You may have thought I’d be writing about inflation since it is the main economic topic in recent news, and I did—quite a lot actually—but I’m going to save it for my Deeper Dive because there is another inflation report coming out on Thursday to which I want to compare everything I wrote. That will be the Producer Price Index. I’ll cover the CPI for everyone and then have a section only for paying subscribers to compare CPI to what is happening further up the pipeline.
Much adieu was made about the headline numbers in CPI recently, and I can assure you the important news was not the good news in the headline number that received all the focus by those who always want to talk markets up (or brag about their economic programs). The devil was, as is often the case, in the details where the trends differed from what the market crooners were saying. So, everyone will get to see what was wrong beneath the surface, and then I’ll dig even deeper into what is happening further upstream in producer prices that haven’t reached consumers yet.
I think both parts will be interesting for you.
MAGA trouble looms big for Trump
Now, I’m going to chase after a number of wild headlines that relate to what I wrote because the cracks in MAGA support over the Epstein Files are getting quite deep, and the fighting in some places has become intense. I’m going to lead off with the scrappiest fight.
One of the first headlines I read said there was going to be a cage match on the White House lawn. I thought for sure the article was going to be about a cat fight breaking out between two Trump supporters that have been going at it. I was wrong. It was about an actual cage fight that is being planned for entertainment. Darn, I thought, not half as interesting as a cat fight!
Ah, but then I turned the page (actually just dropped down a link), and there it was! Before I get into it, though, let me thank those of you who support my writing in this publication for hanging in there with me. Many are Trump supporters, or have been, and I know that makes me sometimes hard to take. However, only one paying subscriber left, and no free subscribers, other than the automatic two I seem to get every single day by attrition (hopefully replaced by three or four newcomers some of you have invited).
However, something I am even more thankful to see is that the MAGA folks are taking a serious stand on the Epstein stuff. As much as they have had their hopes set on Trump, about half of them (it would appear) are seriously standing ground against the terrible crimes that were done to over a THOUSAND girls. MAGA supporters are increasingly and more stridently demanding that President Trump release all the files and get the full truth out there. Bravo for them! That can be a disheartening stance to take when you’ve bet all your hopes on someone you think will be your champion.
That is why I want to explore the divide that is opening, partly to show how intense it is becoming and partly to give credit to people who are not letting the Epstein issue get sidelined in order to stand by their man. A good example can be found in Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom I have not liked in so many ways, but she has reached her limit over Epstein and has been clear about the sense of betrayal she feels as well as firm in believing she must stand up for the young women who will be abandoned if all of this just gets flushed down the White House toilet, which it seams to be circling at present.
Not all the original MAGA promoters feel the same way, however. Laura Loomer tore into Marjorie Taylor Greene this week like she was in a bar fight. The claws came out:
Laura Loomer is out for blood.
The far-right provocateur has gone after her fellow MAGA Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene with a level of vitriol that is striking even by Loomer standards, calling the lawmaker a “rabid dog” and a “lying fake Christian whore.”
“This is a woman who allowed her sexual impulses to tear her family apart,” Loomer, 32, wrote in a social media post. “She wants to now tear our country apart to try to steal [President Donald] Trump’s movement away from him. Don’t let this home wrecker become a country homewrecker.”
“Go find a chair to hump like the dog in heat you’ve always been,” Loomer added.
MTG often sounds like a junkyard dog, as heated as Loomer. So, this level of discourse is not too far beneath either of them, but I think Loomer has reached a new level of outrage as she holds on to support for Trump and throws her rage at MTG for turning the page.
Several hours later, she posted a follow-up calling Greene, 51, a “lying fake Christian whore” and “one dumb b—-.”
OK, OK, we get it.
The fight began over Greene accusing Loomer of lying about the “original” Trump supporters, as if Loomer was not one of the originals:
“She has no long-time relationships because she psychotically turns on everyone,” Greene wrote. “Laura Loomer is the most unstable person and worst liability to ever walk in the Oval Office.”
