First There Was a File, Then There Was No File, Then There Was

The Trump Era Begins to Sink

July 28–30

By Marc Cooper

Sorry for the short delay since my last post but it feels like I ingested some magic mushrooms and have hallucinated the last ten days. Alas, they are real. Reviewing this false reverie I have concluded and I am willing to state that we are now witnessing the collapse of the Trump Era.

He’s not leaving tomorrow. And he can’t be voted out of office for more than 3 years from now. There’s still a lot of very bad things to come and even if the Democrats sweep 2026 and 2028 and Trump is safely entombed in Timbuktu, America will be living the next couple of decades with MAGA that already controls half the states along with tens of millions of Americans and their children whose brains are already rotted.

With that caveat, and without knowing exactly how this Epstein chapter will play out, it's obvious that Trump peaked on January 20, 2025 and is now in the fast lane to political demise.

The rat-tat-tat of events of the last two weeks have been mind-boggling even for a world-weary cynic like yours truly. If you melded Robin Williams, Joe Rogan and three psychiatric patients into one writer they would never have been able to write the script of just the Todd Blanche–Jizzlaine Maxwell chapter of this sordid saga.

The president’s former and current personal lawyer, the day-to-day chief of the DOJ Todd Blanche goes unaccompanied by any witnesses to spend two days to talk privately with Ms. Jizz, now serving a 20 yr sentence for being the organizer and co-participant of Jeffrey Epstein’s depraved sex and lollipop ring, leaving behind a mind-boggling 1,000 women and underage girls as victims, to discuss exactly what with her? And her lawyer is also a BFF with Deputy Attorney General Blanche. A triple conflict of interest.

And as soon as this cozy threesome concludes their huddle, Blanche comes on the tube to tell us just how sweet and cooperative this diabolical sickie behind bars was and how she named “100” people whose names and deeds are still a secret.

Only those who believe that Mars is made of synthetic meat couldn’t see this was all laying the groundwork for Trump and the DOJ to spring her from the can and in return have her read a pre-written script swearing that she and Jeff barely knew Trump, they never saw him do anything except pick his nose and that it’s really Bill Clinton who should be shamed (which is probably true).

It didn’t take long for all this to become very real when on this Monday morning, 72 hrs after meeting with the Deputy Atty General Blanche, Jizz’s lawyer made a public plea for clemency from Trump as well as an appeal to the Supreme Court alleging his depraved client was somehow screwed out of some crooked plea deal.

Only a political and amoral idiot would let this monster out of jail early, but then again Donald Trump is an amoral political idiot and over the weekend refused to rule out such a move. A couple of loose screws in the MAGAsphere are trying to get ahead of the curve by trying to rebrand Epstein’s co-conspirator as a victim (!) but that’s not gonna work.

Personally, I hope Trump does unleash Jizz Max as I figure that about 90% of the electorate would be repulsed by it. Which is not that far off from some of the polling already out there that pretty much spells DOOM for Trump. But he’s dumb enough to do it, believe me.

Nothing else so far has worked and the lobster pot Trump’s stewing in is ominously starting to simmer. Nobody except 14 or 15 screwball voters have bought into the phantasmagoric allegation proffered by head case Tulsi Gabbard, the frickin’ Director of National Intelligence, that this whole Epstein thing is a “hoax” and that somehow Obama and Biden concocted the Epstein Files and then secretly inserted them into the DOJ vault in a “treasonous act.” There’s just a few holes in that conspiracy theory (not counting the one in Gabbard’s head) like, Obama would have needed a time machine to carry this out as Epstein’s criminal clashes date back to 1997 – when Barry Obama was still sampling ganja on the beaches of Hawaii or studying at Oxy.

Trump, of course, immediately endorsed this craziness and then put a cherry on top of it (no pun intended) when in a desperate sweaty moment of panic he called for the arrest and indictment of Al Sharpton, Kamala Harris, Oprah and Beyoncé for their alleged criminality in the 2016 election, forgetting that he won that one.

His now glaringly visible cognitive decline, his inability to finish one whole sentence without some error, his long-winded ramblings about lethal windmills are not funny. This decrepit scared-to-shit liar has control of the entire machinery of state. The Republican House, meanwhile, are hiding in the caves of Tora Bora and anxiously fearing their return date before Labor Day when a bipartisan discharge petition will force every single one of them, on the record, to vote yes or no on the Feds releasing the Golden Fleece of the Epstein Files that will, in turn, dump one giant load of bull poo-poo onto the propellers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know some of you nihilist Democrats who believe you have no skin in the game will say, oh this is the umpteenth time Trump’s demise has been wrongly predicted. I guess you have not yet realized that Trump is not an immortal Superman, he does not cast magical spells of ignorance, FOX does not determine public opinion and that in the end, enough bad public opinion is kryptonite for any politician including a bumbling moron like Trump. Especially if it is active and organized.

