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      in US Politics

      ‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’

      by

      Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters, the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its plunge into the sparkling waters below.This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?) Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they took away any sense of normality, any faith that societies can provide lives without bold-faced slogans, bald-faced lies, leaders with steely set jaws, and crusades against phantom menaces, whether Venezuelan or Ukrainian.I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel, Vera, or Faith, is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future with fairly good aim in novels such as Super Sad True Love Story, where social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and change.But before I wrote that book, there was a period of some optimism where, I confess, I got things terribly wrong. I imagined, in my least cynical moments, that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently Afrikaner. Politicians in all countries lie, but the Russian and American floods of lies are not just harbingers of a malevolent ideology, they are the ideology.Vera, the titular character of my new novel, is a 10-year-old girl growing up in an America that is just slightly different from our own. Her best friend is an artificially intelligent chessboard named Kaspie (after the chess player), the car that drives her to school is an ingratiating AI named Stella, and the lessons of her school are preparing her for a constitutional convention that will allow certain “exceptional” Americans, ie those who can trace their heritage to the colonial era but were not brought to the country in chains, five-thirds of a vote. This is being done, Vera is continually told, not to diminish her rights (she, being half-Korean, would not qualify for the enhanced vote), but to honour the Americans who are exceptional by nature of their birth.One reason I wanted to write from the point of view of a 10-year-old character – who, as it happens, is also half-Russian by heritage – is because of the way living in an authoritarian regime changed my own life. There was daily cruelty in the courtyards, classrooms and workplaces of the Soviet Union (not to mention the daily fisticuffs over nonexistent products in the food stores), but there was something else you could never forget even as a child: ubiquity. I grew up a stone’s throw from the biggest statue of Lenin in Leningrad; Lenin looked down at me from the walls of the kindergarten classroom in which my mother taught music; and the very city in which I lived had been renamed after him.When I wrote Vera, my own son was 10, and Trump was every bit as much a part of his life as Lenin was of mine, from talk in the playground to conversations at the dinner table to the discussions of his social studies class. It is unsurprising that Trump’s sometime ideological consigliere Steve Bannon has chosen Leninism as a model for his hero’s rule. All mode of social inquiry, even at a fifth-grade level, must lead back to the scowling man on the television and telephone screen. My parents and I may have different styles of childrearing and certainly different politics, but despite our disagreements I will always honour them for getting me out of the Soviet Union at the right time. The question for my son as well as the fictional Vera remains: is it time to do the same with our children? Or is there still room to stay and fight?Of course, there are large, some would say crucial differences between the Soviet Union of the 1970s and the Trumpistan that America has become today. Much as the comparisons of the contemporary United States with Hitler’s Germany are incomplete (though getting more complete by the day), Russia and America are hardly twins either. And yet, their increasing similarities raise the question of how the similarities that seemed nonexistent at the end of the cold war are becoming unavoidable now.To start with, these are vast lands that stretch from sea to sea. Their size alone is enough to fuel messianic complexes, manifest destinies, divine rights. And religion, which can easily morph into ideology and then violence, drives the stupidity of both nations. In both societies, religion helped normalise the bondage of other human beings: slavery in America and the institution of serfdom in Russia. Inequality is baked into the national psyche of both, despite Russia’s experiments with state socialism: the idea that human beings must be parsed into a multitude of categories. Obviously, other countries have caste systems, but none has the capacity to impose its worldview on the rest of the globe with such stubborn resilience. The Soviet Union loudly professed the brotherhood of nations, but Russian racism remained thick and outlandish on the ground (ask almost any African exchange student), and was converted with great ease into a hatred of Ukrainians, with Russian television using animated images of Ukrainians rolling in the mud with pigs and references to a racial slur that can be compared with the worst used in the States.Trumpistan dives right into this morass with the falsehood that some commonplace tattoos found on Venezuelan bodies supposedly signify gang orientation, but really emphasising that some people – brown or black or non-Christian or non-straight – can never fully claim the mantle of Americanness. There are, indeed, “exceptional” Americans, those that look like Trump and much of his coterie, and then there are those who semi-belong, or who