By Ben Meiselas
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Trump is grasping frantically for ways to bury the truth. As I write this, the House of Representatives just voted to release the Epstein files. It passed by a vote of 427-1, with Republican Clay Higgins of Louisiana being the only member to vote no. But that doesn’t mean Trump, MAGA Mike, and the Republican enablers don’t have a few tricks up their sleeves to keep the damning information buried.
Trump and Johnson are scrambling to derail the release even as they publicly pretend to support it. This morning, Johnson telegraphed the plan plainly: work with Senate Republicans to slip “poison pill” amendments into the bill, changes designed to either gut the disclosures or erase any reference to Trump’s role altogether.
Their excuse is as cynical as it is insulting. Johnson claimed releasing the files would create “new victims,” by which he meant wealthy, well-connected men whose names appear throughout the documents. Survivors stood on the Capitol steps hours earlier and said, with clarity and conviction, “Release the damn files.” Yet Johnson wants the country to believe the real victims are potential reputational casualties among the powerful. That’s right: Johnson is setting it up to declare Trump a victim, and thereby redact his name and any references to his activities.
But the most telling moment came when Johnson insisted, unprompted, that “President Trump has nothing to do with any of this.” If that were true, he wouldn’t need to say it. And he certainly wouldn’t need to keep saying it. And Trump would have released the files on his own, rather than force Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie to force a vote via a discharge petition.
Meanwhile, Trump himself spent the morning in the White House hosting Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, wrapped in pomp, military flyovers, and red-carpet pageantry meant to project strength. But what it really projects is something else: a man insulating himself with foreign money and foreign influence as his political, legal, and economic world cracks beneath him.
I just recorded a separate report on Trump’s bizarre meeting with the Crown Prince, which you can watch here, because there iwas a lot to unpack. But briefly, here’s what happened: Trump gushed over the Crown Prince, got oddly handsy with him, attacked Jamal Khashoggi — the journalist murdered with the involvement of the Saudi royal family — while denying the Crown Prince had anything to do with it, scolded a journalist, and then berated the press for asking about Epstein.
Meanwhile, the economic cracks are real. New jobless claims reportedly rose to 232,000 in the week ending October 18, putting the country on pace for nearly a million lost jobs per month. Markets are wavering under the weight of an overstretched AI bubble. Yet as Americans confront affordability crises, layoffs, and growing instability, Trump’s focus is on protecting his own wealth, cultivating foreign autocrats, and attacking reporters, calling a female journalist “piggy” for daring to ask about the Epstein files.
And while Trump claims to want transparency, ProPublica revealed this morning that he did in fact intervene to halt a federal investigation into accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, ordering agents to return confiscated electronic devices and back off the case entirely. Once again, a pattern emerges: Trump shields the powerful, not the vulnerable. He protects the accused, not the victims.
What’s happening today is clear. Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, standing on the Capitol steps, delivered the most concise moral framing anyone could ask for: “I am traumatized. I am not stupid.” They know what Trump and his allies are doing. They see the delays, the procedural tricks, the feigned outrage, the last-minute conversions. And they are calling it what it is.
This is one of those rare moments when the divide between democracy and authoritarianism, the divide between accountability and impunity, comes into sharp focus. The Senate now has a choice: stand with survivors, with transparency, with the American people… or stand with those who believe truth is dangerous because it threatens their power.
I know where I stand. And I know where the Meidas community stands. We will keep covering this fight, exposing the games, amplifying the voices of survivors, and making sure this day is remembered for what it truly is: the moment the country said enough.
