Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Valdhammer]

i'd imagine there's also a MAD type scenario to consider.
all this hubub is about whatever files that US federal law enforcement agencies have, but i'd be shocked into a coronary event if it turned out that there was zero dirt floating around in private hands.
i obviously have no evidence for this, but simply as a matter of rational thought i cannot for a second imagine that all the high level geopolitical power brokers that we know of explicitly (not to even mention the who-knows-how-many more secretive types) wouldn't have pictures, videos, etc etc of their own kept in a safe somewhere.

i imagine the entire epstein situation is everyone involved being tied to a bundle of TNT and every cord leads to a center point where they're all connected.
donald trump might be as sharp as a burlap sack of damp cat hair and he may surround himself with some of the biggest failsons of the 21st century, but even they possess enough animalistic survival instinct to not light that particular match.

Yeah, I think there’s an element of that for sure. Even if the people named in the files aren’t in possession of their own incriminating records, they may be in possession of other types of damaging information or they could be other reasons keeping them happy is advantageous.

[gondrin]

It’s not an issue of privilege. It’s an issue of ethics. If you meet with a prospective client who divulges sensitive information to you, and that person is then involved in litigation where the information disclosed to you is relevant, and the other party tries to hire you you, then you have a conflict because your obligation to the prospective client is ongoing even if you aren’t actually representing them in any matter.

You have knowledge that you can use against them, and the law does not allow you to be in the position where you may act against that person’s interests even by accident. If you proceed regardless, the prospective client can sue you and you will probably lose your license.

Ahh, ok. New information is always good. I remember read this a long while ago as something that the news or whatever would bring up on why people would have trouble suing Trump in NYC but they never actually explained it outright.

[Kaleredar]

My hot take: even if this list was revealed, it really wouldn’t matter.

Which is absolutely not me defending anyone on that list or trying to say that what they might have done isn’t deplorable or shouldn’t be prosecuted.

But in today’s highly partisan society… people will just believe what they want to believe and not what they don’t want to, and/or will rapidly launch into whataboutism. “Oh trump was on that list? Well so was Clinton! So yeah I’m going to keep supporting Trump!” So many of these institutions exist with their power structures ingrained beyond any singular person, and so much of News and social media is based around partisan spin-doctoring that the entire media landscape would shift into rapid blame-shifting and hand-waving damage control.

Even if some fiendish CEO of some mega corporation was on the list … unless they’re arrested and convicted (statute of limitations, unclear paths to trial, jurisdictional issues, etc ) even if they were token laid off I’m sure they’d still receive some hefty windfall severance package and be replaced with some similar slimeball of a person. Same with the heads of political parties and news corporations and all the other people in places of power imagined to be on the list.


The Republican party is the poster child of this kind of thing being like shit off a shit-duck’s back. Constantly mired in scandal, politicians arrested and convicted or found engaged in some weird sex thing and the party just doubles down on them. And their success rate on doubling-down on some godawful candidate isn’t zero. And they still remain a viable party with massive corporate backing and media reach.


There’s almost a critical mass thing, here. Weaponizong a name on a list against one person to pressure them to do something is one thing. But when all of these rich and influential fucks find themselves in the same boat with fingers pointed at them? It almost just becomes noise at that point.


TL;DR, people are insinuating that this would be some bombshell MAD type thing that upend the world order by generating outrage in the global public that people just couldn’t stand for.

I really don’t think so.

[Breccia]

"Hey Breccia, why do you call Trump senile and/or retarded? What evidence is there?"

Let's look at Trump's visit to Pittsburgh today.

“I want to introduce Dan Meuser. Dan Meuser is here,” Trump said. “Where’s Dan?”

“They all stayed in Washington,” McCormick told the president.

“Oh, they’re in Washington working on our next bill? Good,” a surprised Trump said.

"Okay, that's not great, but hardly the first time someone forgot that everyone didn't come with him."

