Trump abruptly reverses course on Epstein files

After fighting tooth and nail to prevent the so-called Epstein files from being released, last night Trump reversed course and issued a statement reversing course asking his party members in Congress to vote to do so. The House vote to release the files was scheduled for this evening or tomorrow.

Late on Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.

“And it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he added.

Why the switch? Here’s the conventional wisdom:

Trump spent last week aggressively squeezing allies in the US House, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, to back off in their support of releasing the files. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and when it became apparent the measure was going to pass, Trump backed it in an effort to salvage an embarrassing political loss. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” he posted on his Truth Social network on Sunday evening.

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The strange saga of the Epstein files

I have not written much about the Epstein files and the recently released trove of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump and other various well-known people because it is being covered so extensively in the media. Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that the Epstein emails are becoming a chronic problem for Trump.

On Capitol Hill, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, kept the chamber in recess from mid-September to mid-November in what seemed to be a transparent effort to block a vote on releasing the Justice Department files. This, I’ve long thought, should have been more of a scandal in its own right—Congress closing for business for weeks and weeks because a Speaker was running interference on behalf of a President who didn’t want more details to emerge of his dealings with a sleazy dead rich guy who had sex with underage women on his private island? How was that not a bigger deal?

But, in order to end the longest-ever government shutdown, Johnson had to give in this week and order the House to return to work. That meant swearing in a new Democratic member who had won a special election in September; she quickly became the two-hundred-and-eighteenth signatory of the discharge petition that will now force Johnson to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.

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How the ‘Sandwich Guy’ jury deliberated

It is often interesting when, after a trial that garnered a lot of attention, the jurors talk about what went on in the jury room. That is what happened when a juror spoke to Ashley Parker, a reporter from The Atlantic magazine, about the case in which Sean Charles Dunn, aka the Sandwich Guy, was on trial for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. She said that she wished to be anonymous because of the reputation of the Trump people to be vindictive and seek to retaliate.

The juror I spoke with told me that the jury—three men and nine women (roughly an equal mix of Black and white)—included an architect, a professor, an analyst, and some retirees whom she described as probably “100 percent anti-Trump” and protective of their city. She went into the trial thinking it was “bullshit,” she told me, “but I did enter it trying to be objective.”
…

The group was careful to avoid politics, she said, and instead focused on several key questions: Had the sandwich actually “exploded all over” CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, as he’d testified? (Specifically, they analyzed—and at times mocked—Lairmore’s claim that “I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night.”) What was Dunn’s intent in flinging the grinder? And what actually constitutes “bodily harm”?

On the first question, several jury members struggled to stifle laughter as Lairmore expanded on the hoagie’s alleged explosive properties. “It was like, Oh, you poor baby,” the juror told me.

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An academic takedown of The New York Times

I know that many of the readers of this blog also read PZ’s Pharyngula so this post may be a bit redundant for them but I followed a link he gave in a recent post that was so good that I wanted to give it more publicity. The link was to an essay by Peter Coviello who used to be the chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, an expensive elite liberal arts college in Maine. It was also the department in which Zohran Mamdani majored while in college.

Coviello says that whenever an alumnus of a college becomes famous, and especially if they are controversial, reporters come calling to get some background on that person and this was no exception. Reporters approached him to ask about Mamdani. He warns that little good comes of talking to the reporters because they usually have an ax to grind and they will take what you say and make it fit their agenda, which will often be opposed to what you stand for. But it is hard to resist such an approach. For one thing, academics love to have the opportunity to spread greater awareness of their work and the popular media provides a major platform. There is also the issue of vanity. Being quoted in the media can be seen as a feather in one’s cap, a sign that one has had some impact, and can improve one’s standing among colleagues, provided it is not a takedown of you.
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The politics of Zohran Mamdani’s father

I had not known much about Zohran Mamdani’s family who were not in the forefront of his successful campaign for mayor of New York City but his father Mahmood Mamdani is a professor of colonial studies at Columbia University and he was interviewed by Evan Goldstein for The Chronicle of Higher Education after the election.

Long before Mahmood Mamdani’s surname became ubiquitous in national politics, it loomed large in the field of postcolonial studies. In several major books, he explored the enduring effects of colonialism — specifically, how various political and legal statuses, such as “citizen” and “subject” (the title of his 1996 book) explain various inequities and power differentials in postcolonial societies. Last month, Harvard University Press published his new book, Slow Poison. Mamdani tells the story of post-independence Uganda through the lens of two national leaders — Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni — and his own experiences as a scholar at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, and as a member of the country’s minority Asian population.

