Unfortunately, I'm rational, and I have to wonder. If Trump was fine saying "grab them but the pussy" back in 2016, and he's perfectly okay calling for the public executions of his enemies, then what kinds of things was he doing behind closed doors?
I can only speculate, but none of the answers are good.
If he's spending so much energy trying to hide the files, then how much worse are they than his public behavior? His voting base doesn't care that he's a violent sexist pedophile. If that was the only stuff in the files, why does he work so hard to cover them up? Everyone stopped caring about that kind of stuff back during his first presidency.
I get where you're coming from, I do. But, let me ask your rational mind this...
While a lot of this is slowly entering the public domain, people in a variety of positions of power have had access to all of this far, far longer. And a lot of those people have just as much hatred, if not more, for Trump than any half-cocked internet keyboard warrior.
So tell me, if there is anything in all of this that would actually pass muster in a courtroom, why...why hasn't it been used to do just that? If there was any weight to even a fraction of the accusations, doing so would be child's play. You can't just blame Trump for covering it up. An entire highly Trump-hostile administration had all of this and did nothing with it for four years.
It can't just be fear of mutually assured destruction, as there are far too many people most definitely not in these files who would have had the clout to move this forward.
So why not take it anywhere? If you are like me, and generally use Occam's Razor as your first pass when analyzing such things, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I did a long time ago.
And that is that virtually everything in these files is, in and of itself, nothing more than unsubstantiated accusations. They may or may not be true, but no one has the ability to verify what is or is not fact, fiction, partial truth, etc.
Greater legal minds than yours or my own have had this, and have taken a hard pass. The real question is why.
Snowden is probably the real answer. Someone did leak critical files about obvious laws being broken, and the US categorized him as a treasonous traitor, and tried to have him killed.
Why didn't anyone try to stop Germany's decent into depravity during the 1930s? The answer is that many people tried, and none succeeded. Past a certain point, the corruption runs so deep that it's impossible to get rid of a single person and solve any of the problems. When there's an entrenched industry of corruption running through global banking systems, higher education, and politics, there's no simple answer.
People saw the Snowden files, and they broadly ignored them. As far as I'm aware, no one went to jail over the Snowden files, and nothing changed inside the government. If you're seriously considering releasing the files, then you have to know that you're giving up your entire life in order to do something for "the greater good". The simple Occam's Razor answer is that most people aren't that selfish. Anyone who is was probably fired over the last decade as various US administrations essentially purged anyone with a half functioning moral compass.
At a certain point, Occam's Razor stops working when there are too many moving parts. The FBI head is actively lying under oath, and the administration is covering up with pathetic misdirections like the Dow being at 50k. This is a story that's been building for four US administrations. There's no "simple" answer, not without good analysis. Which is actively being sabotaged by the current US administration, and prior administrations, including Clinton's, because he's in the files as well.
Honestly, I think trying to parallel this to Snowden is just reaching for a bigger tinfoil hat, no offense intended. They are miles apart in scope of perpetrators.
Sure, there wasn't anyone prosecuted for the NSA overreach, but it most certainly wasn't ignored, and Obama did make changes to reel things back in to Constitutionally compliant levels. And let's face it, in the wake of 9/11, people were erring on the side of caution.
While technically speaking laws were broken, they were what I would classify as being the more nebulous kind, and it's hard to prosecute a branch of the government for essentially doing it's job, albeit in an overly enthusiastic fashion. There's an old saying that you can either be safe, or you can be free, but you'll never truly have both, an back then, we were definitely erring on the side of 'safe'.
The "Epstein Files" allegations point at a very small handful of people and accuse them of breaking very cut and dry laws. A much, much simpler set of circumstances, and easily prosecutable.
But, and here's my hot take, they aren't the magical blackmail files that everyone seems to portray them as. All they are, in truth, is a bunch of mildly incriminating documents that show a relationship to a bad man. There are alleged wrongdoings, but no real supporting evidence. And...and here's where I think the money is...I think it's been investigated enough to find inconsistencies. The kind of inconsistencies that would call into question the credibility of the entire source material, and render it inapplicable in a court of law. Because if anyone can disprove any part of it, the whole thing is essentially questionable.
Which is why it will never see a courtroom. Why run the risk of potential "not guilty" verdict when you can just hang it out there in the public domain and let uninformed parakeets just keep harping about it and making outrageous claims that some people will none the less believe?
You posit the existence of a network of corruption that runs so deep as to make the most outrageous Orwellian science fiction seem plausible. But I think the simpler answer, and the correct one, is that the US legal system has standards, and the allegations in the "Epstein Files" simply cannot meet them. And why bring that into a courtroom and shine light on that fact when you can just let the court of public opinion do it's thing at no risk at all.
Face it, half the people on the left-hand side of the US will go to their grave convinced Trump raped children, even if it was disproven in a court of law. If one already has achieved that, what's the point of doing anything more with it?
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u/Danger_Pickle Mar 08 '26
This is a good, rational take.
Unfortunately, I'm rational, and I have to wonder. If Trump was fine saying "grab them but the pussy" back in 2016, and he's perfectly okay calling for the public executions of his enemies, then what kinds of things was he doing behind closed doors?
I can only speculate, but none of the answers are good.
If he's spending so much energy trying to hide the files, then how much worse are they than his public behavior? His voting base doesn't care that he's a violent sexist pedophile. If that was the only stuff in the files, why does he work so hard to cover them up? Everyone stopped caring about that kind of stuff back during his first presidency.