The heated congresswoman told Loomer to shut up and accused her of working on behalf of a foreign government or intelligence agency, and that’s when the fight began. There is clearly only so much a girl can take. Clearly, Loomer didn’t have any choice at that point but …
… to go full scorched earth and accuse Greene of “getting bent over backwards inside the gym by every man who isn’t your husband” with a “polyamorous tantric sex guru” as well as a gym manager in the early 2010s.
OK, put your clothes back on, girls.
The attack started with Greene after Loomer posted a rant about the Medal of Honor going to a veteran who was, in Loomer’s mind, neither Republican enough nor American enough, though the veteran threw himself at a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in 2012 and nearly lost his life, fighting in the US army.
I’m getting off a bit into the weeds here. It’s hard not to do that when a cat fight breaks out, just because of the sheer theater of it all, so I’ll get myself back to the main point:
The divide between Loomer and Greene tore apart when Trump told his supporters there was nothing to see in the Epstein Files, then concealed the files in order to prove it … and had his DoJ people dump that fake video proof on us (real video but entirely fake in claiming it proved anything, other than that something that looks a little like a jail exists somewhere). Greene turned sharply against Trump over the Epstain mess, while Loomer still stands by her man and is scrapping to prove her loyalty, which Loomer believes means she has the higher virtue as a true MAGA “original.”
Candid conviction from Candace Owens
Another sharp divide that has nothing to do with all the personality frazzle that is flying around between Loomer and Greene has shown up in equally “original” Trump supporter Candace Owens. With Owens, this is about nothing other than the principles involved, so there is no mud-slinging, though her words against Trump on this matter are severe—severe but not name-calling:
‘Trump has betrayed us’: Candace Owens attacks Trump as ‘deep state’ president
Right-wing podcaster Candace Owens said that President Donald Trump “betrayed” his MAGA supporters by becoming part of the “deep state” after refusing to release files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein….
“I think the real mask-down moment was, of course, him trying to gaslight us about the Epstein files. That’s ridiculous.”
Owens made here statements in an interview on the Alex Jones show (who has also taken a sharp stand against Trump over the Epstein Files as I reported earlier):
“So the fact that he intentionally read the room wrong and then said, ‘If you’re still interested in the Epstein files, I don’t want you as my supporter anymore.‘ He tweeted that effectively. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. No one should accept that.”
Owens admitted that she had initially believed that Trump “was going to be a solution to the deep state,” but changed her mind because “now it seems that he’s become it.”
So, part of this has developed because Trump turned on his supporters first and flushed away any who did not show total blind loyalty to him as he sealed up the Epstain mess. He expected them to step back in line. Some did not.
Flashing back to that word “original” that Greene and Loomer were lobbing back and forth, I originally said before Trump’s first term that I was nearly convinced he was a Trojan horse, maybe not mindfully, but being played by the Deep State to that end. Whether that was accurate or not, Owens started as a totally sold-out or fully committed believer in Trump going all the way back with the rest of “originals,” just as much as Loomer and Greene and Jones. Now she’s disillusioned because there is no way to justify Trump’s stance of Epstein.
Owens believes Trump changed, which must mean, she claims, that the Deep State got to him and somehow pressured him into covering for all their own Epstained people. I think that is the kind of rationalization you make when you don’t want to feel you’ve been duped. I think Trump’s character always clearly shown he was ALWAYS a part of the Epstain, right at the core of his being, and he is covering for himself and his high-rolling friends. It’s not hard to see:
Counterpoint
While I believe Owens is not admitting that she was wrong about the kind of character Trump has always been, I do believe she is standing on principle, and that is creating cognitive disconnect that demands her deep-state solution as to how he could be so different than she imagined. (After all, it is the rest of us who have Trump derangement syndrome.)
The principle, as someone I am inclined to believe is the Christian she says she is, is that there is no way you can stand by someone covering for Epstein’s heinous crimes against young women, and it is so clear that Trump is covering things up for which she cannot with any intellectual integrity fabricate an argument that says he is right to be protecting people who would be hurt by the revelations in the files or right in saying there is no list of names and nothing left to try here when, even if there were not an actual list per se, one could easily build a list out of all the hundreds of boxes of evidence.