At another point in his remarks, he seemed to have trouble remembering how to pronounce the name of a longtime aide, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios.

Trump made the claim that he secured $16 trillion in investment in the U.S. economy - despite the total U.S. economy totalling just under $30 trillion.

"Okay, but who doesn't forget how to pronounce the name of someone you work with every day, and randomly make up numbers out of thin air?"

Fine. Let's talk about "Uncle John". Trump referred to him as the longest-running professor at MIT. Naturally, that's false. But it got much worse.

“Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There's very little difference between a madman and a genius,” he said.

Trump then claimed to have asked his uncle about the murderous ex-academic.

“What kind of a student was he Uncle John? He said: “What kind of a student — seriously, good ... he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn't work out too well for him. Didn't work out too well, but it's interesting in life,” Trump said.

"Okay, so he happened to teach the Unabomber. That's interesting, doesn't show any form of evil or mental defect."

Yes it does. That story is fiction. The story is laughably false.

First, Kaczynski got his undergrad degree in 1962 from Harvard and graduate from University of Michigan in 1967. He did not attend MIT.

Second, Kaczynski worked at Berkley from 1967 to 1969. Not MIT. It is possible the two bumped into each other professionally, although working on opposite coasts and in different (related, but different) fields, this is highly unlikely, and even then, Kaczynski would not have been his student.

Third and most importantly, nobody knew Kaczynski was a dangerous terrorist until his arrest in 1996. "Uncle John" died in 1985. Nobody would have asked him about Kaczynski, because nobody would have asked anybody about Kaczynski, in 1985.

Trump is imagining a conversation that did not exist. So, yes, he's senile or retarded.

"Obviously he was just lying."

You again! Now, yes, a reasonable person might conclude Trump was lying because his lips were moving. But the Unabomber hasn't been, you know, relevant for thirty years. If Trump was willingly making up a falsehood to entertain a crowd at an Energy and Innovation symposium, largely people under 40, why would he pick the Unabomber? Why not just claim he fucked Amelia Earhart? Why that lie, at that point, to that crowd, in that context, on purpose?

I claim, with evidence, that Trump did not choose that lie. He either remembers conversations and events that did not exist, that's senile, or he's incapable of having a conversation on topic and instead throws random fiction out at random, that's some form of brain damage. Call it retarded or insane, neither one is redeeming.

I challenge literally anyone to find any evidence at all, other than "because Trump said so", that the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and "Uncle John" Dr. John Trump ever stood in the same room at any time ever. We'll come back to who was who's student if there's even a shred of history backing they met. Until then, there is no redeeming explanation to why Trump is telling rooms filled with people and a Senator an obvious objective falsehood.

[Xyonai]

Can someone explain to me why Bondi wouldn’t just mess with the files to remove references to Trump and other Republicans from the files or create an entirely fictional file entirely? I don’t understand this at all. Deception is as natural to these people as breathing, and they know Republicans will believe whatever they release. So why do any of this? What am I missing?

It says one of two things to me:

1: They never had, or had already destroyed the evidence of the client list so they do not actually have any copies -to- alter-.
2: There's no feasible way for them to go ahead with showing a doctored list without it falling under legal scrutiny and, even if they're currently in their 'we don't fucking care what the law says' arc, any risk of having the full list exposed would be too much.

- - - Updated - - -

It seems the MAGAbots have gotten the latest software patch and are now up to date. Over the weekend, things were looking bleak for them, many seemingly questioning if they made the wrong move by supporting him, what with him saying to drop the whole Epstein thing. Now that they've been patched, they're back onboard the MAGA train spouting things like:

"There are no real victims! These women chose to go to the island!" Yes, even the 13/14 year olds....

"The whole Epstein file was made by Obama, Clinton, Biden! Trump had nothing to do with it." Parroting what their dear leader has said.

"Libs are the pedo party! They only want the report released so they can get off on it! Sickos, all of them!"


And here I thought they were having genuine reflection.

