On Trump's Escalating Madness, Epstein, Compromise And The Unsustainable Path He Has Chosen

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Morning all. Today’s post is a more of a collection of notes rather than a coherent essay as we all try to asses where we are now after Trump’s terrible August of spiraling madness and physical decline. So here we go…..

I think Trump’s disappearance last week was a significant event, and suggests that he is having significant physical and/or cognitive challenges. As we’ve discussed Trump had not taken a vacation all summer - an odd thing for such an old man in such a demanding job - which I’ve felt was a sign of disquiet and worry in his mind, a desperate need to reverse his declining poll numbers and growing sense that his government is failing, to somehow make Epstein and his horrible past disappear, of the shock of two buddies, Elon and Putin, turning on him. Rather than being a slow month to rest and reset ( as JD Vance viewed it), Trump manically attacked August - the wild, impulsive and destructive tariffs; the red carpet for Putin; the occupation of DC; the firing of the heads of the BLS and DIA and a Fed governor; Kennedy’s medieval assault on our public health; the escalating campaign to steal Congressional seats and make our elections bend the knee to him; the venal harassment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; a new effort to illegally and unconstitutionally wrest control of federal spending away from Congress; the dark middle of the night loading of young children to traffic them to Guatemala, Uganda or god knows where else…..

Then he just disappeared without any explanation of where he had gone. No “vacation” - which would have been deserved and welcome - no a few days golfing. Just gone. Off camera for a week. After his manic and reckless August it was a bit of a shocker, and does suggest that his health problems - evident to the eye, unable to be AI-ed away - are far more serious than they admit. Then there was this bit of palace infrequent - Vance saying he was fired up and ready to go if anything happened to Trump….

Yesterday Trump showed up for the cameras again and it was ugly. His remarks were wild and deeply unhinged - mad even. Here’s NBC News reporting, straight up, on why Trump said he moved Space Command from Colorado:

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that U.S. Space Command's headquarters will move to Alabama from Colorado, reversing a Biden administration decision.

In remarks at the White House, Trump said he was making the shift in part because of Colorado's use of mail-in voting.

"The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting, they went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections," Trump said in the Oval Office.

Colorado allows for in-person elections, but every voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. According to Colorado's secretary of state, about 92% of the ballots cast in last November's election were a mail ballot, with about 8% voting in person.

Trump said last month that he wanted to ban mail-in voting nationwide, an announcement that has already been met with pushback from some Republicans.

"We can’t have that when a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections, because that’s what that means. So that played a big factor also," Trump said while flanked by the Alabama lawmakers who lobbied for Space Command's move to their state.

I’m sorry but that is fucking insane. 25th Amendment territory.

Then Trump released a video of the US military vaporizing a boat of 11 “narcoterrorists” near Venezuela. Are we really at war with Venezuela now? The President is posting videos of us killing a bunch of people at sea? What in the world is going on?

Then we have the incredible spectacle of the governor of Illinois having to basically prepare his citizens of a Federal invasion of Chicago using National Guard troops from Texas. Ummmmmm, whaaaaaattttt?

But as Trump descends deeper into his make believe world, into his authoritarian madness, the real world is still out there, not bending the knee.

In recent days his tariffs were declared illegal (again), a judge declared the LA troop deployment illegal and a violation of the Posse Commitatus act, and another judge ruled that his use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport residents here without due process was also illegal. Together, these rulings tell a story of a remarkable, historic, deeply deranged and clearly impeachable abuse of power by Trump over these past few months.

As we return of course chaos reins inside Trump’s party as a government shutdown looms. Here’s Punchbowl News this am, GOP heading into different directions as funding fight begins:

The most high-wire month on the legislative calendar is off to a rough start for Republicans.

Government funding will run out in 28 days. And the Republican trifecta that controls Washington is pursuing three different strategies at the moment.

Senate Republicans are doubling down on bipartisan funding bills that call for tens of billions of dollars more in spending than House Republicans — or the White House — have proposed.

House Republicans seem to be gravitating toward a stopgap funding resolution that would keep the federal government funded through mid-November, giving Hill leaders and the White House more time to find a FY2026 spending deal – if possible.

But the White House isn’t interested in a short-term funding patch.

Instead, administration officials want to fund federal agencies until the first quarter of 2026, according to administration sources involved in the talks. This would avoid repeated shutdown deadline dramas. Yet it also opens the door to a year-long continuing resolution — something House and Senate appropriators desperately want to avoid.

All this comes as President Donald Trump infuriated Democrats and some top Senate Republicans by issuing a “pocket rescission” of nearly $5 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid.

We wrote Tuesday morning that Democrats need to find a coherent strategy and pursue it as a unified entity. But it’s clear Republicans need to get on the same page as well — and quickly.

All that really matters for Republicans is that Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are aligned closer to the Sept. 30 deadline. The diverging strategies at this stage are a reflection of just how difficult it will be for all three to get on the same page — and whether they can shift the blame to Democrats if there’s a shutdown.

And then our deranged, idiot-in-chief apparently woke up to how he has been played, terribly, foolishly, by Putin, Xi and Kim (and perhaps he will now understand - or perhaps we need to make him understand - how his tariffs have made us far weaker today and our adversaries far stronger):

As I wrote to you yesterday I think we need to aim to make the story of the fall one of his retreat and struggle, and our movement asserting ourselves, winning elections and turning the tide. As he stumbles, and his failures and decline become more manifest, we must be courageous, bold, ambitious for more than anything else Trump takes a perception of weakness as a permission to escalate. As a movement we must be in his face every day on every possible issue, contest every space, force them to confront both the madness and extremism driving their regime and their ongoing failure to make things better for American and its people.

