Everything Trump says is, at best, a half-truth. He’s been claiming that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-A-Lago because he was poaching his employees, which is partly true. What he doesn’t mention is that this was after years of privileged access to resort employees. We have more details published in the Wall Street Journal.

Per the report published on Tuesday, Trump sent young women who worked for the Palm Beach resort to Epstein’s home for massage sessions, a perk afforded to some members of the Florida club. The resort kept up this practice for years, even though Epstein was not a member of the club.

The outlet reported that “the house calls went on… even as spa employees warned each other about Epstein.” Employees told the paper that Epstein “known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments.”

Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell is known to have used the resort to recruit women and girls for the late sex trafficker. One of Epstein’s most vocal accusers, Virginia Giuffre, was pulled into Epstein’s orbit while working at Mar-a-Lago. Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year, had refuted accusations that Trump was involved in Epstein’s sex crimes.

The president said earlier this year that Epstein’s poaching of employees like Giuffre was part of the reason their friendship came to an end. The report dug into the much-discussed falling out between Trump and Epstein in 2003. Per employees who spoke to the outlet, Trump barred Maxwell and Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after an 18-year-old employee returned from a house call and said that Epstein “pressured her for sex.”

Mar-A-Lago was a pedophile hunting ground for years and years, and even if Trump didn’t directly rape any young women, he was an enabler who turned a blind eye to Epstein/Maxwell calling up and asking to have women delivered for “massages”.

It’s New Year’s Eve. Goddamn, this has been an awful year.

There is nothing magical about this date, it’s just another day in a long series of them, we’re just going to change the number of the year, but there are things I’ll be wishing to happen (while having low expectations that anything will happen.)

For 2026, I would like to see the rule of law creep back. I want white nationalism to be repudiated. I want vengeance: I want the fascists in government arrested and locked away.

Is that too much to ask?

If not, throw in the end of capitalism, the collapse of the AI bubble, and the death of Trump.

I’ve been hearing about corruption in Minnesota for many years. The short summary, since I’ve been regularly seeing articles about it in our newspapers since at least the start of the COVID pandemic, is that the state exercised poor regulatory oversight of charitable foundations, and some bad actors moved in to exploit that. The problem exploded during COVID as state and federal services were expanded to cope with the social disruption caused by the disease, and a few people figured out that founding phony charities was a good strategy for siphoning off tax dollars…a lot of tax dollars.

Honestly, I was tuning out all the news about the Feeding Our Future scam back in 2020, because it was all about the state slowly stamping out all the scammers. We’ve had a steady throb of stories in this state about crooks getting arrested for lying about these fake charities, slowly getting prosecuted, and typically getting convicted — the justice system grinds slowly, especially when hundreds of millions of dollars are involved, and while many have been convicted, even today most of them haven’t been sentenced. When your local news is a steady drip of incremental stories about infamous con artists getting court dates, it’s hard to sustain focus. It’s been a slow cleanup of a ghastly mess, where frauds were claiming to set up meal delivery for schools, getting paid by the state, and then not actually delivering anything.

Except now it’s blowing up again because Republicans have discovered a racist angle to it. A lot of the schools not-served by these services were in poor Somali communities, with the complicity of Somali con artists, because as usual poor people are ripe for the picking with promises of free money. So now there’s a story Republicans can seize upon: poor black people were stealing our money! Never mind that state officials were aware of the problem and have been trying to do cleanup and improve regulatory oversight for over a decade and that it’s not just a Somali problem.

For instance, here’s the organizer of the scheme, Aimee Bock:

Whoops. I guess we’re going to have to round up all the white women and deport them. Just can’t trust ’em.

Keep in mind that Minnesota has a population of 80,000 people of Somali descent. Something like 80 were involved in the crime, so sure, indicting over 3 million white women in the state because Aimee Bock stole millions of dollars seems fair.

For a more thorough overview of the scheme, here’s a fast-talking white woman to compress the whole convoluted mess into 24 minutes.

One of the more crazy accusations coming out of the demented Right is the claim that the Minnesota state flag, which is blue and has a star on it, was designed to resemble the Somali flag, which is blue and has a star on it. You be the judge.

The Manhattan Institute carried out a poll that dissects the current Republican coalition. It’s not a particularly trustworthy think-tank — Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow, and it publishes the City Journal, a magazine that only catches my eye because it is egregiously racist and pro-eugenics — so don’t accept its conclusions without question. A major result of the poll is that it detects two broad categories within the party that are somewhat in conflict, but also have much in common with each other.

• Core Republicans (65%)—longstanding GOP voters who have consistently backed Republican presidential nominees since 2016 or earlier; and
• New Entrant Republicans (29%)—recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.

I don’t like either group. The Core Republicans are boringly familiar, they fit the old stereotype of Republicans. The New Entrant Republicans are much more interesting and unexpected (to me), and have a more complex perspective. They’re a mess, and I don’t understand how they’ve aligned themselves to Republicans — they mainly look a bunch of flighty and weird people who bumble about looking for self-justification of their views, some of which I might agree with, except they somehow end up supporting Trump.

This description starts out positively, and ends up horrifically.

But a sizeable minority—new entrants to the GOP coalition over the past two presidential cycles—look markedly different. Younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past, this group diverges sharply from the party’s core. They are more likely, often substantially more likely, to hold progressive views across nearly every major policy domain. They are more supportive of left-leaning economic policies, more favorable toward China, more critical of Israel, and more liberal on issues ranging from migration to DEI initiatives. A significant share also report openly racist or antisemitic views and express potential support for political violence. Yet they overwhelmingly identify as Republicans today and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Yikes. “A significant share also report openly racist or antisemitic views and express potential support for political violence” — I think that alone is enough to explain why they ended up in the Trump camp. That’s the glue that is holding the coalition together.

With one other feature: they’re crackpots. This is the lunatic party.

Over a third of the Republican party thinks vaccines cause autism, that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Holocaust was exaggerated, that 9/11 was engineered by the US government. Over half believe Trump’s claim that his election losses were criminally engineered, and that the pandemic was produced by China. They’re nuts. This party is not salvaged by the fact that most might disagree with these conspiracy theories, it contains a substantial number of loons.

This explains a lot about the Republican party.

Although I’d like to see a similar analysis of Democratic voters — I’m lacking too much context here.