Criminally insane idiots & incoherence

Adam Serwer wrote a book during MAGA’s first term in the White House entitled The Cruelty is the Point. Very true. Millions of those who are devoted to Trump love his cruelty, which they believe is not a sign of painful weakness by one of strength. Killing over 100 unarmed men in small boats on the ocean, and almost that many during an illegal FBI/military incursion into Venezuela to render its president to a US court, is heedlessly, idiotically cruel. His people love that he does this kind of shit.

Trump accuses Venezuelans of smuggling fentanyl into the US and has Hegseth kill them a thousand miles from our shores, blowing up and sinking their small boats and then killing survivors. When the corpses wash up on land, along with pieces of their boats, not a trace of fentanyl is found. Smuggling drugs is not a capital offense, even if proved with a mountain of seized fentanyl. Even if you are a strongman dictator like Rodrigo Duterte, currently cooling his jets in a prison at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for his extrajudicial executions of suspected drug dealers. Still, the cruelty of this random, impossible to justify mass murder, and the unappealable violence of it, excite the grievance-drunk lynch mob that is Trump’s electoral base.

The cruelty is certainly the point, but equally essential to fascism is incoherence. If your explanation for your illegal, murderous actions is completely incoherent, self-contradicting, ridiculous, stupid, senseless, plainly false, a series of constantly changing brazen lies — well, congratulations you have escaped the trap of Reason. No argument can succeed against relentlessly asserted incoherence. Incoherence embraced by the faithful, unchallenged by trusted mass media, equals absolute control.

Ask the Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Diet Coke bringer Little Marco Rubio [1] what the legal authority for a bloody extraction of a foreign leader is. That this violent, murderous attack on a sovereign nation violates the UN Charter the US signed is beyond question. It is an act of war to kill 80 more people, including civilians, to seize and render the head of a foreign country, and his wife, to “face the wrath of the American justice system” as cruel idiot Pam Bondi styled it. The Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Ethics Advisor/cheerleader will mumble and fumble and give no hint of any legal authority for the mass killing in Venezuela, or the kidnapping, except to speak of leverage and whatever evasive drivel happens to seep out. He will blandly deny the assertions of his commander-in-chief while dodging questions and becoming increasingly indignant. Corporate media will not embarrass him too many follow ups, particularly once the guy gets testy and defensive. And so it goes.

The cruelty is the point, it frightens the opposition and thrills millions of sadists whose only real pleasure is the deliberately inflicted pain of others. The incoherence is also the point. There is no argument with a willful tyrant who wields incoherence as his final rationale. Ask Mr. Hitler.

As usual, a complete and coherent account of the illegal invasion of Venezuela comes from Heather Cox Richardson.

Epstein at Trump’s second, or third, wedding.

From The Onion, America’s finest news source.

[1] Little Marco’s actual titles: Secretary of state. Acting administrator of the (dismantled, defunded) U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. And now interim national security adviser to President Trump.

Whatever they say, whatever proof they claim to have, it never happened, none of it!!!

“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

If this testimony had been aired live, two days before the law required all of the Epstein files be made public, imagine the shit show, even on Bari Weiss’s CBS. That’s why it happened behind closed doors, why Trump’s puppets waited until New Year’s Eve to release it. Jim Jordan, a belligerent cretin whose claim to fame is that as a college wrestler he was impossible to pin (like when he was assistant coach watching college wrestlers being sexually abused by his boss, and since) was completely overmatched by Jack Smith. Smith made the clear case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow election results after losing the election in 2020. There is no doubt that the events were set in motion for the benefit of one man, Donald, and the amoral billionaires who are his chief benefactors/beneficiaries. To wit:

Meritocracy

Here are the two slam dunk federal cases against Trump, in a nutshell. He violated the Espionage Act by illegally taking classified documents with him when he left the White House. He “negotiated” with the Department of Justice and the National Archives for a year about retaining the documents, lied about having classified documents, claimed he could declassify them with his mind, had his lawyer lie in a false affidavit that he’d already returned them all. There was probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. The FBI found file boxes full of illegally retained government documents, including classified ones. There is not anything alleged about any of this. His obstruction of justice, his lies, his lawyers’ lies, his illegal retention of the documents, all matters of public record. Only Clarence Thomas, in a note to Venezuelan-American judge, lame duck Trump lifetime appointee Aileen Cannon, got Trump off the hook for this one, by declaring Jack Smith illegally appointed (spoiler alert, he wasn’t, he was only appointed too late to do his job).