may stay as long as they are useful, and then there are those who don’t belong at all and can be deported at will.Trump loves Putin with good reason. Putin takes the messianic ideals that are found at the nub of both American and Russian societies and he makes something out of them that Trump can only find beautiful and instrumental to his own power and corrupt dealings.As both countries enter headlong into postindustrial, likely artificially intelligent ages, Putin subverts the meaninglessness of Russian working-class lives with loud (though sometimes nonsensical and contradictory) narratives, rooted in a perceived insult to the messianic ideals of the fatherland. When, during his debate with the doomed Kamala Harris, Trump said that Haitian immigrants – those who would never be true Americans even if granted citizenship – are “eating the cats … eating the dogs”, he almost surpassed his master in terms of the clarity and shamelessness of his message, as well as an understanding of the audience for whom these comments were intended. It is most interesting to see older Russian-speaking immigrants in America, who fled the authoritarian USSR of their younger days, embrace Trump precisely because of the clarity of his message, their inability to deny a great leader shouting slogans that, if you take away their ideological direction, look much like the ones that lined the walls of our metro stations or the front pages of the newspapers we sometimes used as toilet paper.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen I wrote Vera, there was one thing I couldn’t quite do to my 10-year-old heroine, which is to subject her to the threat of violence. She was simply too young for that, and also, because her family was financially privileged, less likely to face such a threat. But as I write this, in June 2025, Trump is taking the final steps of authoritarian progression in his attempt to label any protest against the unconstitutional nature of his rule as an insurrection that must be put down with military force. These attempts, as we can see, can be easily accepted by his followers, many of whom drink from the well of (often Russian-born) misinformation. There are parts of our population who are aching to shoot a brown “un-American” person at the border, in the same way many Russians without a purpose in life dream of profitably shooting a Ukrainian.And whereas Putin has relied on his own praetorian guard, the Rosgvardia (or Russian National Guard), so Trump is stumbling toward his own force in the fiercely racist and loyal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice, which, in cities like Los Angeles and elsewhere, happily spreads the fuel with which our democracy may soon burn.View image in fullscreenI want to take a step back and return to the mythical country with which I began. My favourite country in the world, Italy, is ruled by a political party with ties to Mussolini. Other countries I love are not paragons of social democracy and have little love of the “outsider”, although they may rely on exactly such people to care for their parents or raise their children. But the danger of America and Russia lies in the ferocity with which we believe, a ferocity that in Russia is fuelled by a justifiable anger (and built-in fatalism), given how the population has been ruled throughout the entirety of Russian history, and in America is enhanced by a population that, despite its relative wealth, reads below a sixth-grade level and is easily susceptible to manipulation. Ignorance, to add a pinch of Orwell to the proceedings, is the strength of both regimes. Convincing these populations that slavery was but a feeble blip on the radar of American history or that Ukrainians are porcine savages who precipitated Russia’s invasion requires a groundwork set by centuries of hatred and exploitation.So where should my Vera live? It is hard to say, because living under these regimes is already preparing our children for the two choices they will inevitably face – to fight or to conform. And is it right to ask a child to give up her birthright, the right to live in a country that invented the grace of the blues, the easy slide of denim jeans, the sweet, almost religious voices of Walt Whitman and James Baldwin? That is a lot to ask of a 10-year-old.The beauty of writing about a child is that you can see the monstrosity of the world adults have built filter through their innocence. But no child stays innocent for ever. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt

      by

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      Democrats condemn CBS for axing Colbert show: ‘People deserve to know if this is politically motivated’

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      Democrats are condemning CBS for its recent decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes just a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump.Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”In early July, Paramount settled a “frivolous” lawsuit with Trump over the president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Paramount is also seeking approval from the US Federal Communications Commission for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. On Monday, Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.Colbert’s firing would not be the first potentially spurred by a dispute with the president. In February, after MSNBC fired host Joy Reid, Trump celebrated her show’s cancellation. Reid, a Black woman, had been a vocal critic of Trump and spoke frankly about the Black Lives Matter movement and war in Gaza. And in December, ABC News agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos with a $15m payment to a Trump foundation and museum, as well as paying $1m in the president’s legal fees.