What I see now is not a strong man but a weak one; not a success but a failure; not a popular leader but a deeply unpopular one who has lost the consent of the governed and the legitimacy he so desperately seeks. And then later today comes the Epstein survivors, voices crying out from his dark and terrible past, and a party that seems deeply weary of the clumsy and insulting coverup.

On this Epstein affair Trump is clearly guilty of something terrible. He and Epstein were best friends for years. 1,000 FBI agents assigned to scrub the files and even that wasn’t good enough. So we get an unbelievable coverup, clumsy, illegal, deeply corrupt. Then the House Rs rebel in late summer, and vote to subpoena the files. And DOJ has failed to comply. It’s extraordinary that Trump has put his government in a place where it is now openly defending sex traffickers and pedophiles and refusing to prosecute the crimes these records point to. Here’s the Washington Post this morning about the pressure Senator Ron Wyden is bringing to bear on Treasury for covering up sex crimes:

A Democratic senator is accusing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of withholding key information that could help illuminate the finances of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, ramping up the bipartisan pressure the department faces to release its confidential trove of financial files on the matter.

In a new letter, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says Bessent is “directly responsible for the decision to withhold the Epstein files from Congress.”

“This ill-advised decision is impeding my investigation into the financing of Epstein’s sex trafficking and preventing transparency into one of the worst pedophile rings in U.S. history,” Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in the letter sent on Tuesday.

The letter comes only two days after House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Kentucky) requested that Treasury release financial files relating to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for her role in helping Epstein groom, traffic and abuse underage girls.

Posting this video post-release of my original morning post of Rep. Massie speaking at the survivors press conference today. Watch. It’s incredible:

Wherever this extraordinary scandal goes there is one aspect of it that has not gotten enough attention - The President of the United States is clearly compromised. People, foreign governments, Ghislaine Maxwell, perhaps Elon Musk have leverage over Trump. Does this explain why he has been so fanatical about pursuing policies that are doing clear harm to our national interest - the tariffs; the severing of our historic alliances; the dismantling of our global democracy and soft power tools; the use of foreign gulags; the assault on science, higher ed and public health; the stepping back from our global leadership of clean energy tech; the turning of our military’s focus on China and Russia to pursuing Trump’s domestic ambitions?

Some days the easiest explanation for what Trump is doing to the country is that Putin and Xi have him by the balls and are squeezing with everything they got; and the re-emergence of the Epstein nightmare is part of a broad pressure campaign to keep him executing on the checklist they have given him. For I will say it again - the last three manic, no-vacation months of escalation that we’ve seen from Trump began with Elon’s three day assault on him in early June that centered on the Epstein files tweet above that lead to another - now deleted - of Musk endorsing the idea of Vance replacing Trump. For while Trump ferociously worked through the summer, JD Vance took numerous lengthy vacations even at moments that Trump was declaring national emergencies that were apparently not emergency enough for Vance to return to……

OK, Simon. Where are we? I am not sure, but what I feel in my bones is that Trump is now on an unsustainable path. Too much isn’t working. He has brought too much material harm to the country and the American people. He is too unpopular, and he has lost his powers of persuasion, despite their enormous information superiority. His assault on our public health is insane, dangerous, medieval and completely indefensible. He is old, addled, and in declining health. He is illegally and brazenly monetizing the Presidency in a way that suggests he won’t be around much longer. He is a convicted felon who continues to break every kind of law imaginable on a daily basis. These images the last few days from Beijing even make it look Trump is in the process of losing the Cold War to Russia and China a half century later, in what will become known, without question, as the greatest series of national security and foreign policy mistakes in all of our history. That he and his regime are failing, extreme, dangerous, doing clear material harm to our people and interests, and also let us just say it - traitorous and betraying the country - is becoming harder to whitewash or ignore It’s just there for all to see. If one is willing to look.

I don’t know where we go if this path is unsustainable, but it is why we need to keep working with everything we got to force a course correction; to win these fall elections; to find a better path for our great country. If things are going to change we need to commit to try to make them better and do everything we can to prevent them from getting worse.

I believe this is a moment of opportunity for us, and we need to seize it. Let us work now to win the fall, together.

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For more on Hopium’s approach to elections check out:

• our big recommendations to the family coming out of the 2024 elections

• the many important wins we had together last cycle

• my latest thinking on where we are and the path forward for the Hopium community.

Our updated fundraising goals are now for the end of the year, December 31st, except for the 2025 races, which are now for Election Day, 2025.

Our Recommended Actions - We are prioritizing two actions today. You can get our full list of recommended actions here. Let’s get to it:

1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Four-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our our emerging four part agenda. Demand that your reps work to

1. Roll back Trump’s terrible and illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, and alienating governments and people throughout the world

2. Block the expansion of ICE and the use of the military on our streets including DC

3. End Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; stop the cuts to the ACA and Medicaid; demand the removal of madman Robert Kennedy from HHS - yes we need to FIRE HIM

4. Stand with Ukraine and block Trump’s ongoing efforts to sell out the US

2 - Bring “Resolutions Of Condemnation” To Your Community - Inspired by the tactics of our Founders learn about how Hopium members are advancing “Resolutions of Condemnation” in their communities across the country and consider bringing this initiative to your state, country or city/town. Be sure to check out our new discussion with Deborah Potter and Rachel Poliner who have passed resolutions in New Mexico and Boston, and offer advice on how to get a resolution passed in your own community.

Remarkably, members of this community are now advancing 75 (!!!!) resolutions projects in 23 states +DC. Can we get to all 50 states by the fall election?

Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Been impressive to see how many of you remain involved in local, in person protests of all kinds in your communities. Keep it up!!!

As we get ready for what is going to be a very intense fall of politics let’s take inspiration from those famous words from Robert Frost that “the best way out is always through” - Simon