Yeah as I said the other day, it was a matter of time before all the talking heads would be forced to fall in line. Like I'm not even surprised at how nakedly stupid the pivot and excuses are. I'm sure the rest of the drones will either start parroting the same dumb shit or get the hint and stop whining about the client list and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled national embarrassment.

I just hope Dems keep hammering them on this, because I expect the MSM to also get bored with trying to run with this story before long unless we get another shocking revelation.

[fwc577]

Ya'll can sit there and bitch about how quickly Republicans seem to have "flipped" on this issue based on the media but just take a 5 minute look at places like Reddit such as r/Conservative. Lots of hate over this and then I saw this gem of a comment:

Honestly though, I never expected anything different..

However, what I will say is this episode is highlighting who I can trust in the media.

People like Charlie Kirk who I used to trust are clearly just repeating whatever the administration are telling them, rather than holding people's feet to the fire.

The sheep aren't buying the bullshit.

[Xyonai]

Ya'll can sit there and bitch about how quickly Republicans seem to have "flipped" on this issue based on the media but just take a 5 minute look at places like Reddit such as r/Conservative. Lots of hate over this and then I saw this gem of a comment:



The sheep aren't buying the bullshit.

A decade or so of Trump seemingly unable to face any consequences from his electorate for his behavior has made me understandably cynical when it comes to the integrity of Republicans and their voting base. But I'm open to be proven wrong in this instance.

[Kaleredar]

Ya'll can sit there and bitch about how quickly Republicans seem to have "flipped" on this issue based on the media but just take a 5 minute look at places like Reddit such as r/Conservative. Lots of hate over this and then I saw this gem of a comment:



The sheep aren't buying the bullshit.

Listen I’d love to be wrong but like I noted earlier… this is just one of a dozen conspiracies trump has on the fire, and just one of hundreds of bits of outrage bait in general that keep his base dumb and fired up. Will him lying about this mean they won’t support him… or will they figure “he might have lied, but if we don’t vote for him the liberals are going to make everyone get evil CDC vaccines!” Or “he might have lied, but if we don’t vote for him the liberals are going to put trans women in sports!” Or perhaps “he might have lied, but if we don’t vote for him the liberals are going to let the illegals take over!”


Are they going to stop and collectively think “hmmm if trump lied about this, what else is he lying about?”

I seriously doubt it. If they were capable of that kind of self-reflection and critical thinking they’d have never voted for Trump in the first place.

[Cthulhu 2020]

I’m a lawyer and one of the things we studied in law school was how Donald Trump managed to conflict-out just about every major law firm in the 80s and the 90s by setting up meetings with them and unloading on them a bunch of sensitive information the knowledge of which would make it unethical for them to represent people who tried to sue him. It got to the point where firms forever changed how they onboard new clients.

I went to law school years before he became president btw. So this is something that was taught to law students without any political agenda.

That's even crazier than I imagined. He'll go down as one of the biggest con mans in American history. Once he dies and documentaries are written about his entire life. Before he said some racist shit and became the Republican front runner because of it, everyone fucking hated him. New Yorkers hated him, anyone who knew about him hated him. He was busy using the legal system to con both normal people and the elite, but those who didn't know his story only see him a one thing, successful, which in their eyes is all that matters, get to the top no matter how unethical. And that's why these people don't care when they find out their favorite got there by conning their way to the top. When they all know he's a pedophile. He's a con man, but he's successful, and that's all that matters to them. A group of people who so regularly try to abuse the legal systems to their advantage, because they know their privilege has gotten them lighter punishments, who he also looks down on.

However, Trump has taken a huge L in the public eye on the Epstein files. When he's no longer president and even dead, people will hopefully see the long term damage he's wrought and think "Damn I was crazy for ever thinking he'd fix anything" and get some humility to boot. Maybe that's too much to hope for in some people.

[DarkTZeratul]

those who didn't know his story only see him a one thing, successful, which in their eyes is all that matters, get to the top no matter how unethical. And that's why these people don't care when they find out their favorite got there by conning their way to the top.

