THE RELEASE OF ADDITIONAL EPSTEIN FILES IS JUST ONE MORE BIT OF EFFLUENT IN THE FIREHOSE

More Jeffrey Epstein files were released yesterday. The government has additional documents but says it won't release them, in defiance of the law. Nevertheless, what we saw yesterday hinted at the loathsomeness of many famous people -- Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Howard Lutnick, Steve Tisch ... And then there are the more horrifying claims, such as the allegation that the late Robin Leach, who hosted the TV series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in the 1980s and 1990s, "strangle[d] a young girl to death at a party."

Was this worth it? We're shaming these boldface names, but no one seems to have a plan to hold anyone accountable, up to and including Trump. It's good to put a scarlet letter on these vile people, but that's probably all we're going to get out of this.

As for the timing: In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon told Michael Lewis that the correct Republican strategy for dealing with the media was to "flood the zone with shit." The standard interpretation of this phrase is "flood the zone with lies and half-truths" -- as David Corn wrote last year, "It’s Trump’s version of what’s been called the 'firehose of falsehood' model of propaganda utilized by Russia."

But what we're getting from the Trump White House in 2026 -- and have been getting since he was inaugurated a year ago -- isn't a firehose of falsehood necessarily. The Trumpers just throw everything at us all at once, and we struggle to respond to one outrage as twenty others pop up on our phones. Yesterday I noted that the Trump administration has been arresting journalists who covered a protest at a church in Minnesota, seizing ballots and other electoral records in Georgia, and planning to do to Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, what's recently been done to Minneapolis. Now there's more. It's being reported that Trump wants the arch he intends to build in D.C. to be more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial. He also announced that he wants an Indy-car auto race to take place on the streets of Washington this summer, and he wants a stadium that can hold 100,000 people to be built in front of the White House, in time for a scheduled UFC event scheduled for his birthday. This isn't "shit" as in lies and misinformation -- it's "shit" as in I'm doing this, and you haters will just have to eat shit.

The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell posted this yesterday:

Called it.

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— Sarah Longwell (@sarahlongwell25.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 11:15 AM

I'd say that Trump is throwing so much at us that it's all a distraction from Minneapolis, and the other items I've mentioned are distractions from the newly released Epstein files, and the fact that the administration withheld millions of Epstein pages but exposed many famous people in the newly released files is a distraction from the additional appearances of Trump's name in the newly released files, and reports that the administration is adopting a "new tone" in Minnesota are distractions from the fact that the crackdown hasn't really abated -- the administration continues to claim broad powers to arrest people without judicial warrants, and there's this:

The government is escalating its war, not drawing down.

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— The Editorial Board (@editorialboard.bsky.social) January 31, 2026 at 8:45 AM

We're all struggling to get purchase on all of this, and that's what the Bannon strategy envisions.