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has called for an investigation into Paramount’s relationship with Trump over the Skydance merger, wrote: “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount.”Skydance is owned by David Ellison, the son of a close Trump ally, Larry Ellison.Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington also posted on social media, writing: “People deserve to know if this is a politically motivated attack on free speech.”Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator, echoed similar concerns. “CBS’s billionaire owners pay Trump $16 million to settle a bogus lawsuit while trying to sell the network to Skydance,” he wrote. “Stephen Colbert, an extraordinary talent and the most popular late night host, slams the deal. Days later, he’s fired. Do I think this is a coincidence? NO.”CBS announced it would retire the Late Show after Colbert’s contract ends in May, cutting short a 33-year run that began when David Letterman launched the show in 1993. The show received an Emmy nomination earlier in the week for talk series.A number of celebrities also voiced their frustration with the cancellation, including concerns that it may have been politically motivated. In a social media post the actor John Cusack wrote: “He’s not groveling enough to American fascism – Larry Ellison needs his tax cuts – doesn’t need comedians reminding people they are not cattle.”In a joint statement, Paramount and CBS executives wrote that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”.They said they considered “Stephen Colbert irreplaceable” and that the show’s cancellation “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount”.Writing on his own social media platform, Trump celebrated the show’s cancellation: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”Trump has called for the network to fire Colbert since September 2024, when the host called the president “boring” during an interview with PBS NewsHour. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Maga and Jeffrey Epstein: the truth about Donald Trump and conspiracy theories | Editorial

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      Donald Trump has thrived on conspiracy theories – “birtherist” lies that Barack Obama was born outside the US; the lunacies of the Q-Anon movement; false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. All centred on the idea that the “deep state” was lying to, and thus cheating, ordinary people. Mr Trump was their tribune.It’s hard not to feel schadenfreude now that he’s at the sharp end of a theory that he at times encouraged and allies eagerly pushed: claims that the prison death of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein might not be suicide after all, and that wealthy and well-connected associates were trying to hush up connections to the financier. Mr Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised that “truckloads” of documents would help reveal the truth and claimed that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now”.Then, abruptly, the department of justice said that the financier’s death was not murder, that no more files on the investigation against him would be released, and that there was no list of “clients”. The administration says that Ms Bondi was referring to general files on the case. In short: many of those who promoted the idea that vast, vile secrets were being concealed now claim that there are no secrets at all – with no clear explanation for their volte-face.The result has been uproar in the Maga movement, with far-right politicians and media figures including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer and Alex Jones among the unsatisfied. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House and a key ally, said that the justice department should “put it out there”.Mr Trump attempted to dismiss the story as “boring”, before attacking his own supporters as “weaklings” for “[buying] into this ‘bullshit’”. Then, hours after a Wall Street Journal report that he sent a “bawdy” letter to Epstein – which he denies – he told Ms Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony on the sex-trafficking case.Epstein’s crimes are fact, not a “hoax”, and it’s also fact that he had repeated contact with high-profile figures, including Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Mr Trump himself – who once remarked of the financier: “Terrific guy … It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The files need not suggest, let alone confirm, any wrongdoing to embarrass anyone mentioned in them: highlighting the association is enough.At the heart of all Maga conspiracies lies another kernel of truth: that the rich and powerful often get away with exploiting vulnerable people through connections to the state. Yet Trump voters fail to see how that relates to the administration’s broader actions.They are unmoved by his reverse Robin Hood budget legislation, which snatches from the poor to give to billionaires – like those in his cabinet. It’s less visceral than Epstein’s crimes, and its brazenness may, counterintuitively, make it less viral. Many on the right blame imaginary weather modification, rather than the global heating caused by fossil fuel dependence, for Texas’s deadly floods. Conspiracy theories give those who feel powerless a sense of power; of knowing something that others can’t see. Even so, the truth revealed by the Epstein scandal – that ordinary Americans are deeply angry at the unfairness and abuses created by elites – is worth heeding, and demands a better political and economic response.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump’s endless toying with conspiracy theories has finally come back to bite him | Moira Donegan