The Washington D.C. case is equally straightforward. Trump knew he’d lost the election, he was told several times by his closest advisors, as they later testified under oath. He continued to lie about iihht (and $50,000,000 was dumped into an ad campaign to promote this lie). He worked with fake electors from several states in a scheme to throw the election to the GOP majority (by state) House. He called election officials to twist arms in states he lost. He had operatives accessing voting systems, bringing frivolous lawsuits, spreading knowingly false information. He called for a crowd to assemble in Washington D.C. for the morning of the certification of Biden’s win. He whipped up the crowd for an hour and urged them to parade (without a permit, which would have mobilized DC police to supervise it) to the Capitol to “peacefully” fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore. As the riot unfolded, and before his allies fled for their lives, e called his allies in Congress urging them to execute the plan to illegally keep him in office. He watched the riot live on TV for hours. It was with great reluctance that he finally made a video telling the rioters to go home (none were arrested), that he loved them, that America would never forget this day of love.

Just to prove his great fuck you to democracy had been perfectly righteous, on his first day back in the Oval Office he pardoned all of the rioters who were found guilty of violent assaults on January 6th. A Day of Love. 2020 was a stolen election, ask any current GOP member, they all wriggle away from answering that Biden won. “Well, Biden was the president…” they will say. Yep, he was.

Meantime, a robust 1% of the Epstein files have been made public (with massive redactions) by the most transparent administration in US history under (and in defiant contempt of) the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump himself signed into law. Do not compare the murderous, compulsively lying Mr. Trump to Mr. Hitler! How dare you?!! By all means, dude, illegally invade a South American country and render the leader and his wife to … CECOT? What could go wrong?

Healing does not come all at once

For those who can heal from abusive treatment by those who were supposed to take care of us when we were helpless, or from dear lifelong friends or family members, the process can take a long time. Decades of programming were involved, making us believe that we were the problem, that only we could fix something that is by its nature unfixable. If someone is damaged enough to consistently abuse people they claim to love, there is nothing the improperly loved one can do about it. There are several distinct steps an adult can take to this healing. There is no timetable for this, I’m sorry to say, but it is encouraging to know that healing can 100% happen.

The first step is to understand the dynamic. You are forced to present a false, always conciliatory face to those who treat you unkindly, particularly right after they mistreat you. This is an iron law of abusers — they blame you for making them treat you harshly. Nobody has ever consistently abused another person without putting the entire blame on that other person. A person who acts abusively actually believes they are justified in acting that way. They are damaged beyond hope of changing, most of the time. It is hard to believe this of someone you love, but the first step for getting out of a sick relationship is seeing it for what it is. If the entire relationship rests on you being eternally conciliatory, always accepting the full blame for any conflict, you are not in a healthy relationship.

The second step, I think, is listening to your body. Your body often knows the deal before your conscious mind does. Your muscles tense, you feel exhausted, your lungs hurt, your digestion gets disrupted, your body will give you all the signs you need that something is very wrong. Cause and effect demonstrates that if all of these things happened right after a confrontation with someone who can never be wrong, you need to understand what your body is telling you. You may want to believe you can work things out with anyone, particularly a longtime loved one. Your body will tell you, without any ambiguity, that you can’t work things out with someone who angrily demands you recognize that they can never be wrong and that all anger is your fault alone.

The final step, once you understand you are dealing with an implacably angry person who can’t be wrong, is to truly stop caring what these abusers say or do. If you can’t have a reasonable conversation and work out any conflict with a loved one, you don’t have a relationship worth saving. This addition by subtraction is a wonderful gift to give yourself. Once you truly internalize the necessity of doing this you are prepared not to fall into the trap of the charming person who idealizes you in order to use you and mistreat you, whenever the occasion demands. It is a beautiful feeling to finally know there is nothing better you can do than avoid this type. And that you now have the tools to avoid these fuckers.

