August 12, 2025

Aug 13, 2025

Liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov nailed it this morning when she wrote: “He’s doing everything EXCEPT releasing the Epstein files.” Her comment was in reference to President Donald Trump’s social media post of 7:30 this morning, when he chummed the water by suggesting that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center, would soon be called the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER.” He made the comment as he said this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be announced tomorrow.

Trump has been frantically trying to change the subject away from his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein since July 7, when Attorney General Pam Bondi stirred up fury from Trump’s MAGA base by saying the Department of Justice will not release any more information from the Epstein investigation.

On July 23, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s name is in the Epstein files “multiple times.”

But even Trump’s attack on Washington, D.C., yesterday has not managed to distract attention from the possibility that the president of the United States sexually assaulted children. Epstein’s associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, has been in the news because of the administration’s sudden transfer of her from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse children and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Allison Gill, who goes by the name Mueller She Wrote on social media and who writes at The Breakdown, reported yesterday on Ghislaine Maxwell’s electronic file from the Bureau of Prisons, to which she got exclusive access. Sex offenders are not eligible to serve their sentences in minimum security prisons, but the file shows that someone waived that status to permit her transfer. Gill’s information also shows that the terms of her custody permit her “to leave the minimum security campus for work assignments; much like Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to leave prison as part of the sweetheart deal he got from Alex Acosta.”

Writing in The Hill today, former deputy U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York James Zirin wrote: “You may ask whether Trump approved the transfer. You can bet on it. This Justice Department doesn’t make a move without Trump’s thumb on the scale.”

Also yesterday, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York refused to grant the Trump administration’s request that grand jury files from Maxwell’s sex trafficking case be unsealed. As Zirin noted, that request was always a red herring: grand jury minutes do not include evidence or witness statements and are “largely uniformative.”

Judge Engelmayer was even clearer. As Casey Gannon noted at CNN, the judge called out the Department of Justice for misleading the public about what the files would reveal. “Its entire premise—that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them—is demonstrably false,” he wrote, and pointed out that the material is already almost all public.

Engelmayer continued with an observation about why Bondi might have made the request: “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.

The administration also has an interest in getting people to look away from the rising inflation numbers. A report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that consumer prices rose again in July, an indication that businesses are beginning to pass on the cost of tariffs to consumers. As economist Justin Wolfers noted, after declining for two years, inflation is on its way back up and is now at 3.1% for the year. Those numbers do not include the tariffs that went into effect on August 7.

Meanwhile, as Aliss Higham of Newsweek reported today, layoffs in the U.S. “surged in July to their highest level since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” After the July jobs report showed that hiring has stalled and that hiring in May and June had been dramatically overestimated, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the numbers in the report were rigged.

Yesterday Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to replace McEntarfer. Heritage was the driving force behind Project 2025, and in keeping with that institution’s drive toward Christian nationalism, Antoni’s doctoral dissertation from Northern Illinois University thanks his “spiritual patrons: Our Lady of Victory, St. Joseph, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Jude, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and Sts. Peter and Paul. Thank you, most especially, to Our Lord, with whom anything is possible.” Antoni is known primarily for media work, including appearances on the Fox News Channel, where he has relentlessly cheered on Trump’s policies.

Dominic Pino of the conservative National Review wrote today that Antoni is “nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner,” noting that “he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.” As J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, destroying faith in statistics by cooking the books is actually Trump’s plan, illustrated in his announcement of Antoni’s nomination when he wrote: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are Honest and Accurate.”

Last notes that if Trump wanted to reassure people that government statistics are trustworthy, there are plenty of conservative economists he could have chosen to take the job of commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instead, he picked “a hack he sees on Fox” to show that he is imposing his will even on the numbers that businesses, banks, and people need to make good decisions about investments.

In an interview on Fox Business News that appeared yesterday, before his nomination was announced, Antoni suggested that the government should stop issuing the monthly job reports, focusing instead on quarterly reports.

Last points out in his Bulwark article that Project 2025 called for consolidating the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into a single office and aligning their “mission with conservative principles,” as well as putting as many loyalists into statistical positions as possible.