You can 100% blame The Apprentice for that.

[Breccia]

Trump Effect Starts to Show Up in Economy

New data reflect that president’s tariff and immigration policies are boosting inflation and weighing on jobs

As I mentioned before, the WSJ isn't made up of fools. They are fully aware of the problem.

A chaotic rollout of tariffs is starting to filter through to price tags on store shelves. An immigration crackdown is beginning to weigh on jobs growth, measured by federal surveys. Taken together, the impact of President Trump’s whirlwind six months back in office is showing up in the economy.

The effect isn’t yet enough to derail the economy, which by many measures has weathered Trump’s trade wars much better than many on Wall Street and in Washington feared. Economists see less risk of a recession now than three months ago, a Wall Street Journal survey found.

Yet a long stretch when Trump’s policies left little imprint on the hard data appears to be ending.

Investors have grown accustomed to America rolling with the punches, first during the pandemic in 2020-21 and then during the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases from 2022-23. This time, pressure is building internally in hard-to-predict ways.

Tuesday’s inflation numbers for June came in close to economists’ expectations at 2.7% annually. But there were price bumps on what Americans pay for key imports such as furniture and clothing, a potential sign of tariff-linked price increases that many economists think will continue in the months ahead.

The costs for core goods excluding autos rose at their fastest monthly pace in three years, according to UBS. Barring a recession or pullback in tariffs, analysts at the bank project that overall inflation won’t slow to April’s 2.3% rate between now and the end of 2027.

“Today’s report showed that tariffs are beginning to bite,” Omair Sharif, founder and president of Inflation Insights, wrote in a note to clients.

Even as the stock market continued trading near records Tuesday, a selloff in government debt pushed Treasury yields higher, leaving the 30-year yield above 5% for the first time since May.

Gee, why would there be a selloff in debt owned by Donald Trump?

Cracks also have begun to show in the labor market. While data on the unauthorized workforce is unreliable, employment growth appears to have slowed in industries that rely heavily on workers who entered the country illegally. The foreign-born labor force has shrunk significantly since March. And recent immigrants appear more reluctant to take part in the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households.

To be sure, Americans are still spending, and employers continue to add jobs. On Tuesday, some of the biggest U.S. banks reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings.

Still, the question is whether all that will hold—and, if it doesn’t, how long the world’s largest economy can keep powering ahead.

The tariffs are 100% being applied, increased, decreased, and removed by Donald Trump. Any effect on the economy due to tariffs are due to his direct actrions he took in public on purpose. Trump, and Trump alone, is damaging the economy.

[Draco-Onis]

Good news everyone Donald Trump is coming to con I mean help you with your 401K by feeding it to vultures I mean private equity.

The SEC’s Office of the Investor Advocate has named the inclusion of private equity and other alternatives in retirement plans as a top policy priority for 2026

White house readies order to bring private equity to 401Ks

But wait there's more

Tokenized stocks explained: How Robinhood opened US markets

Basically owning a stock through a third party without any of the protections or knowledge of how many are out there under the sole control of a third party aka Robinhood via crypto tokens.

The golden age of cons is upon us.

[Breccia]

Trump has launched 529 air strikes since his inauguration. By contrast, Biden has launched 555.

"Oh, so Trump is less than Biden at the same point in his tenure!"

No, Biden launched 555 total. Trump is roughly equal and it's been six months. So much for "no new wars" huh?

- - - Updated - - -

Bondi fires DOJ's top ethics chief.

No cause was given, and she spelled his name wrong in the letter.

The article I cited suggests this could be retribution for the fired official signing off on one Jack Smith expenditure one time, or that it's part of the larger purge in which Trump is just firing everyone in the attempt to grind the federal government to a halt. I instead say Bondi is about to do something massively illegal, and wants to do it while nobody left has the ability to look over her shoulder.

[Edge-]

Bondi fires DOJ's top ethics chief.

