The estate released over 90,000 pictures to the House Oversight Committee and a few were released today. There are several of Trump, Dershowitz, Bill Gates, Richard Branson,Woody Allen, Bill Clinton and others.
There are also pics of sex toys and pornography and from what we can gather, those are the tamest ones. (I’m not here to judge adults’ sexual behavior but if these were used on underage girls it’s pretty gross.)
Get a load of this, though. It appears to have been taken when Bannon was doing a project with Epstein and helping with PR in 2018 and 2019. It’s impossible to believe that anyone associating with Epstein during that period didn’t know what he was up to.
Take a look at this creepy thing:
BREAKING: Zoom into this disgusting photo just released of Bannon and Epstein.
Note Steve Bannon was the CEO of the 2016 Trump Campaign, White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President. pic.twitter.com/axpF9lGV51
It appears that he had a picture of a women naked from the waist down lying on a couch appearing to be passed out? Is that what we’re really seeing there? Bannon surely saw it.
There’s trouble in MAGA paradise on this:
Trump has actually said that he cut off Epstein in 2007. And there’s some evidence that he wasn’t actually cut off at all, at least according to Epstein’s emails.
There’s been bad blood between Stone and Bannon for years and Stone (along with Elon Musk) has been saying for quite some time that Bannon is featured heavily in the Epstein files. Last month Stone challenged him to a bare-knuckles fight. “In the unlikely event that Steve wins, he can pay back the Epstein estate for the millions they paid him to rehabilitate his Pedo buddy’s image,” Stone wrote.
It’s getting hard to keep track of who hates who in the MAGA universe and I would guess it’s even more confusing for addled old Trump.
Stay tuned. The government’s files are supposed to be released next week.
THERE ARE MANY ITEMS on President Trump’s agenda that are hurting the U.S. economy: the pointless trade wars, the socialization of the private sector, the mass deportations, and much more.
But in the long run, the most damaging policy of all might be one that’s gotten scant attention, at least from non-finance-nerds: Trump’s quest to crush the Federal Reserve. If Trump succeeds, he may doom the United States to high inflation for years, if not decades, to come.
Bullying the Fed has long been one of Trump’s favorite pastimes. Way back in 2019, he called Jerome Powell, the Fed chair whom he had appointed the year before, an “enemy.” He’s continued the broadsides during his second term, repeatedly musing about firing Powell—including earlier this year. It got press coverage at the time, due to the resulting market wobbles—and a truly awkward visit Trump made to the Fed headquarters as some sort of intimidation tactic. But the firing never came. And when the threats stopped, most of the media moved on.
They shouldn’t have.
The threats to Fed independence have continued, and got darker this week. We may now be at an inflection point, as the Trump administration tacitly threatens to purge not Powell but other officials who set interest-rate policy. If he’s successful, Trump could seize direct control of the money supply and turn America into Venezuela.
For those of you of a certain age, as I am, this is a frightening prospect. People on fixed incomes do very badly in these situations. Not that the young do any better but they at least have the ability to work two jobs as I did back in the late 70s and early 80s. (Assuming the jobs are available…) Old people can’t. Someone needs to tell the elders who are still voting for the orange madman that they are showing the seeds of their own financial demise if they keep supporting him.
I’m still hopeful that the Fox News brain-rotted Supremes, who have shown themselves to be nothing more than rank partisans in almost every way, will draw the line at Trump taking over the Fed. Their wealthy benefactors can’t be happy at that prospect. Trump could kill everyone’s golden goose. Even today, most Masters of the Universe aren’t billionaires.
“The darkness of this administration is beyond anything I’ve ever seen”
If you too feel like you’re taking crazy pills, here is food for thought this morning.
ICE is nothing like professional law enforcement, but roaming gangs of masked thugs with badges. That is if they actually display any. But you knew that. Listen for the eight seconds of silence in this clip below, starting at 1:18.
So this was a Internal affairs meeting & they were asked if when ICE follows a person & jumps out at a gas station masked & wont present ID & the police are called do they verify that they’re really ICE & the answer from the Police Chief was No! These men are able to be fakes! pic.twitter.com/fWgstEg8Fa
Dan Friedman on Thursday reported for Mother Jones on Eric Geressy, Pete Hegseth mentor and Pentagon adviser. In investigating Geressy’s security clearance and reading habits, Friedmand found himself quickly threatened by Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate promoter and newly minted member of the Trumpified Pentagon press corps. (There’s some coordination there, you think?)