Shall we now quickly review where Mr. Trump now stands in the eyes of the American Electorate presently, meaning before The Files go public or are ordered to be incinerated.

Six months ago Trump was coronated after winning 50% of the vote. Today his favorability rating is 37%. That’s better known as Falling Off A Cliff. As the pundits say, let’s also look at the cross tabs from the latest YouGov survey conducted before the last week of Epstein madness.

Five months ago in February among the 18–29 yr old demographic, Trump was underwater by three points. Ten days ago among the same group with the same demographic he was underwater 28–72%. That’s called falling off a seaside cliff wearing cement shoes.

In that same survey only 22% of all adults approved of his handling of the Epstein issue. And 23% of MAGA supporters disapproved. Not great news for the Prez.

A gigantic 81% of Americans believe he is involved in a “cover-up” of the Epstein files. That includes 73% of self-identified Republicans.

Trump is underwater on every major issue and on inflation, one of the two pillars of his campaign, he’s scraping the bottom of the Pacific Trench, doing worse than Joe Biden did on this count.

He’s in even more trouble on what was considered his strongest issue, his xenophobic racism perfumed by the media as “immigration.” His mass deportation scheme and his deployment of ICE gangs of masked thugs have blown up in his face.

In previous posts I have taken the literary license to call ICE his Brown Shirts. That description is no longer hyperbole. The deliberately brutal and masked gangs of overweight ICE agents have appalled the country as they smash car windows to pull victims onto the streets and send in two militarized ICE SWAT teams to detain one 76-year-old car wash worker on heir hyper—funded path to becoming the third biggest army in the world.

An investigation by the French news agency AFP found that 71 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record in any country. There are currently 61,000 souls languishing in some 200 ICE detention facilities, 10,000 more than the Nazis held in concentration camps four years into Hitler’s dictatorship and before they were turned into death camps.

Chancellor Trump wants 100,000 ICE “beds” by the end of the year and the whole crackdown has been a bonanza for private sector vultures as 2/3 of detainees are held in privately owned facilities where profit is maximized in direct correlation to the abuse, lack of facilities, bad food, overcrowding and lack of training and any accountability of staff.

THE OPPOSITION

In the shadow of these numbers, the immediate future for the Democrats should be a golden age. But you rarely win elections on the basis of negative partisanship – by merely degrading your opponent while not proactively building a coalition with forward thinking momentum and ideas and authentic, organic leaders.

Which of course brings us to the Democrats who, while Trump is at his weakest, FDR’s old (and I mean really old) party is at its lowest point of popularity in 35 years. As reported, not editorialized, in The Wall Street Journal:

“The Democratic Party’s image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.

[A] new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.

That is a far weaker assessment than voters give to either President Trump or the Republican Party, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively. A mere 8% of voters view the Democrats “very favorably,” compared with 19% who show that level of enthusiasm for the GOP.”

One thing that the poll data above omits are those who don’t identify as Republicans or Democrats, that vast swath of so-called independents who often make or break a candidacy. When Trump came into office his nose was just above the waterline among these folks. Today he is 37 points underwater. That should be a death sentence for the GOP holding the House.

This is where the armchair analyst is supposed to offer prescriptive advice. You know, the party should move left using the NYC mayoral election as a model or should move to the center and run centrist ex-military candidates. If I knew the answer I would gladly whore myself for a couple of million dollars as an Official Consultant. Too bad I don’t have an easy answer. My instinct is that more than moving right or left, the opposition—meaning the Democrats and Beyond—better start figuring out soon how to MOVE FORWARD and organize that Beyond as the geriatric and corrupt Party Leadership are too weak and too compromised to lead this fight.

One of the only things I want to say today about the short-term future is that while authoritarian rule will harden over the rest of Trump’s term, the chances of a full-fledged fascist state have significantly abated. Trump doesn’t have the oomph to be a Führer and a Führer needs a solid, loyal and whipped up base to build his project. That moment has passed for Donald Trump. We are watching it in real time.

Then again, he’s increasingly a cornered and very desperate and therefore a very dangerous bear. He is, quite simply, capable of anything and I see no institutional barriers to whatever over-the-top move by him. Nothing, except the firm resistance and forceful pushback of the citizenry.

The ball is now in our court and we cannot afford to fumble it. I can think of only one slogan that would resonate today across the entire Right–Center–Left currents of a growing opposition: RESIGN! ++

The major mass media is crumbling and bowing to Trump. Newspaper edit boards are being MAGAfied. Trump is trying to take down the three major networks. Only independent reader-funded media like The Coop Scoop have full freedom of expression and keep dissent alive ands vigorous.Don’t sit on the sidelines. Join the fight. Please spend a few pennies a day so we can continue offering all of our content for free for everybody.