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      Donald Trump’s followers, and the conspiracist influencers turned government officials through whom he persuades them, have turned on the president and US attorney general after they declared an end to federal inquiries into Jeffrey Epstein’s death. But it would be a mistake to think that the investigation scandal is sui generis. It’s more like the culmination of a long-running trend, one in which Trump’s exploitation of the conspiracist fictions, distrust of institutions, and prurient fascinations of his base have finally come back to bite him.A pedophile ring at the center of power is a recurring theme in rightwing conspiracy theories of the Trump era. During the 2016 presidential election, supporters of Trump, then an outsider challenger for the Republican nomination, began to spread dark claims about his rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton. Online, far-right trolls and members of the population now called “low trust voters”– people who believe that something nefarious and conspiratorial is going on in the halls of American power, even if they don’t know exactly what – speculated that Clinton was at the head of a huge human trafficking and pedophilic abuse ring based inside Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington DC. There was no secret ring. But that didn’t stop a disturbed man from showing up with a gun.Pizzagate, as it was called, gave way to QAnon, the elaborate mass delirium in which Trump supporters believed that they were receiving secret messages from Q, a fictitious but supposedly highly placed security official. QAnon, too, centered around the notion that powerful people – Democrats, mostly, but also some Hollywood celebrities – were secretly running a vast pedophile network. In his dispatches, Q detailed Trump’s efforts to dismantle a deep state ring of child sex trafficking. None of that was true, either, but that didn’t stop thousands from believing in it.Trump exploited these fictions, nodding to them deliberately with varying degrees of enthusiasm and plausible deniability. They were useful to him, stories in which he was a hero, and his political opponents were maximally morally repulsive. The conspiracies helped paper over the gap between the near-messianic esteem in which Trump’s followers hold him, and the shambolic, incompetent and often cruelly sadistic character of his actual administration. And the content of the stories – dealing as they did in secrecy, power, helpless innocents and forbidden sex – made them potent tools, igniting the fiercest passions and darkest imaginations of his fans.To a man with a bottomless appetite for self-aggrandizement and no principles, the conspiracy theories’ emergence must have seemed like a great stroke of luck. Trump lies like he breathes, and the national media, his fellow politicians, and all manner of experts have lost both the ability and the will to correct the record. Over the past 10 years, through the force of his personality and with mounting attacks on universities, journalists and other outlets for knowledge building, fact-finding, and expertise, he has helped to accelerate a total epistemic collapse in national politics. Policy and public opinion alike are now unmoored from factual reality. What is true is no longer what matters.The story of Epstein, the dead financier and prolific sexual abuser of young women and girls who killed himself in a jail cell in 2019, was in retrospect always bound to become a central character in these vast fantasies. Part of the reason is because of the true horror of Epstein’s crimes, and the uncanny ways some of the facts of his story – as demonstrated in court transcripts, unredacted documents, testimony from his victims, and the dogged, years-long investigations of the Miami Herald’s Julie K Brown – mirror some of the darkest details of QAnon’s fever dreams. A billionaire investor with ties to a shocking number of prominent people across the political spectrum – prominently including Trump himself – Epstein carried out his abuse of dozens of teenage girls over the course of years, allegedly trafficking them for abuse on his private island and aboard his private plane, and, according to some of the girls, now women, who have testified about their experiences with him, pawning them off for abuse by his rich friends. He was a man who lived in tremendous luxury, who mingled with the rich and famous, and who treated human beings – girls – as objects to be consumed, with a kind of casual indifference to their will or wellbeing. He was evil – and, to those on the right who seem to understand both conspicuous consumption and the sexual abuse of women as markers of status, he was also darkly aspirational. In some of the breathless coverage of Epstein, particularly as it emerged on the podcasts and web forums of the conspiracist right, you could detect in the fascination with Epstein not only moral revulsion but an acute envy.It’s unclear why Trump is now trying to wrap up a conspiracy theory that has paid such dividends. Perhaps, as some are suggesting, Trump worries that sustained attention on Epstein’s case will draw more attention to his own abuse of women, though such revelations about Trump have been many, and have not hurt him before. Perhaps he just thinks that he cannot deliver, from his perch atop the federal bureaucracy that is so implicated in crimes and cover-ups in