Rick Wilson tweets:
I did not have "Asian cuck porn" as the latest embarrassment to come from SECDRUNK Pete Hegseth's Pentagon, but here we are.
David French expected bad things from the second Trump administration. But not as awful as torture and summary executions. “The darkness of this administration is beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”
"This is the first administration in my lifetime where you say, it could be worse than my actual worst case scenario… The darkness of this administration is beyond anything I've ever seen."@DavidAFrench and @Timodc discuss Trump's second term. pic.twitter.com/KOuTUVMb4a
Donald Trump Sharpied the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on Nov. 19 under a “photo lid.” No pictures, none of his usual showmanship. The law gave the government — his government — 30 days to release to the public the bulk of its Jeffrey Epstein investigation files. That deadline is one week away: Dec. 19. So, one more week for the government to craft a “the dog ate my homework” excuse for minimizing or else doctoring what it does release.
A lot has happened since then, USA Today notes. A U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan on Dec. 10 ordered the release of grand jury records of an investigation into Epstein. Another U.S. District Court judge in New York the day before ordered the release of grand jury materials related to Epstein aide and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
It’s possible that not all of the documents will be released in the end, though. The law makes an exception for documents that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.”
The law also allows authorities to withhold records that violate victims’ privacy or contain sensitive material on child sexual abuse.
So there is reason to be skeptical about what we will see next week. Epstein survivors and a group of Democratic members of Congress have asked for an independent review of files to determine if any have been “tampered” with or concealed (CBS News):
In a letter Thursday to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the internal watchdog to undertake a formal review to check for any “chain of custody” problems with the Epstein files.
Speaking with CBS News, representatives of some Epstein survivors have also asked for a third-party review to check if any record has been “scrubbed, softened, or quietly removed before the public sees it.”
[…]
Thursday’s letter from Senate Democrats — including Sen. Adam Schiff of California — pointed to allegations that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel ordered a massive review of Epstein-related records, “which resulted in around 1,000 FBI personnel working 24-hour shifts and required personnel to identify any mentions of President Trump.”
“To reassure the American public that any files released have not been tampered with or concealed, the chain of custody forms associated with records and evidence in the Epstein files must be accounted for, analyzed, and released,” the request read.
Trump signed the law under pressure from an overwhelming bipartisan vote in Congress. That doesn’t mean his lackeys will comply fully. A belligerently defiant Attorney General Pam Bondi has refused to answer questions about her performance put to her by a congressional committee. Anyone who witnessed that can believe that if the boss doesn’t want something in the files released, she will do his bidding. Any investigations she launched at Trump’s prompting may give her the pretext.
Daily Beast suggests Trump may be setting up FBI deputy director Dan Bongino “as the likely fall guy” for whatever gets redacted or retained. TBD.
“I signed the Epstein discharge petition,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) posted to Facebook (with image at top) on Sept. 3. “The heavily redacted files released last night, 97% of which were already in the public record, won’t suffice.”
Since the deadline is a Friday on the weekend before Christmas, expect any release late in the day so to draw as little attention as possible. Whatever (or whomever) Trump is trying to shield from public view, don’t get your hopes up for sunshine on Dec. 19.
I read today that older people are still backing Republicans by a small margin. They really ought to rethink that unless they’re looking forward to dying on a ventilator:
Children’s Health Defense this week filed a petition asking FDA commissioner Marty Makary to deem Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID vaccines “misbranded” and revoke their licenses due to a lack of “compliance with FDA regulations.”
Its argument is based on the vaccines’ conversion from emergency use early in the pandemic to full approval later on.In other administrations, the move would be an extreme long shot. But Kennedy’s personal ties to Children’s Health Defense may improve its prospects. [Kennedy founded the CDF]
Meanwhile:Last season’s COVID vaccine significantly reduced kids’ ER and urgent care visits, per new CDC data.
Trump told him to “go wild” and there’s every indication that’s exactly what he’s doing.
I can’t imagine they’ll let him do this because Trump still has a fleeting desire to take credit for the development of the vaccines and he’s also a geriatric who had COVID so there’s some awareness of how bad it can be, just like tens of millions of others. So maybe he won’t let Bobby do this.
I predict that if he does it, there will be a massive senior citizen backlash.
