Melania spoke yesterday either for that reason or because she expects some damaging journalism to drop soon. I think she might be afraid of the forthcoming Maggie Haberman/Jonathan Swan book because that book was the source of a recent New York Times story on how Trump made the decision to go to war. I'd be surprised if any other excerpts from the book appear soon, because it won't be published until June 23. But this might be on Melania's mind.
Melania is talking about Epstein while her husband is fully retreating, at least for the moment, into the right-wing bubble. The most obvious sign of his retreat is a rant he posted on Truth Social yesterday afternoon:
Normal people don't care that Trump thinks Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones are "low IQ." Normal people don't care about these right-wing media figures at all. But Trump's base cares deeply. These are titanic figures in the pathetic world of by the right-wing voters who, regrettably, control American politics.
These voters also hate immigrants and regard immigration as the most important issue ever, apart from the economy, and they agree with Trump that if one Haitian immigrant kills someone, then all Haitian immigrants should be forced to leave. The Guardian reports:
Besieged by questions about his war on Iran and his wife’s statement on Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump tried to shift the national conversation back to his immigration crackdown by posting a graphic, distressing video of a woman in Florida being killed last week by a man he described as an illegal immigrant from Haiti.Substacker Pablo Manriquez notes that the victim was also an immigrant, a Bangladeshi named Nilufar Easmin.
The video, taken by a surveillance camera outside a Fort Myers gas station, showed a man identified by authorities as a Haitian immigrant using a hammer to bludgeon to death the woman, who was reportedly a clerk at the gas station.
I'm especially offended by the Trumpist core message on immigration -- that everyone in a particular ethnic group deserves to be deported if one member of that group does something pathological -- because I'm Sicilian-American on my father's side. When you say that people sharing an ethnicity with criminals don't belong here, you're saying that I shouldn't be here. You're saying my father shouldn't have been here and his Sicilian immigrant parents shouldn't have been allowed in.
The Sicilian Mafia has committed many crimes in America over the years. Is that my grandparents' fault? Is it my father's fault? Is it my fault?
None of us were criminals -- in fact, my father was a victim, roughed up by loansharks when he couldn't pay back money he'd borrowed. He was an honest truck driver who'd fought in World War II. His brother died in that war.
Trump believes in collective guilt, at least for non-white people. So does his base, which includes millions of voters. But I want to believe that most Americans don't.
And finally, there's this:
The Trump administration is finalizing a report that casts the Biden Justice Department as anti-Christian over its enforcement of laws protecting abortion clinics and enforcement of Covid regulations, among other issues, according to details of the report viewed by NBC News.Only in the Republican bubble are six-year-old COVID restrictions still a burning issue, and only in that bubble is access to abortion regarded as abhorrent.
Add this to the administration's desperation to save fellow fascist Viktor Orban from electoral defeat in Hungary and you see an presidency that has no perspective on what Americans outside the right-wing bubble care about. It's still sometimes said that Trump has no strong political views, but he's clearly been Fox-pilled for at least fifteen years, and he'd clearly like to live in a world where everyone else is as Fox-pilled as he is. If only we could remove him from office so he could get his wish.
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