No cause was given, and she spelled his name wrong in the letter.

The article I cited suggests this could be retribution for the fired official signing off on one Jack Smith expenditure one time, or that it's part of the larger purge in which Trump is just firing everyone in the attempt to grind the federal government to a halt. I instead say Bondi is about to do something massively illegal, and wants to do it while nobody left has the ability to look over her shoulder.

Be honest: We were all surprised that person wasn't fired already.

[Breccia]

It also forced all people great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on the foreheads," the quote said, "so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name

"Uh, Breccia? Why are you quoting scripture? You're not religious."

I'm not. I'm quoting MTG. She's opposing Trump's recent push on crypto.

Congratulations, Republican Party. You've made the Bible-thumping voice of Jewish space lasers the voice of reason.

[Moralgy]

Ya'll can sit there and bitch about how quickly Republicans seem to have "flipped" on this issue based on the media but just take a 5 minute look at places like Reddit such as r/Conservative. Lots of hate over this and then I saw this gem of a comment:



The sheep aren't buying the bullshit.

Those comments happen every controversy, but the issue is they don't hold... Ever. They can't because supporting trump is more than just an opinion, it's an identity and a large part of their social circles. So like, yea there's issues with it now, but after a week or two of reprogramming via everything around them, they develop a new opinion on the topic.

[Dontrike]

Looks like that missing minute is actually triple that.

Newly uncovered metadata reveals that nearly three minutes of footage were cut from what the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation described as “full raw” surveillance video from the only functioning camera near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The video was released last week as part of the Trump administration’s commitment to fully investigate Epstein’s 2019 death but instead has raised new questions about how the footage was edited and assembled.

WIRED previously reported that the video had been stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files, contradicting the Justice Department’s claim that it was “raw” footage. Now, further analysis shows that one of the source clips was approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video, indicating that footage appears to have been trimmed before release. It’s unclear what, if anything, the minutes cut from the first clip showed.

The nearly three-minute discrepancy may be related to the widely reported one-minute gap—between 11:58:58 pm and 12:00:00 am—that attorney general Pam Bondi has attributed to a nightly system reset. The metadata confirms that the first video file, which showed footage from August 9, 2019, continued for several minutes beyond what appears in the final version of the video and was trimmed to the 11:58:58 pm mark, right before the jump to midnight. The cut to the first clip doesn’t necessarily mean that there is additional time unaccounted for—the second clip picks up at midnight, which suggests the two would overlap—nor does it prove that the missing minute was cut from the video.

The footage was released at a moment of political tension. Trump allies had spent months speculating about the disclosure of explosive new evidence about Epstein’s death. But last week, the DOJ and FBI issued a memo stating that no “incriminating ‘client list’” exists and reaffirmed the government’s long-standing conclusion that Epstein—whom the US government accused of committing conspiracy to sex traffic minors and sex trafficking minors—died by suicide. That announcement triggered immediate backlash from pro-Trump influencers and media figures, who essentially accused the administration of a cover-up.

In response to detailed questions about how the video was assembled, WIRED sent a request for comment to the Department of Justice at 7:40 am on Tuesday morning. Just two minutes later, Natalie Baldassarre, a public affairs officer for the DOJ, replied tersely: “Refer you to the FBI.” The FBI declined WIRED’s request for comment.

On Friday, WIRED published an analysis of metadata embedded in the video, confirmed by independent video forensics experts, which indicates that the file was assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website, where it was presented as “raw” footage.

WIRED’s initial analysis found that those saves took place over a 23-minute span; however, further analysis of additional metadata shows the file was actually edited and saved several times over a period of more than three and a half hours on May 23, 2025. Specifically, the file was created at 4:48 pm and last modified at 8:16 pm ET that day. The metadata also references “MJCOLE~1,” which is likely a shortened version of a longer username. While it likely begins with “MJCOLE,” the full name cannot be determined from the metadata alone.

