as farce, and it's so comically grotesque and repellent to us, we can't even describe the situation accurately without sounding deranged ourselves.

But our inability to stare directly into the orange glare of this fascist takeover of our lives hasn't worked for us so far. We need better ways to explain to people what's happening. And what they can do about it.

More on that coming... this weekend.