By Ben Meiselas
Saturday mornings in this country used to mean something predictable… Coffee, breakfast, maybe a quiet moment before the day begins. Remember those days?
Under Donald Trump, they’ve become a rolling crisis broadcast in real time from Mar-a-Lago, funded, as always, by the American taxpayer.
This morning, Trump’s crash out is escalating. He spent the morning erupting online, unleashing tirade after tirade at members of his own party and spiraling into increasingly erratic behavior, all in the wake of the 23,000 Epstein emails whose release has shattered what remains of Trump’s political equilibrium.
We now know that Trump’s name appears on more than half of the Epstein email threads, an extraordinary and deeply disturbing fact. And the president’s reaction is somehow even more revealing. His posts were a frenzy of projection and panic. He’s been calling Marjorie Taylor Greene “a disgrace,” before renaming her “lightweight Marjorie Taylor Brown.” He accused her of “turning left,” “becoming a RINO,” and “betraying the entire Republican Party.” Trump added: “Green grass turns Brown when it begins to ROT!” This is not strategy. This is collapse.
At the same time, the White House, now operating more like a crisis PR bunker than the seat of government, attempted a strange counter-programming campaign. They posted a photo of Trump and Melania embracing, captioned “I can’t help falling in love with you” as the Internet was abuzz regarding one email thread where Epstein and his brother discussed whether Vladimir Putin “has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” They posted a video of Trump and young children as his relationship with Epstein once again became the biggest news story. This is not normal.
I could not help but be reminded of all of Trump’s public obsessions and bizarre actions and comments on stage. There was nothing funny about it then, and there is certainly nothing funny about it now. The clips speak for themselves, from Trump miming sex acts on a microphone to retelling tales about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy during official events. These weren’t harmless eccentricities; they were symptoms of a leader unfit for any public office, let alone the presidency.
But the Epstein emails reveal something even darker than what we saw on stage. They expose a world of proximity, access, and leverage, with communications between Epstein, his network, and Trump’s orbit that raise profound national security concerns. And instead of addressing any of it, Trump has turned to distraction: inviting authoritarian leaders into the Oval Office for photo ops, spraying perfume on the Syrian dictator, and negotiating real estate deals with Saudi Arabia even as he promises them advanced U.S. fighter jets. Our entire national security has been traded for personal profit.
Foreign governments have taken notice. When a Swiss delegation visited the White House recently, they presented Trump with a $130,000 gold bar and a luxury Rolex desk clock. According to one Trump administration official, “It was tough to beat Apple.” Week after week, we see bribe after bribe. And it’s all in plain view.
Fortunately, not every institution is capitulating. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom and the University of California leadership fought back successfully as a federal judge issued an injunction preventing the Trump regime from stripping all UC funding based on fabricated claims of antisemitism. As Judge Rita Lin noted, this was transparently retaliatory. It’s a familiar pattern: invent a pretext, punish dissent, demand loyalty.
And Trump’s physical and cognitive state continues raising alarms. In a recent interview, he said he didn’t know which body part had been scanned during a recent MRI. “I have no idea what they analyze,” he said. No one who has ever received an MRI talks like that. As medical experts have made clear, this is “25th Amendment territory.”
Trump’s allies are scrambling to clean up the fallout. Alan Dershowitz attempted to redefine Epstein’s crimes on television. Megyn Kelly insisted Epstein was merely “into the barely legal type,” as though that were a defense. Jesse Watters actually argued we should “believe Ghislaine Maxwell.” This is the moral rot of MAGA: excuse the inexcusable, diminish the indefensible, protect the powerful at any cost.
Our country cannot continue like this. We deserve normalcy, competence, safety, and truth, not chaos, corruption, and the normalization of abuse. What we are witnessing is not strength. It is unraveling. It is dangerous. And it demands a democratic response rooted in accountability and the rule of law.
Thankfully, the tide is turning. Fast. The American people are wide awake. And that’s all thanks to you. So keep sharing these stories. Stay in this fight. And let’s continue in this battle to restore both our democracy and basic decency.
