The country is captivated by the page in the Jeffery Epstein birthday book that appears to be a drawing and letter from Donald Trump. You know the details on it. The excitement is about the drawing.
What’s really troubling about the whole thing is that Trump seems to have been besties with a guy running a child sex ring. That doesn’t mean Trump was in on that, but it does mean that he used to hang out with some really disgusting people besides Pete Hegseth.
That aside, the response to the drawing has been all over: The drawing doesn’t exist. The drawing that doesn’t exist seems to exist, so it must be a fraud. The signature isn’t Trump’s. Joe Biden inserted the forged drawing/signature into the birthday book 20 years ago, knowing that it would be an embarrassment to Trump when he was elected a second time.
Congress is struggling with the release of the full “Epstein files” from an investigation of the crimes committed. They likely contain a lot of embarrassing information about powerful men in both political parties and business circles. Great. Bring it on. Expose them all, and the sooner the better.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has just ruled that when it comes to immigration enforcement, racial profiling is perfectly OK. ICE can detain people for looking Hispanic, speaking Spanish, or working at low wage jobs.
It used to be that arrests required “probable cause” to believe that a crime had been committed before arresting somebody. That’s an already low standard, but now working at a meat packing plant while brown is reason enough for an arrest, causing the person arrested to prove that they are in the country legally. Even if they were born here and are citizens.
Until they start rounding up Norwegians, people who look like most of us get a pass on that one. We don’t have to carry our “papers” with us all the time and worry that instead of picking the kids up at school, we will be hauled off to some detention center until we can prove our legitimacy.
That doesn’t feel right.
The U.S. military is pointing its weapons at U.S. citizens in American cities. That doesn’t feel right, either.
News broke this week that 2,000 people at a high school mountain bike race at Soldier Hollow were exposed to measles. There were “only” active cases reported. That used to be a year’s worth nationwide.
There are lots of ways to get hurt racing mountain bikes. Road rash is expected. Measles rash? Not so much.
The public health system has been demolished at the national level. “Make Measles Great Again.” Stand by for the reintroduction of polio and small pox.
Nobody has figured out a workable solution to climate change. We were making some minimal progress with stuff like LED lighting, roof-top solar, and phasing out coal-fired generators. Then we more than offset it with the new demand for the giant server farms that will store all our important TikTok cat videos and run the AI systems that will make customer service even worse.
But that wasn’t enough. President Trump promised the fossil fuel industry that if they would raise a billion dollars for his campaign, he would give them anything they wanted in terms of policy changes. EPA is defanged, coal is back in style, and renewable energy is pretty much off the table now. Make air pollution great again. Government policy is for sale to the highest bidder.
The Justice Department has become a Gestapo-like goon squad attacking officials who won’t play along. A member of the Federal Reserve Board apparently took out mortgages on two houses and claimed they were both “primary residences.” That probably got her a lower interest rate. Technically mortgage fraud.
They are throwing the book at her, while apparently several Cabinet members did the same thing on their multiple “primary” residences and are not being questioned. The difference is that she isn’t going along with Trump’s policy goals.
It’s all the stuff of banana republics, but what bothers me most is that Congress has disappeared for all practical purposes. The Constitution is clear that tariff and taxing power is congressional, not presidential. But we have completely arbitrary tariffs imposed, waived, exemptions sold to friends, and rates pulled out of the air by the White House alone.
Where is Sen. Mike Lee’s pocket Constitution now? Sen. John Curtis had been an advocate for addressing climate change, a real supporter of renewables as part of an overall energy policy. As that all gets hauled to the dumpster, what has Curtis had to say about it? Pretty much crickets. He voted to confirm this mess.
U.S. Rep. Mike Kennedy, who you probably never heard of even though you might live in his district, is both a physician and a lawyer. You would think he might have something to say about the dismantling of the public health system, or the importance of childhood vaccinations, or the spread of infectious diseases in general.
Nada. He’s been in office since January, and I doubt his constituents could pick him out of a police lineup. (Hint: He’s the non-Hispanic one.) He’s invisible, useless, but drawing a full salary just the same. The rest of the delegation is hiding under desks.
Demand more.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.