We’re watching huge swathes of our fellow humans be attacked in the streets, arrested and otherwise harassed by the federal government’s police force. The assault on DEI is a thinly veiled racist attack on people of color by a group of white men and the women who love them.
But maybe those white women should stop and think a little bit about that. Michelle Goldberg wrote about the rebellion among congressional GOP women that shows there is some chafing among the female enablers. Leopards are starting to nibble on their faces:
Recently several Republican congresswomen have been complaining, on and off the record, that their party’s leaders, especially Mike Johnson, the House speaker, don’t take them seriously. It started with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a onetime MAGA icon who is resigning next month. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” she said in September. It turns out she’s not alone in her frustration.
Last week, The Times reported on Republican women in Congress who say that Johnson “failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues,” which they seemed to attribute to his highly patriarchal evangelical Christianity. (He recently said that women, unlike men, are unable to “compartmentalize” their thoughts.)
Media Matters has an excellent report on where the GOP is going with women’s rights and it is horrifying. We all know the Heritage Foundation has gone completely over the MAGA, white nationalist cliff. And it’s getting worse:
Heritage has now brought on Boise State University professor and anti-feminist crusader Scott Yenor to head up its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. As conservative pundit Henry Olsen notes at The Atlantic, the decision “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”
New Heritage hire pushes birth control restrictions and rollbacks to the Civil Rights Act
Olsen runs through some of Yenor’s lowlights, including pushing for laws that would let businesses “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage,” and his belief that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”
Yenor has repeatedly attacked the Civil Rights Act — a distressingly commonphenomenon in conservative media — telling a Mother Jones reporter that the landmark 1964 law “made it impossible and, in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.” Yenor’s opposition to the law extends to racist grievances too. A blog he co-wrote argues that “the 1964 Civil Rights act, and especially its administrative and jurisprudential offspring, have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.”
Heritage’s decision to bring Yenor on has generated significant support from right-wing media, suggesting that he’s more of an opening salvo than a random misfire.
Fellow Heritage staffer Emma Waters wrote that it was a “huge win for @Heritage to have Scott on board, and I’m glad he’s here.” Her colleague Genevieve Wood reacted to The Atlantic article by writing: “The entire premise of this piece is invalid and disingenuous.” Anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo argued: “Scott’s idea that private companies should be able to prioritize hiring married men with families is completely within the bounds of reasonable debate, and, in fact, it’s absurd that individuals cannot hire whomever they want in their own companies, with their own money.” (The Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on sex and other characteristics.)
The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world
Given Yenor’s recent output at Heritage — his author page currently hosts two pieces of writing — The Atlantic’s premise doesn’t seem invalid in the least. An October 29 blog headlined “RFK Should Grill the Pill” argues that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should consider imposing restrictions on hormonal contraceptives and that his seeming reluctance to do so is “to the detriment of women across the country.” Yenor and his co-author write that the “proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.”
The blog is hardly the first time Heritage has gone after birth control. Roberts took aim at the pill in his own book, writing: “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.” As Media Matters previously reported, Heritage’s sprawling presidential transition effort, Project 2025, “suggests restoring Trump-era ‘religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate’ through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage.” A separate Media Matters analysis found that at least 34 of Project 2025’s partner organizations “have spread misinformation about contraceptive methods or championed limiting access to contraception, largely on religious grounds.”
Myths about the supposed dangers of birth control have found purchase in social media and podcasts as well. By early 2024, right-wing influencers spreading misinformation about birth control on TikTok had racked up millions of views. Now, some elements of the Make America Healthy Again movement — which is closely associated with Kennedy — are turning against hormonal contraceptives, illustrated by prominent MAHA podcaster Alex Clark referring to birth control as “poison.” The rejection of safe and proven forms of health care extends to so-called tradwife influencers, who have advised young women to embrace not only a far-right definition of proper gender roles, but also “a general distrust of the government and modern medicine.” One prominent tradwife figure used social media to spread “anti-trans bigotry, opposition to sending women to college at 18, and disturbing messages like ‘any wife who denies her husband intimacy is acting against her marriage.’”
This is some real trad-wife nonsense:
Read on. Right-wing media figures are also urging women to leave the workforce. Aaaand they want to take away women’s right to vote.
It sounds ridiculous. But these people are extremists and they are accumulating power. If they could achieve even a small bit of this grotesque agenda, women will be much worse off.
It would be very foolish to assume this could never happen. They play a long game.
