Sorry Trump, You Can’t Wish the Epstein Story AwayPlus: The spiritual psychobabble of Trump’s faith office luncheon.
JD Vance has been mostly out of the news lately, only popping up here and there to offer a fixed-grin endorsement of Trump’s foreign policy moves he secretly hates, like the pivot toward offering more support to Ukraine. Today, though, he’ll be heading to northeastern Pennsylvania to perform one of his chief roles: that of Trump’s Rust Belt whisperer. Politico notes he’s going to pitch the benefits of Trump’s new Big Beautiful Bill, which Democrats plan to make a centerpiece of their attacks ahead of next year’s midterms. Happy Wednesday—and don’t forget about our 30-day free trial!
The Epstein Case: A Guide for the Perplexedby William Kristol The president of the United States is perplexed. “He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. . . . I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. . . . I don’t understand why it keeps going,” Donald Trump told reporters late yesterday afternoon. At Morning Shots, we exist to serve—so let me take a shot at briefly explaining to our perplexed president why the Epstein case is interesting. Trump dismisses the Epstein case as old news: “He’s dead for a long time.” Well, Jeffrey Epstein hasn’t been dead for that long a time. He died less than six years ago, during the first Trump administration, in a federal prison, and not of natural causes. The cause of death was officially determined to be suicide. But Trump himself had his doubts. In 2020, he told reporter Jonathan Swan (then at Axios) that Epstein “was either killed or committed suicide in jail. . . . And people are still trying to figure out: How did it happen? Was it suicide? Was he killed?” That’s an interesting question. The Trump administration claimed to have resolved the question in its terse statement ten days ago, which supported its finding of suicide. It even released what it described as the “full raw” surveillance video from the only working camera near Epstein’s cell. But as Wired reported yesterday, “Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut” from that video, raising “new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.” In other words, the tape was doctored. That’s kind of interesting, too. Trump is dismissive of Epstein’s importance: “He was never a big factor in terms of life.” Well, I’m not so sure about that. Jeffrey Epstein ran a massive criminal conspiracy for many years that the federal government says victimized more than 1,000 girls. This enterprise involved very prominent figures, ranging from American billionaires to British royals. How he got away with that for so long, who helped him, who else participated in his crimes, how he was able to get the sweetheart deal he got from the George W. Bush Justice Department—all of those are interesting questions. Furthermore, among Epstein’s friends was one Donald J. Trump, who subsequently became president of the United States. Trump said of Epstein in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. 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.” Especially in light of that last remark, but also in light of the fact that Trump and Epstein certainly seem to have enjoyed each other’s company, it’s worth asking just what President Trump knew of Epstein’s criminal activities, and how close his own active social life intersected with Epstein’s. All of that is kind of interesting. Now President Trump is claiming that the Epstein case files “were made up by” James Comey, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. These are the same files that were supposedly meticulously reviewed this year by his own Justice Department and FBI, and whose authenticity they found no reason to question. One would certainly want to ask Attorney General Pam Bondi or FBI Director Kash Patel whether they agree with this novel assertion by the president. Is there evidence for such a fraud? And of course, if fraud on the scale alleged by the president happened, then Congress surely needs to hold hearings to look into it. These are just a few of the reasons why the Jeffrey Epstein case “would be of interest to anybody” and “why it keeps going.” Indeed, the case is of interest to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. He’s a Trump loyalist who said just this week of President Trump that “There is no doubt that he was miraculously saved by God in order to lead our great nation again.” But Johnson said yesterday that he is dissatisfied with what the administration has done, and wants it “to put everything out there.” The American public agrees with the speaker. A new YouGov poll asked: “Should the government release all documents it has about the Jeffrey Epstein case?” Seventy-nine percent of respondents answered “Yes.” Five percent said “No.” And 67 percent of Americans think the government is currently covering up evidence it has about Epstein. A mere eight percent disagree. Trump has suffered few serious defeats so far in his second term. At this point in his second term, President Richard Nixon was also still riding pretty high. But it was on this day, July 16, 1973, that a former aide, Alexander Butterfield, revealed to the Senate Watergate committee that a taping system existed in the Oval Office. It was all downhill from there. History doesn’t repeat itself. But sometimes it rhymes. Not Your Grandpa’s Religious Rightby Andrew Egger Back in February, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a new “White House Faith Office,” an administration initiative aimed “to assist faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship in their efforts to strengthen American families, promote work and self-sufficiency, and promote religious liberty.” On Tuesday, the office held one of its first major events: a deeply weird White House luncheon at which Trump delivered a vaguely faithy campaign-style speech. Most of the coverage of that speech focused on the outrageous content of Trump’s remarks, especially his accusation that Democrats are “evil people” who “wanted to take God and religion out of your lives.” Watching the event, though (Sam and I broke it down the other day on YouTube), I was less struck by any particular wacko thing Trump said than by the highly unusual theory of the event itself. This shindig of the “White House Faith Office” wasn’t a gathering of religious leaders, or even of leaders of faith-related organizations. It was, as Fox News noted, a symposium of “CEOs and business leaders who donate their time to faith-based charitable works”—guys like Hobby Lobby founder David Greene. “These are purpose-driven individuals who use their wealth for good in the Earth,” a White House official told Fox News ahead of the meeting. “Faith and Economy come together to Make America Great Again—spiritually