The cherry on top is when you realize you have no feelings about it afterwards, outside of relief. When you stop brooding over what you’ve allowed yourself to endure at the hands of a damaged person, when their name brings up little feeling, when you have no doubt that you’ve done the only sane thing, that feels very much like a deep wound has finally healed.

The most transparent administration in US history

In a twisted way, this statement, a mantra of loyalist Karoline Leavitt, is absolutely true of Trump “No guardrails, wheeeee!!!!” 2.0. They are transparent in their unified contempt for the law, the government and in their open corruption. The administration is completely consistent in this, even violating a law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, that Trump himself urged his party to vote for and then signed into law with a Sharpie. They are consistent in lying, about election fraud, “stolen elections”, the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”, the grocery prices hoax, the Democrat [sic] health insurance hoax , the ongoing murders in the Caribbean hoax, the Democrat [sic] hoax about Epstein and Maxwell, prosecuted by Biden’s weaponized DOJ (brought by devout communist AG Bill Barr) and virtually everything else, including too many witch hunts to count.

The other day “the most transparent administration in history” apparently released the records of the “assassination” attempt on Trump during a campaign speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, right before the Republican convention in 2024 (though I could find nothing about it online…perhaps I was informed of it by someone who was uninformed). One person behind Trump on stage was actually murdered, proving real bullets were shot toward Trump and the hand of God Himself spared MAGA’s Chosen One.

The ear torn by a bullet, treated at a local hospital, bandaged as Trump gave his campaign speech at the convention, MAGA all wearing sanitary napkins on their ears in solidarity, magically healed, without a trace of a scar, a few days later. Medically impossible, but a modern day miracle showing, to the credulously faithful, the favor and grace Christ has bestowed on one particular flawed vessel.

The hospital records of Trump’s visit? Top secret, like his grades, his test scores, recent MRI, the subjects of countless non-disclosure agreements, any Epstein files involving Mr. Trump. The mass media to this day treats the highly suspicious events of that day as an unquestioned assassination attempt, carried out with exquisite political timing by a young man who was killed within seconds of firing the shots and cremated virtually immediately. Nothing to see here!

This may well be the most transparent administration in US history, taken by its actions. It is quite clear to anyone outside of the rightwing cult what they are trying to do, what they’re in the process of doing. They make no bones about dismantling the hated “administrative state”. They are open about setting up a network of lucrative, privately owned concentration camps, reserving the absolute right to detain anyone they please, rough them up, send them anywhere in the world, shoot them if necessary. They are transparent about their hatred of their deranged enemies and their love of fossil fuel. They are transparent about their desire to increase suffering and torment on the bulk of the population until heads start to explode, violence erupts and they can start carrying out the long-cherished plans of the evil billionaires who have been funding them, and exploiting a bent version of militant, white Christianity to their own, very unChristlike ends.

If quaint abstractions like “contempt of court”, “obstruction of justice” and “abuse of power” are Libtard Queer Trans Muslim Jew Mexican Colored hoaxes, then the rest makes perfect sense. And they are absolutely transparent about that. Down to the masks worn by their unidentified “law enforcement” goon squads collecting detainees for the for-profit detention centers and their shareholders.

You and I may have a different idea of what transparency really is, but nobody is asking us. And besides, Jim Jordan just released the entire recent eight hour behind closed doors grilling of Trump persecutor Jack Smith. Who’s the transparent one now, cucks?

Living in the modern world

We may not question that the greediest and most ruthless among us have every right to rule, since they are the fittest, the most motivated, the most special and the most entitled.   If you only have $100,000,000 there is no reason you shouldn’t have every right to go for ten, a hundred or a million times that.  It is only jealously on the part of losers that could account for a failure to realize that acquiring more money than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes is simply the highest expression of freedom.  Ask the Free Market, consult the Invisible Hand, consider the Finger.

Your new doctor agreed you were right to want to rule out cancer before undergoing another operation on the same organ.   You take an MRI.   A few days later a bot will send you the MRI results, because — of course they will.  If it’s bad news your doctor will call, and sure enough, the next Monday morning, his office calls to wake you with the news that your doctor needs to speak to you.  He can talk by video in one week.  You put it in your calendar and try not to worry until you get actual bad news.  A few days later the office calls to tell you that the doctor will be doing surgery during your appointment and will have to reschedule.  Of course.  He can talk to you the following week, they tell you.  You put it in your calendar and try not to consider it, though your sleep suddenly turns brittle and you wake exhausted each day.