the imaginations of his supporters, the kind of earth-shattering revelations that the conspiracy theory’s narrative structures demand. Either way, Trump has turned abruptly and dramatically against the Epstein theory. He’s trying to reassert control over reality, trying to dictate which fantasies his movement adopts, and which they leave behind. It’s not working. The post-truth conspiracist world he helped to usher in is too unwieldy to be redirected at will.There’s a grim irony in the fact that it is a case of sexual violence that has underscored the dangers of epistemic collapse for Trump himself, because sexual violence represents an arena where a post-truth reality long predates him. No one knows better than sexual violence victims, who are routinely disbelieved, dismissed, or punished for telling the truth, what it means for the facts of your own life not to matter as much as the passions and prior commitments of your audience.What people tend to forget about Epstein’s life – clouded as it has been by all the speculation about his death – is that much of what he was doing to those women and girls was out in the open. Epstein had already been convicted and served prison time on charges pertaining to his sexual abuse; when he’d gotten out, he’d resumed his place among the rich and famous: his status was undiminished by the revelation of his violence. Maybe this is the real delusion at the heart of the conspiracy theories about Epstein and the other pedophile rings that populate the rightwing imagination: not that widespread sexual abuse happens, but that it is concealed, hidden, waiting to be unveiled by the righteous. For sexual abuse, at least, the real horror has always been this: that no one cares enough about the victims for the abusers to have to hide.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Stephen Colbert on Trump’s Epstein controversy: ‘Desperately looking for a scapegoat’

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      Late-night hosts dig into Donald Trump’s growing anxiety over the Jeffrey Epstein files and his beef with the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.Stephen ColbertOn Thursday evening, Stephen Colbert announced that the Late Show would end in May 2026, owing to a decision by the CBS parent company, Paramount. Though Paramount said the decision was “purely financial”, the cancellation comes just three days after Colbert openly criticized the company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump for $16m.The settlement coincided with Paramount seeking approval from the Trump administration for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.In a separate message to viewers on Thursday, Colbert said he was informed of the decision the night before. “Yeah, I share your feelings,” he said as the audience booed.“It’s not just the end of the show, it is the end of the Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced, this is all just going away,” he added. “Let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish someone else was getting it. And it is a job I am looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months.”During his monologue, Colbert focused on the Jeffrey Epstein controversy consuming the White House, and “causing so much trouble for Trump that he recently ordered it to be put in a cell and for the cameras to stop working for three minutes”.“Maga is furious because they think Trump is refusing to release the Epstein files,” he explained. “In response, Trump has been saying that there are no credible files, and if there are, they’re really boring, and also Obama made them up.“That part is true, and you can read them on Obama’s annual summer Epstein client list,” he joked.“As crazy as it is, Trump is going all in on the idea that his followers have fallen for a nefarious Democratic scheme.” As Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday: “Certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats, and they’re following the Democrat playbook.”“That is ridiculous – the Democrats have never had a playbook,” Colbert joked. “It’s improv, baby!“Trump is desperately looking for a scapegoat,” so on Wednesday, he fired the Manhattan prosecutor who handled the Epstein case and “pulled the Uno reverse card”, calling on the FBI to investigate “this Jeffrey Epstein hoax”.“By which he evidently means he wants the FBI to investigate the folks who investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” Colbert said, “which is weird, but we could get a whole new spinoff of To Catch a Predator.”Seth MeyersTrump “is under a lot of pressure from all this Epstein stuff. Even his most devoted supporters are trashing him and demanding answers,” said Seth Meyers on Thursday’s Late Night before clips of numerous Republicans demanding answers and even calling for an independent special counsel.In an interview with a far-right media network, Trump called the Epstein files a “scam” that’s “all put out by Democrats, some of the naive Republicans fall right into line like they always do”.“Fall in line with what?” an exasperated Meyers asked. “Democrats didn’t say a word. Your own supporters are the ones who spent years demanding the files and obsessing over the Epstein case, which was a very real criminal case involving a very real person, and now you’re the one fanning the flames of the conspiracy by calling it all a hoax. I swear we’re like a day away from Trump claiming Jeffrey Epstein was never even a real person.”Meyers also homed in on the far-right interviewer who validated Trump with “they definitely set the Republicans up.”