Today the administration advanced Project 2025 ‘s determination to reshape American culture from a right-wing perspective when it sent a letter to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

Meredith McGraw and Jasmine Li of the Wall Street Journal, who reported the letter, say that the review will focus on the “National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.”

Legal analyst Anna Bower notes that the woman in charge of reviewing the Smithsonian is his Florida criminal defense attorney, who joined his team from the field of property law and who, as Bower writes, “didn't like some of the museum's exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Also on the three-person team is Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.

Trump’s assumption of control over the Washington, D.C., police force and his calling out of the D.C. National Guard are definitely ways for him to divert attention from the Epstein files and the stalling economy. But they are also an attempt to create a dictatorship as Project 2025 prescribed. Both can be true at the same time.

Today Alex Horton and David Ovalle of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration is looking at putting 600 National Guard troops on standby at all times as a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” to deploy into American cities to combat protest or civil unrest. The troops would be split into two groups of 300, stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona to cover the regions east and west of the Mississippi River. The cost would run into hundreds of millions of dollars, and funding could not start before fiscal year 2027.

National security affairs scholar Lindsay P. Cohn told the reporters that while National Guard units are commonly deployed for emergencies within their own states, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening. Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” she said. But the proposal could take resources that states will need to respond to national disasters or other emergencies.

This morning, about 800 National Guard troops arrived at the D.C. Armory to report for duty. They have been deployed until September 25.

But the power grab underway among MAGA leaders is not going unchallenged.

Yesterday MSNBC ran a column of statistics fact-checking Trump live during his press conference, showing that crime in Washington, D.C.—and across the country—is falling significantly, despite Trump’s claim that we are in a crime wave. It appears at least some in the media are catching on to the idea that his lies must be challenged as they happen, rather than hours later when public attention has moved on.

Also yesterday, California governor Gavin Newsom issued a public letter telling Trump that if he doesn’t back off on his attempts to redistrict Republican-dominated states in order to rig the 2026 elections, Newsom will be forced to work to redistrict California. “You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy,” Newsom wrote, “while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make…. I do not do this lightly, as I believe legislative district maps should be drawn by independent, citizen-led efforts,” he wrote. But "California cannot stand idly by as this power grab unfolds.”

Newsom’s press office followed the letter up this morning with a post on social media: “DONALD TRUMP, THE LOWEST POLLING PRESIDENT IN RECENT HISTORY, THIS IS YOUR SECOND-TO-LAST WARNING!!! (THE NEXT ONE IS THE LAST ONE!). STAND DOWN NOW OR CALIFORNIA WILL COUNTER-STRIKE (LEGALLY!) TO DESTROY YOUR ILLEGAL CROOKED MAPS IN RED STATES. PRESS CONFERENCE COMING—HOSTED BY AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR, GAVIN NEWSOM. FINAL WARNING NEXT. YOU WON’T LIKE IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

Then the account posted: “FINAL WARNING DONALD TRUMP—MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT WARNING IN HISTORY! STOP CHEATING OR CALIFORNIA WILL REDRAW THE MAPS. AND GUESS WHO WILL ANNOUNCE IT THIS WEEK? GAVIN NEWSOM (MANY SAY THE MOST LOVED & HANDSOME GOVERNOR) AND A VERY POWERFUL TEAM. DON’T MAKE US DO IT!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

A follow-up post tonight read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, ‘MISSED’ THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS,’ THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!). BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM—YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR—THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR ‘MAGA.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! —GN”

Tonight, Elizabeth Blair of NPR reported that Trump’s announcement this morning that Kennedy Center Honors recipients would be named tomorrow caught the staff of the Kennedy Center entirely off guard.

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Notes:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/justice-department-told-trump-name-in-epstein-files-727a8038

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/5447317-is-there-any-reason-to-pardon-ghislaine-maxwell-except-to-buy-her-silence/

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-sentenced-20-years-prison-conspiring-jeffrey-epstein-sexually-abuse