You must get the idea of murderous corporate medicine out of your head.   Doctors have to work for large medical corporations in a capitalist system in order to practice medicine — the equipment and facilities they use are fantastically expensive.   If a doctor is too busy for two and a half weeks to give you bad news, whose fault is that?   He is busy saving lives and earning his keep at the corporation by performing surgery. It is absolutely nothing personal, and you have to understand that.   If you are a whiner who needs a doctor to hold your fucking hand, whose fault is that?  That’s why the market created “concierge doctors”.  Pay or quit whining.

This is simply the way the modern, end-stage capitalist world works.   You can bang your head against it or shut up about it.  Or you can write a meaningless blahg post that three or four people might read.  It’s really up to you, in this exceptional land of the free and home of the brave.

And good luck with your fucking fears, asshole.

This is why wealthy fascists paid Bari $150,000,000 to run a former flagship news service

“Anti-woke” influencer Bari Weiss was chosen to run CBS news by billionaire Trump donors/CBS buyers Ellison, father and son, because they like the cut of her jib. She can look woke cucks in the face and own them. The Ellisons paid her $150,000,000 for her blog when they hired her as Editor-in-Chief of CBS. Here’s an email Weiss wrote to CBS news staff after killing the story of hundreds of humans rendered, without any legal process at all, to an El Salvadorian torture prison for indefinite detention and abuse.

Our mission?   Media monopoly, owned by oligarchs, promoting curated “news” supportive of the regime’s policy goals to implement permanent one party, totalitarian rule?   Hmmm, I guess that tracks.  It may indeed seem radical, on a slow news week when nothing of great national consequence is happening, to kill a carefully vetted story damaging to the fulfillment of their mission.   

Slow news week.   The DOJ violating a law the president signed, withholding 99% of files in a brazen, lawless attempt to protect an actual cabal of powerful, untouchable pedophiles, likely also including their boss, an adjudicated rapist  — slow news.  The chaotic serial dumps of thousands of compromising documents relating to notorious pedophile, teenaged girl trafficker and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, including numerous mentions of his fellow “playboy” the president, and the sudden “discovery” of a million new files … a very, very slow news week, you dig.  

At least Rupert “Fair and Balanced” Murdoch’s FOX news can straighten this CBS kerfuffle out. CBS may have indeed have had a reasonable, even if dubious, or possibly spurious, rationale for killing the story:

Psychopaths will be psychopaths

Yawn, very slow news week.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.

The cover-up is shameless, the crimes, much worse

Those who exploit underage children for sexual gratification are probably the most universally despised group of men in the world.  I’ll leave the reporting of Trump defying a law he himself urged Congress to vote for, and signed with his customary Sharpie, to the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson who gives a complete account of the scope of the Trump DOJ’s brazen crime.    Here’s Trump criminal attorney, now number two in the DOJ (and smells like it, too) Todd Blanche, incoherently channeling his inner Roy Cohn. “The absurdity of us pulling down a single photo because Trump is in it is laughable.” Well-said, asshole, no argument here:

Heather gives every detail you need to know about the dick-fingered coverup of Donald’s bestie Jeffery Epstein’s pedophilia club for rich white men.  One thing she didn’t mention is that the Department of Justice [sic] has 300 GB of Epstein files in their possession and has released a hefty 3 GB, on the very last day to “comply”.  

American media treats this, in virtually every account, as the release of a fraction of the records, but, let’s be fucking clear, that “fraction” is 1/100th. Coincidentally 1%, just like the wealthy, powerful child rapists being protected by our criminally inclined DOJ. Heather continues:

Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actioyns that last more than 60 days.

What Heather doesn’t go into in this piece is that Trump, illegally creating an “agency” to let Musk slash agencies that were investigating the businesses of the richest man on earth, not only violated the 1974 Impoundment Act, it also resulted, directly, in the deaths, so far, of at least half a million poor people, many of them children. It’s hard to get the numbers, and nobody’s paying much attention to them in the media, with the Orange Polyp performing his stinking shit show around the clock, but the footnote gives you some idea of the scope of the mass deaths from his violation of the Impoundment Act and his recission of the budget that was allocated to prevent these deaths. [1] Here’s the skinny from an extremely dry, bureaucratic account of this mass death:

Relative to FY2024, declining obligations to global health implies the potential for 1.1 million lives lost per year if these trends continue.