“Set them up how?!” he implored. “We’ve been asking this question all week: how did they set up the Republicans? They made up fake Epstein files, then kept those fake files secret, then convinced the entire Maga base to spend years demanding the release of those files, then knew they would lose the election to Trump, who would then refuse to release the files they made up? You people all need to take a fucking dementia test.”The Daily Show“We all know President Trump has spent the last two weeks in a wrestling match with the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show. “But he’s been fighting the last six months with a much more alive person: Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. And boy does Trump hate the guy.”Klepper played a series of clips in which Trump called Powell a “stupid person”, an “average, mentally, person. I’d say low at what he does” and a “numbskull … you talk to the guy and it’s like talking to nothing. It’s like talking to a chair.”“Yeah! Whatever happened to all of our exciting, dynamic Federal Reserve chairs?” Klepper joked.“The way Trump talks about him, you’d think they caught him at a Coldplay concert with Trump’s wife,” he added. “But at its heart, this is a beef about economics. Trump wants to lower interest rates to help juice the economy, but Jerome Powell is in charge of setting those interest rates, and he refuses to lower them because he’s worried that will increase inflation. And nothing, nothing makes Trump angrier than someone doing their job well.”In another clip, Trump blasted Joe Biden for nominating Powell. Except … Klepper cut to a clip of Trump nominating Powell in 2017, calling him “strong,” “committed” and “smart”.“Damn, Joe Biden looks fat as shit,” Klepper joked. “But also, I get it. I’m also trying desperately to forget everything that happened during Trump’s first term.” More

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      The end of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show is a concerning nail in the coffin for comedy | Jesse Hassenger

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      The idea that the political career of Donald Trump would be a goldmine for comedy died a long time ago, with the coffin accepting stray nails for the past five years. The latest and possibly last such nail is the cancellation of The Late Show, the CBS late-night talkshow hosted by Stephen Colbert since the fall of 2015, and originated by David Letterman when the network poached him from NBC in 1993. At this point, Trump hasn’t just made topical late-night comedy look outdated, hackneyed and an insufficient response to his reign of terror; he’s also made a chunk of it flat-out go away.There will be time to eulogize Colbert’s particular talkshow style later; the Late Show isn’t leaving the air for another 10 months, when his contract is up. Surely that leaves plenty more time to savage the president – and Colbert has been in this slot since right around the time Trump became a real contender in the presidential race, so why has this only now come to a head? Seemingly because the axing of the Late Show franchise follows the $16m settlement of a frivolous Trump lawsuit against CBS and their newsmagazine show 60 Minutes over the show’s editing of a 2024 interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Colbert made great fun of his bosses’ payout as a cowardly “bribe” designed to appease the Trump administration, who are in the position to approve or deny the sale of Paramount, the corporate owners of CBS, to the company Skydance. In other words, the pre-merger nixing a comedian who regularly goofs on Trump on network TV seems like a convenient bit of timing – maybe even an unspoken bonus to go along with those millions of dollars.The network, of course, has characterized the decision as “purely financial” amid a period when most traditional late-night shows have struggled. As excuses go, it’s not entirely unconvincing. After all, Colbert isn’t being replaced with another host; The Late Show is simply going the same route as its short-lived companion series After Midnight (and The Late Late Show before it). CBS is surrendering the late-night block entirely. This represents a major retreat after the Letterman deal made the network a genuine player for the first time in ages. Presumably it’s back to reruns and old movies going forward.In that sense, this decision does transcend politics. CBS has ripped off a bandage that the big three networks have been applying to similar wounds for years. Late-night programming simply doesn’t mean as much as it used to, with smaller network lead-ins from primetime lineups and more audience choices for comedy, talk, music or even the dopey celeb games that Jimmy Fallon throws together. Saturday Night Live has retained some cultural cachet, thanks to a combination of lower commitment (20 episodes a year, on a night where many people don’t have work the next day, versus eight times as many, all airing on weeknights), legacy branding (it’s still known as a star showcase and political comedy go-to, no matter how wan those cold-open sketches get), and sketch comedy that travels well online. These days, it’s routinely one of the highest-rated network shows of the week when it airs a new episode, offering an encouraging sign that old time-slot rules about viewership no longer apply. It’s also extremely expensive to produce and difficult to replicate, which nonetheless looks more viable than the tired talkshow format.View image in fullscreenBroadly, this could be a good thing for comic minds including Colbert or Conan O’Brien. Some comedians seem unable to resist the siren call of late-night talkshows, chasing the Tonight Show dream even when that