and financially.” This is ridiculous spiritual psychobabble. (Jesus famously had some things to say about the spiritual perils of great wealth.) Still, religion in this country has always had a strain of this sort of thinking. There’s a long and august American tradition of megawatt-smile hucksters selling the notion that what God really wants is for you to get really, really rich. What’s new is the idea—the one presupposed by this White House event—that such business titans are now the preeminent figures of America’s religious right. And it’s hard to argue that Trump is wrong to see them as such—not because these figures have grown more prominent, but because other, actual faith leaders have become so greatly diminished. After all, American religion is in the midst of the same long process of institutional decay that the rest of the country is experiencing. Belief is down everywhere and organized belief—churchgoing and other participation in religious institutions—is down too. I wrote about this process during last year’s GOP Iowa caucuses, when the once-powerful network of state evangelical leaders—who were anything but crazy about Trump—suddenly discovered their flocks were far less interested in what they had to say than in cycles past. They were dealing, I wrote, with “an evangelical populace that was far less a constellation of little communities and far more an undifferentiated mass of online individuals than it had been two decades before.” In a world like this, the power centers of the religious right aren’t people who are known for their religious wisdom and piety or their work in the church per se. They’re people who have achieved success and therefore notoriety in other fields—business or politics or entertainment—and who also happen to have some religious beliefs. All that works great for Trump. He’s always been faintly mystified by actual religious conviction—Mike Pence was a figure of fascination for him. But vaguely Jesus-scented wealth creation is a language he understands. A roomful of pastors would be baffled by Trump’s extended riff on how he’s determined to avoid an economic depression because their wives would all leave them if we had one. These guys, by contrast, yuk it up. For the folks who were in that room Tuesday, faith isn’t a bedrock ordering principle for life. Instead, it’s a sauce for the main dish of political identity. Faith, as a political force on the right today, serves primarily to baptize the political priors Republicans already hold—to cast every political conflict as a struggle between the GOP angels and the Democratic demons. At one point during the luncheon, Trump claimed a divine mandate for his political program. Referring to the one-year anniversary of the attempt on his life last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, he told the audience of CEOs that “God was with me.” “I believe that my life was saved by God to really make America great again.” It got the biggest ovation of the speech. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsHOW SAFE IS POWELL?: As Donald Trump continues to rage against Jerome Powell, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is once again finding himself in the role of offering soothing whispers to Wall Street that Trump won’t actually try to push the Fed chair out of his job. Trump, Bessent told Bloomberg TV Tuesday, is merely “working the refs” to try to rattle some rate cuts out of Powell and insisted that the White House believes an independent central bank to be “very important.” Not everyone is so sure. Last week, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought sent an open letter to Powell claiming he had “grossly mismanaged the Fed.” What sin had Powell committed? Not failing to implement the president’s preferred interest rates cuts, but presiding over a renovation of Fed headquarters that had gone over budget. On its face, it was a bizarre attack: The cost overruns are far outside the main work of the Fed, and have been public knowledge for some time. But many saw it as laying the legal predicate to fire Powell for cause, should the president decide to do so. After the panicked market selloff of a few months ago, traders have plainly resumed assuming Trump will back down on everything from tariffs to meddling with the Fed. As a result, markets are back to their regularly scheduled setting of new highs. But the latest round of anti-Powell rhetoric and strategic planning is drawing stern new warnings from Wall Street: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told reporters on a Tuesday earnings call that “Playing around with the Fed can have adverse consequences, the absolute opposite of what you might be hoping for.” AND YOU THOUGHT BUDGET FIGHTS WERE BAD BEFORE: Congress has appropriated a certain amount of money to be spent, but Donald Trump doesn’t want to spend a bunch of it. In many cases, he has simply (and almost certainly illegally) impounded appropriated money—that is, he has said the executive branch won’t spend it, and dared anybody to sue him. (Many have.) In other cases, however, he has asked Congress itself to revoke its earlier orders to spend money—a legislative vehicle called a rescissions package. Yesterday, the Senate narrowly voted—after a tie-breaking vote by Vice President JD Vance—to move forward with $9 billion in such rescissions. The package, which awaits a final Senate vote today, will slash spending on foreign aid and funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. It also will cut about $140 million from UNICEF, which as our Tim Miller notes, is about the most inane, morally cruel way to find budget savings. Rescissions are a rare maneuver—and for good reason. Government funding bills require a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, making some bipartisan compromise perennially necessary. But thanks to a quirk in the rules of Senate procedure, rescissions packages can’t be filibustered; they need only 51 votes to pass. In theory, the majority party could offer a heap of spending concessions to the minority party to get 60 votes on a funding bill in the Senate—then follow it up immediately with a rescissions package clawing those concessions back. But this strategy would essentially salt the earth on all appropriations bills going forward: Why would the minority ever help the majority pass a funding bill if they knew the other side would just remove any concessions they won after the fact? For that reason, Senate majorities have steered clear of the strategy—until now. The current government funding bill runs out in September. The ball then will be in Chuck Schumer’s court. Cheap Shots
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Sorry Trump, You Can’t Wish the Epstein Story Away
July 16, 2025
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