“I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically worked on my companies. And they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
I don’t know that people were burning cars. Nobody is for that. But there was a boycott on Teslas and his behavior sparked a consumer backlash against his product. Sales have been badly impacted by his involvement with Trump. There’s a lesson in that.
Sean Duffy: "People dress up like they're going to bed when they fly… We want to push people as we come into a really busy travel season, help people out, be in a good mood, dress up."pic.twitter.com/YT9ne8ylfh
— Feisty is proud to be a Democrat! (@FeistyLibLady) December 9, 2025
Dress in your good clothes and work up a sweat while you wait for your delayed flight. And when you are able to finally squeeze into a tiny seat like a sardine you can share your stench with your seatmates. That will totally improve the overall experience.
Airplane dress and airport exercise opportunities are the most important transportation issues facing us. Well, actually not. Philip Bump writes:
It remains the case that a good way to learn how people feel about things is to ask them. So you don’t have to simply assume, say, that people are hankering to work up a sweat before hopping onto a six-hour flight or that they think the central failure of the airline industry can be summarized as “sweatpants.” You can just contact a bunch of people over the phone and online and ask them to tell you what it is that they are concerned about.
Which is what YouGov did. And what they found is probably not surprising: The things that people find most annoying about flying are prices, delays and discomfort.
In fact, more than 6 in 10 Americans pointed to ticket prices as a major problem with flying. Half said the same of cramped seats, delays, hidden fees, and staffing shortages (which, of course, lead to delays). And waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom of the list came “passengers dressing too casually,” which only 8 percent of respondents described as a major problem.
Nobody voted for what they’re selling.
I’m with this manosphere podcaster:
Tim Dillon: "Secretary Sean Duffy urges travelers to dress up and be in a good mood. Hey Sean, fuck you. Shut the fuck up. How about you get the planes in the fucking sky, you scumbag, and shut the fuck up?" pic.twitter.com/D7nkjecYac
Perhaps most worryingly for Trump, who’s become increasingly synonymous with his party, he’s slipped on issues that were major strengths. Just a few months ago, 53% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of crime, but that’s fallen to 43% in the new poll. There’s been a similar decline on immigration, from 49% approval in March to 38% now.
The new poll starkly illustrates how Trump has struggled to hold onto political wins since his return to office. Even border security — an issue on which his approval remains relatively high — has declined slightly in recent months.
Here’s what passes for good news for Trump according to the AP: his approval rating is at 36% which is just down from 42% since March, and this signals that Republicans are still largely behind him.
Still:
Republicans are more unhappy with Trump’s performance on the economy than they were in the first few months of his term. About 7 in 10 Republicans, 69%, approve of how Trump is handling the economy in the December poll, a decline from 78% in March.
They note that many more Democrats abandoned Joe Biden at the same point in his presidency which should put to rest this notion that Dems are just as irrationally partisan at the Republicans.
50% give him high marks on “border security” but they disagree with his approach to immigration generally:
Jim Rollins, an 82-year-old independent in Macon, Georgia, said he believes that when it comes to closing the border, Trump has done “a good job,” but he hopes the administration will rethink its mass deportation efforts.
“Taking people out of kindergarten, and people going home for Thanksgiving, taking them off a plane. If they are criminals, sure,” said Rollins, who said he supported Trump in his first election but not since then. “But the percentages — based on the government’s own statistics — say that they’re not criminals. They just didn’t register, and maybe they sneaked across the border, and they’ve been here for 15 years.”
And this is more than just deportations. They’re closing off legal immigration and making it impossible for people to come here if they don’t have a million dollars which, according to Howard Lutnick, means they are better people. (Hah!) Now they’re even going to destroy the tourist industry with this new draconian visa application for all foreigners demanding DNA, all social media user names and social contacts going back five years and the names and addresses of virtually everyone they know. It’s more stringent than an FBI background check.
I can guarantee that if they actually start doing this nobody’s going to come here unless they absolutely have to. There are Disneylands all over the world. Nobody voted for that.
About 3 in 10 U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling health care, down slightly from November. The new poll was conducted in early December, as Trump and Congress struggled to find a bipartisan deal for extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies that will expire at the end of this month.
That health care fight was also the source of the recent government shutdown. About one-third of U.S. adults, 35%, approve of how Trump is managing the federal government, down from 43% in March.
Keep him on the stump Susie Trump. People need to see him saying that they can believe him or their lyin’ eyes. The Democratic ads write themselves.