actual job remained out of reach. O’Brien is a singularly brilliant comedy writer and performer; as great as his late-night shows could be, in retrospect should he have spent three decades primarily in that waning medium? Colbert, meanwhile, did his strongest political satire playing a parody of a conservative commentator on The Daily Show and its later spinoff The Colbert Report. His warmth and sometimes-sharp humor made him a good “real” talkshow host – and by most standards, a successful one. In recent matchups, his Late Show has been the most-watched such program across the major networks. That he can face cancellation anyway should (alongside O’Brien losing his Tonight Show gig years ago) signal to newcomers that the rarified air of the national late-night talkshow host is also getting pretty thin, maybe unbreathable.Yet Trump has sucked up some of that oxygen, too. Even with the “challenges” cited by CBS, it’s difficult to believe that vanquishing a longtime issuer of Trump mockery wasn’t at least considered a side benefit of canceling The Late Show. Even if the decision was, as claimed, a financial one, it accompanies another financial decision: that Paramount could afford to pay Trump $16m rather than proceed with litigation that many seemed to think they could win. That’s precisely the kind of expense that could diminish how, say, your late-night talkshow attracts more eyeballs than The Tonight Show.Beyond Trump personally smudging up the balance sheets, he’s helped to hasten the demise of late-night comedy simply by being himself, seeming to provide the perfect target: a venal, dimwitted perma-celebrity with an army of devoted sycophants. But after two non-consecutive administrations have flooded the zone with grotesqueries, performing a lightly zinging monologue or sketches as a warmup act for good-natured interviews seems unlikely to entice either those craving anti-Trump catharsis, or those desperate to believe in his strongman powers.That Colbert took a somewhat less cutesy approach than his competitor Fallon seemed to be all that was necessary to mark him as a troublemaker. The thing is, Trump might have ultimately consumed him either way. By providing a ready-made caricature of himself, intentionally or not, the president has beaten the system again. It may not be worth mourning the hacky, presidential-themed jokes we might miss in a future with fewer talkshows than ever. But it does feel like the enforcement of one of Trump’s more minor cruelties: the ability to see himself as the only real star in the world. More

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      ‘He’s a lot of fun to be with’: Trump and Epstein were close friends for 15 years

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      It was a friendship that spanned three different decades. To Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy”. Epstein believed himself to be Trump’s “closest friend”, and praised the future president as “charming”.The relationship would eventually break down, the men falling out over a bidding war on a property in Florida. And after Epstein was convicted of child sex offences in 2008, Trump distanced himself from the financier, claiming he was “not a fan” and wondering, in recent days, why his supporters would “waste time and energy” on demanding that FBI and Department of Justice files on Epstein be released.But photos, videos and anecdotes paint a picture of a close friendship, of two middle-aged men who repeatedly partied together both alone and with their partners, including with Melania Knauss, who would go on to become Trump’s third wife.“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”Trump’s insight into Epstein’s predilections would be proved true in macabre fashion, when Epstein was found guilty in 2008 of sexually abusing girls aged between 14 and 17 years old. When Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors, in 2019, Trump attempted to play down their relationship, insisting: “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.” Trump said the pair had fallen out years earlier, and claimed: “I was not a fan of his.”But during the 15 years that the men were friends, there were plenty of incidents that displayed Trump and Epstein’s closeness.The New York Times reported that in 1992, George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman, had organized a “calendar girl” competition at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private members’ club where he would later live full-time.Houraney flew more than two dozen women to Mar-a-Lago, but he had a surprise when they arrived.“I arranged to have some contestants fly in,” Houraney told the Times. “At the very first party, I said, ‘Who’s coming tonight? I have 28 girls coming.’ It was him and Epstein.”Houraney said he was surprised. “I said: ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs. You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”It ended up being just Trump and Epstein.Back then, Trump made no secret of the friendship. He was pictured with Epstein at events and parties from New York to Florida.Video from a party at Mar-a-Lago in 1992 shows the pair in conversation as a dance track booms through the speakers. Trump whispers something into Epstein’s ear, prompting Epstein to bend over laughing. The tape was aired by NBC News during Trump’s first term as president, and the news channel reported that it showed both Trump and Epstein pointing out women, while at one point Trump gestures to a woman and says: “Look at her, back there … she’s hot.”In 1993 Stacey Williams, then a professional model, visited Trump at Trump Tower with Epstein. On arrival, she would later tell the Guardian, Trump put his hands “all over my breasts”, waist and buttocks while Trump and Epstein smiled at each other, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men.