Owens is deeply disappointed that Trump is not doing any of that, but just not willing, yet anyway, to go the more simple step of just admitting this was Trump’s character all along. Character, as I wrote, MATTERS. Or, at least, it used to among conservatives. This IS the man she has been supporting all along. He didn’t change.
Now, Owens has opinions that I sharply disagree with on some matters, but I do think she trying to have integrity in this matter of great importance and staking a stand against Trump’s failure of integrity. A brave man of integrity does not walk away from the lives of a thousand violated girls in order to protect rich people!
“It saddens me to say this, truly, someone that was really invested in [Trump]. I’m wondering whether or why he betrayed us, you know, what they have on him….
“”Yeah, Trump, I don’t think your supporters have left you,” she remarked. “I think you’ve abandoned your supporters.”
Strong words—despairing words—from someone trying to come to grips about the real Donald Trump. If he was ever the kind of champion she believed in, then the only explanation she can find for what is happening now is that the Deep State got to him and changed him. I think what has changed is her realization of who he is. He may have stood by things she believed, but not with the integrity of his own convictions nor with any moral compass. He stood with what got him supporters.
The coverup
Owens also slammed Trump’s decision to have his people move Ghislaine Maxwell into a cushy prison. She describes quite clearly to Alex Jones just how cushy that particular prison is as prisons go. Another writer in the headlines below points that out too, as I did, and parallels my own question in asking why on earth would you even toss around the tantalizing and perfume-dripping hints of a pardon to the Madame of Epstein Madness, other than to imply to her, “Be careful to say all the right things and only the right things, and you could be FREE.”
Jeffrey Epstein was perhaps the most conspicuous pimp since the Marquis de Sade, and he did so on a grand scale. His associates included bankers, princes, CEOs, governors and past and future presidents.
One of Epstein’s friends was President Trump. Their relationship lasted 15 years…. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump — assuming that the Epstein files contained a list of prominent Democrats who were clients — promised his MAGA base that, if elected, the government files would be released. Now, the Wall Street Journal has suggested Trump’s own name could be in the files, which are closely guarded by his captive Justice Department.
So, what to do? The first line of defense is deception. Pretend you are making full disclosure when you are not. Vice President JD Vance proclaimed Trump’s commitment to full disclosure. “First of all, the president has been very clear,” Vance said. “We’re not shielding anything.”
Who cannot hear the echoes of Richard Nixon’s “Let me be perfectly clear: I am not a crook.”
“The president has directed the attorney general to release all credible information and, frankly, to go and find additional credible information related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
How about just release all existing credible information? There is likely a world of difference between what Vance and his boss would call “credible information” to suit their interests and what Owens or I would call “credible.” At this point, this whole story will morph into multiple conspiracy theories forever if Trump doesn’t just release the full truth with the names and other identifiers of actual victims (the girls) redacted.
Don’t hide behind this nonsense of “we don’t want the victims to be hurt again,” as Team Trump has all already done. As many MAGA supporters are pointing out, as well as some of the victims’ attorneys, many of the victims want it all released, and NO ONE wants to hurt them (other than those who already did), so we won’t complain about their names and photos being dodged out.
That you, Mr. Trump, only redacted their names will become evident and “credible” when you leave in all the places where yours occurs and all the places where your Republican cronies appear, as well as all the places where Democrats appear. We’ll know by how boldly truthful the whole release is that you “credibly” only redacted the identities of the abused girls and spared no one, including yourself. Integrity is putting the needs of the oppressed first and facing whatever involvement you really had.
What Vance failed to say is that Trump did not order his attorney general to disclose the files that would be the “most credible information” to be examined in all their stark significance. Trump prevaricated and ordered her only to unseal the grand jury minutes underlying the prosecutions of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, indicted in the Southern District in 2020, tried and convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in 2022.
Any prosecutor will tell you that grand jury minutes are largely uninformative. They will not normally include the thousands of pages of video and audio tapes, witness statements and other documentary evidence residing in the Justice Department’s files.
Exactly. As I wrote on Monday and when Trump first made the request to open the Grand Jury stuff, Team Trump was merely diverting attention. That is also what the judge over the Grand Jury said: Trump was asking for the release of information he was already certain would say nothing about him. To buy time with his supporters and the Speaker of the House and the Republican congress now that some were asking for Maxwell to tell all she knows to congress, Trump pretended to go after new revelations, rather than disclose all the revelations already in hand, to buy his attorney to grill Maxwell for two days to make sure her story said only the right things or to make sure that only the PARTS of her story that say the “right things” will ever be played for others to hear.