Similarly, the 1973 War Powers Act which requires a president intent on waging war with the US military to get consent from Congress, once the unauthorized killing and military escalations have gone on for more than 60 days. All of those estimated 100 men killed in the Caribbean, their boats blown to shit because “narco-terrorists” equal “enemy combatants” and, according to a lawless regime, may be killed without evidence or any coherent rationale, were murdered in acts of state-sponsored piracy on the high seas.

[1]

For humanitarian and food aid [alone], the decline suggests the potential for [an additional] 490,000 lives lost per year, bringing the total lives at risk from aid cuts to 1.6 million lives lost per year if obligations do not revive. Compared to FY2023, this falls to around 670,000 [additional] lives lost per year.

source

CECOT? There’s no such thing as El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, says Bari Weiss, anti-woke news czar of CBS

60 Minutes, the famous hour-long weekly CBS news digest, was set to air a piece about the brutal conditions in El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, CECOT. This is the prison Kilmar Abrego Garcia and about two hundred other men were illegally rendered to, under the direction of Trump’s repugnant henchmen, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller and puppy killer Kristi Noem (she, in defiance of a federal court order).

Under our law a person must have a chance to defend himself against illegal detention (this right is called habeas corpus) before he can be sent to prison, particularly in another country, particularly one known for torturing its prisoners. 60 Minutes did a fairly harrowing piece on the prison, including several interviews with people sent to CECOT by Trump.

These men, all non-criminals, were illegally imprisoned, for a sadistic indefinite sentence and brutalized on video in the El Salvadoran dictators, notorious torture complex. The piece on CECOT passed all legal vetting and editorial standards meetings at CBS. It was scheduled to air last night. Bari Weiss killed the story. Robert Reich covers the horror of it beautifully here. This is the letter the segment’s producer wrote to her news team:

News Team,

Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.

I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.

Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.

We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.

If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.

These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.

CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.

We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.

I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.

Sharyn

No good dictator will tolerate truthful reporting on their abuses — like the hundreds illegally rendered to CECOT torture prison in El Salvador last Spring. Here’s the story Bari Weiss killed, on behalf of the guy with the “alcoholic’s personality” (and the 1% on whose behalf he acts), the increasingly demented Orange Polyp, on behalf of billionaire Trump donors/media monopoly entrepreneurs Larry Ellison the elder and Ellison the younger. Ellison the younger is the basic Jared Kushner, though with less access to the president, so far.

The piece was actually on YouTube for a little over an hour today, before the billionaire son of a billionaire, Ellison the younger, made sure his legal team was striking this video (shot off a  screen, aired in Canada, if I recall) for copyright violation. 

For the moment, at least, you can see the entire segment here

USA! USA!!!!

This was put up earlier today by Senator Cory Booker. I saw it at 2 pm, I was about number 200,000. Early the next morning 1,100,000 people had seen it. Give it a like!

Epstein Eve in the Grey Lady

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Wow. Check out what the NY Times published on the eve of the deadline for the DOJ [partially, conditionally, grudgingly] complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, unanimously passed by Congress (but for one diehard MAGA representative) and signed into law, thirty days ago, by Trump himself:

The article (which Trump surely regards as a treasonous, false, witch hunt hit job) begins:

Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.

The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.

Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.

But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.

Read all about it

In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement: “This fake news story, which is not worth the paper it’s printed on, is just another stale regurgitation of decades-old false allegations against President Trump. The truth will remain the same no matter how many times The New York Times tries to change it. President Trump did nothing wrong, and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”

And one last bite (from the article), with the classic Trump assessment of a guy he now claims to have hardly known:

In the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein — now extraordinarily wealthy and well connected — seemed to grow less content with the anonymity he had carefully drawn around his life and business. In 2002, practically inviting public scrutiny, he arranged to fly with former President Bill Clinton and a celebrity entourage on a humanitarian trip to Africa. Details of the trip were soon shared with The New York Post’s Page Six. Not long after, New York magazine published the first major profile of Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump provided the headline quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”