Both analyses found that the two clips, labeled “2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4” and “2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4,” were stitched together. The first clip is 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 16 seconds long, but only the first 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 23.368 seconds appears in the published version, meaning nearly 2 minutes and 53 seconds were cut from the end. According to the metadata, the cut occurs just at 11:58:58 pm. The cut is milliseconds before the one-minute recording gap that Bondi said was caused by a quirk of the surveillance system. The second clip, “2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4,” picks up immediately afterward, continuing the footage from 12:00:00 am until 6:40:00 am.

The analysis was first provided to WIRED by a researcher who requested anonymity for privacy reasons. WIRED reviewed its findings with two independent video forensics experts, each with over 15 years of experience in Premiere and video production, who confirmed that the edit occurred just before the missing minute mark and that approximately three minutes of footage were cut from the original clip.

The FBI released both “raw” and enhanced versions of the video. Both versions include internal comment markers, annotations typically used in editing software to flag moments of interest. The enhanced version, which the FBI referred to as Video 2, contains 15 such markers that apparently correspond to visible movement near “46 door” at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC). This door is near the cell block where Epstein was being held while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. These markers appear to have been left by analysts during their review, but they do not include the original comment text.

According to a 2023 report by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), only two cameras in the vicinity of the Special Housing Unit (SHU), the area of the MCC where Epstein was held, were filming and recording at the time of his death. According to the report, the camera that recorded the footage the DOJ released July 7 captured video of a large portion of the SHU common area and parts of the stairways leading to various “tiers,” one of which housed Epstein’s cell.

The OIG report notes that the MCC’s surveillance system was outdated at the time of Epstein’s death, “had not been properly maintained,” and that the DVR hard drives that stored the video files “frequently malfunctioned and needed to be replaced.”

Both the 2023 OIG report and the DOJ-FBI memo published last week state that anyone entering or attempting to access the tier containing Epstein’s cell from the SHU common area on August 9 or 10, 2019, would have been visible on that camera. However, Epstein’s cell door itself was not within the camera’s field of view. The stairway leading to the tier where he was held was also partially obstructed and difficult to see clearly on the video. (A second camera, which covered the “ninth-floor fire exit and two of the floor’s four elevators,” was also filming at the time, according to the OIG report.)

Amid backlash from supporters and critics alike, President Donald Trump defended Bondi on Saturday, saying she was doing a “fantastic job.”

“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

[fwc577]

Those comments happen every controversy, but the issue is they don't hold... Ever. They can't because supporting trump is more than just an opinion, it's an identity and a large part of their social circles. So like, yea there's issues with it now, but after a week or two of reprogramming via everything around them, they develop a new opinion on the topic.

Some of the Conservative Media has already switched but the peons haven't bought it yet. And as a matter of fact, Trump's latest Truth Social post about the "Epstein Hoax" has done nothing but make some of them double-down.

[Xyonai]

Some of the Conservative Media has already switched but the peons haven't bought it yet. And as a matter of fact, Trump's latest Truth Social post about the "Epstein Hoax" has done nothing but make some of them double-down.

Yeah as someone in this thread already said but I'm too lazy to go back through and double check who it was: If Trump just shut the fuck up they could wrangle this narrative into a 'good enough' spot and the plebs will have an excuse to simmer down and fall back in line. But, even that said, I don't see the outrage surviving more than a month or so unless - for some reason - Trump and his DOJ continue to fan the flames against themselves or we're hit with another bombshell. Yet I can see this having a knock-on effect with voter enthusiasm going into next year's mid-terms; on top of all the other dumb, deranged, and deliberately destructive shit this Administration Seems intent on inflicting upon large swathes of the American voting public.

[PfeffermintShake]

Just this week, the 79-year-old president hallucinated a lie about the Unabomber, forgot he appointed the Fed Chair he hates, blanked on names of officials, fell asleep at a rally, threatened to strip Rosie O'Donnell of her citizenship and spun wild theories about his good friend the pedophile.