Mamdani has been on medical leave from Columbia University — “back issues,” he said — though he plans to return to teaching next fall. He does so with trepidation, given some of the provisions of the deal Columbia struck in July with the Trump administration.

For an hour, Mamdani spoke quietly, indulging in long pauses, and discussed the relationship between politics and scholarship, the protests that convulsed Columbia last year, and how the FBI introduced him to the work of Karl Marx.

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The Republican war on arithmetic

Trump and Republicans have no qualms about using false numbers about everything including the economy and the effects of tariffs to justify their action. But sometimes those numbers are so obviously false that one wonders how they could say them with a straight face.

Take for example, Trump claiming that he has reduced prices. He throws around random large numbers for the size of the reductions , saying that they are 500%, 1000%, 5000%, and so on, adding that “No one has seen numbers like that”. There is a good reason that no one has seen numbers like that since anyone who is even barely numerate would know that you cannot reduce the price of anything by more than 100% since a reduction of 100% would make it free.

You would expect that Mehmet Oz, who used to be a heart surgeon (and reputedly a good one) before he went on to become a TV personality peddling all manner of dubious health advice, would know better. But this newly minted Trump fanboy tried to explain away Trump’s absurd numbers using absurd arguments.
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The pettiness of Trump never ends

We are used to politicians and government officials having sign language interpreters alongside when they deliver important messages so that the hearing impaired could also benefit from what is being said. But I had missed the fact that Trump had canceled them for his events.

Now a federal judge has ordered that they be brought back.

A federal judge has ordered the White House to restore real-time American Sign Language interpretation at all press briefings conducted by President Donald Trump or press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the Trump White House’s decision to end ASL interpretation illegally excluded deaf Americans from crucial updates from the government on matters of war, the economy and public health. And evidence shows, Ali noted, that closed captioning and transcripts are insufficient alternatives.
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Sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich

Recall the case of the man who was prosecuted by the federal government for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. Yesterday, he was acquitted by a jury.

There was no doubt as to the facts of the case. Sean Charles Dunn flatly said, “I did it. I threw the sandwich.” It was clear that the government tried to make the case into a warning to anyone to not show disrespect to any of its ICE or CBP thugs, after a viral video of the incident made them a laughing stock.

A grand jury in DC declined to indict Dunn in August on a felony assault charge, but he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor. The case moved ahead in federal court, with US district judge Carl Nichols acknowledging the strange case and saying the trial would be short “because it’s the simplest case in the world”.

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Pelosi leaves, time for Schumer and Jeffries to also go

Former speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is not going to run for re-election to her San Francisco congressional seat in 2026. As speaker, while she was a shrewd tactician and had the skills to keep a boisterous caucus together on some major issues such as Obamacare and protecting some safety net issues, she was typical of the party’s old guard of neoliberals, very solicitous to Wall Street interests, unwilling to take on the oligarchy, or to make even the mildest criticisms of any atrocity that Israel committed. This made her out of step with the current generation and it was definitely time for her to go.
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Republicans flailing in the aftermath of Tuesday’s losses

As usually happens, the hot takes by the losers following a bad election loss like what Trump and the Republicans suffered on Tuesday tend to be somewhat extreme. Although they lost everywhere, it is Mamdani’s win that seems to have struck a real nerve and it is not hard to see why. The defeats in the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey, though by much larger margins than anyone expected, were to largely centrist candidates who did, however, lean into the fact that running against Trump was a good idea, something that Mamdani demonstrated throughout his surprising race that took him from 1% in the polls a year ago to winning over 50% of the vote on Tuesday. For example, 71% of people who voted for Mikie Sherrill for governor of New York Jersey said that it was a vote against Trump.

What must bother them is that Mamdani did not at all shy away from all the attempts to ‘other’ him, to make him look like ‘not one of us’. Instead he embraced it. As he said defiantly in his victory speech, “I am young … I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” Republicans are making a big mistake if they think that Mamdani won because of those qualities. New Yorkers may be more progressive than the nation as a whole but they are not that progressive. I think he won despite those things being a handicap and if Republicans focus on those things and don’t look closely at what made Mamdani’s message such a winning one that it neutralized all those deficits, they will be making a big mistake. Mamdani’s achievement was in seizing upon the issues that New Yorkers cared about and refusing to be sidetracked by attacks on his biography. Others could have done what he did but he was the one who saw the opening and seized it. The fact that he is charismatic and energetic and presents a vision of youthful energy and change undoubtedly helped.
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