“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said in 2024. Karoline Leavitt, then a spokesperson for Trump’s election campaign, described Williams’s accusations as “unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”What is undeniable is that the men maintained their relationship through the 1990s. They were photographed at Mar-a-Lago, and the same year were pictured together at a Victoria’s Secret Angels event in New York. The relationship endured. Photos show Trump and Epstein with Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell at an event in 2000. Maxwell would be sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for procuring teen girls for Jeffrey Epstein for him to abuse – when she was charged with the crimes Trump responded: “I just wish her well, frankly.”The Wall Street Journal also reported on Thursday that Trump allegedly wrote Epstein a birthday card as part of a 50th birthday album organized by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003. The letter was fashioned in the shape of a woman’s body, and consisted of an imaginary dialogue between the two, the Journal said.“Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” it read, with Trump’s signature squiggled as it were pubic hair on the outline of the body.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump once believed Epstein to be a terrific guy, but he wasn’t the only one who talked up the friendship. Years later Epstein would tell the journalist Michael Wolff that he had been Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years”, in audio tapes published on Wolff’s Fire and Fury podcast last year. Epstein also told Wolff that Trump liked to “fuck the wives of his best friends”, and said the first time he slept with Melania Trump was on Epstein’s plane. Trump’s camp claimed that Wolff was engaging in “false smears” and “election interference”.The close friendship wouldn’t last. The relationship soured in 2004, according to reports, after the pair became embroiled in a bidding war over a property in Palm Beach. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, he said he had not spoken to Trump for 15 years. And despite his own close relationship with Epstein, Trump would go on to criticize others for the same thing, with Bill Clinton a particular source of deflection. Trump even shared a conspiracy theory that the former president was involved in Epstein’s death – ironically sparking more intrigue in the case. Trump told reporters days after Epstein died:“The question you have to ask is, did Bill Clinton go to the island? Because Epstein had an island. That was not a good place, as I understand it, and I was never there.” Trump adds: “So you have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”Clinton has denied going to Little St James island, which Epstein owned and later became synonymous with his crimes.Trump now finds himself in a mess that is partly of his own making. The “Epstein didn’t commit suicide” conspiracy theory in which he dabbled quickly spread among rightwing commentators and media figures – many of whom demanded that documents related to Epstein’s associates be released. When the Department of Justice failed to do so last week, it caused a rarely seen rift between Trump and his supporters, with Trump trying to brush off the saga, and his supporters angry at a perceived lack of transparency.When Trump was elected in 2024, his supporters believed they were getting an administration that was anti-swamp and pro-open government, the kind of government that holds back no secrets. But looking back at Trump’s statements on the Epstein files during the campaign, the president appeared to be leaving himself wriggle room.Asked in an interview in September if he would declassify “the 9/11 files” and “the JFK files”, Trump said yes. He is then asked if he would declassify “the Epstein files”, and initially said yes, but added:“I think that [declassifying the Epstein files], less so, because you don’t know – you don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phoney stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phoney stuff with that whole world.”That wavering hasn’t helped Trump, however, as he has attempted to quash his supporters’ rebellion. In a cabinet meeting last week the president expressed surprise that people were “still talking” about Epstein, later pleading with his base to “not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about”.How wrong he was. It turns out loads of people care about Jeffrey Epstein – particularly the people who support Trump. It was something Trump addressed on Wednesday, when he explicitly attacked his supporters in a post on Truth Social. “​​My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump wrote.He added: “I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any president in our country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the fake news and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”Trump revels in his relationship with rank-and-file rightwing Americans, a relationship that has benefited him to the tune of two presidential terms and hundreds of millions of dollars. For the past decade it has seemed as if that relationship could endure any scandal, any broken promise.But now, for the first time, Trump is finding cracks in his support. That past friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the “terrific guy” turned “creep”, could prove to be the president’s undoing. More