Trump made sure he controlled the recordings, and then he’ll use them to try to shut down Maxwell’s congressional testimony IF she doesn’t pledge to say only the right things. He’ll do that by having Mike Johnson say that congress doesn’t need to interview her anymore because we already have records to present to congress of her testimony on her behalf—a records that will be as slightly edited as that video that claimed to be showing what was happening at Jefferey Epstein’s prison cell and that won’t face all those untidy congressional questions and angry threats.
It could even be that Maxwell was moved to a different prison because Team Trump didn’t feel they had full control of the situation at the prison she was in. You know, like if they need to shut her up like apparently happened with her husband? That said, I think it more likely that the cushy prison was a reward for working out a useable testimony. Now that Team Trump has tampered with the witness for an entire exclusive two days, we’ll never know what she would’ve said.
What if Trump needed to be sure of Maxwell’s silence? A peek at what Maxwell might say would help. So would a deal about what Maxwell wouldn’t say.
There was talk of clemency and a full pardon. Trump said, “Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it.”
That kind of linguistic construction is how the mafia talks, too, never saying directly what can be said with plausible deniability: “It would be shame if anything happened to that pretty wife and kids of yours. Such a nice family. I hope you don’t do anything that gets them hurt.” In other words, Trump cleverly did not say publicly (so that Maxwell could hear it) that he would offer her a full pardon. He merely said there was “talk” about it. That way, if broaching the idea blew up in his face, he could just say, “Well, I never went along with what they were talking about. I didn’t say I said that, but some were saying it.” But Maxwell knows what he’s teasing her with.
Has the time come for a quid pro quo with Maxwell? Her current lawyer is David Oscar Markus, a Florida-based criminal defense attorney who is a friend of Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and now the deputy attorney general. An ethicist might say there is nothing wrong with this, but one might fairly wonder why Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Blanche to coordinate with Markus about an extraordinary meeting with his imprisoned client.
Extraordinary, indeed. Rather than having your own attorney meet behind closed doors with her if you have nothing to protect yourself from, why not just LET it all go before congress and let them interview her directly without even talking to her or offering pardons at all. The whole thing smells like fish rotting under the full sun, only the daylight here is all artificial.
The two-day recorded meeting occurred and, according to Markus, Blanche asked Maxwell about “100 different people.” Maxwell reportedly “answered every single question” truthfully and to the best of her ability. It is interesting that Maxwell was willing to talk to Blanche but unwilling to talk to Congress.
One week later, without explanation and to the consternation of the victims’ families, Maxwell was transferred from a low security prison in Tallahassee to a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas. Sex offenders, the New York Times reports, are rarely sent to minimum-security prisons, which house inmates with the lowest level of security risk.
Nothing is too cush for the Madame of Epstein Isle. How suite.
The return of conservatism and convictions
And now a Republican representative from Kentucky has invited victims of Epstein to a press conference at the Capitol. Rep. Thomas Massie is forming a bipartisan effort to force the release of the Epstein Files. Massie is one of those old-style conservatives who also thinks the president is spending far too much government money. He and his Democratic co-sponser, Ro Khanna, will be co-hosting a conference with any victims willing to participate on Sept. 3. That way, no one cans say the victims were not protected, since the only victims sharing will be there on their own volition. That trumps that argument.
The event will feature survivors of abuse by Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, several of whom “will be speaking out for the first time,” according to the two lawmakers.
Massie and Khanna will also provide an update on their discharge petition which would force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files, as well as discuss their Epstein Files Transparency Act which, if passed, would require Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all documents related to the billionaire financier in a “searchable and downloadable format.”
“The survivors deserve justice and Americans deserve transparency,” Massie and Khanna both posted on X.
This is the kind of conservatism we haven’t seen in awhile, as well as the kind of bipartisan joining together on important matters of conscience that we should all be able to agree on, which we haven’t seen in a long time. Massie, however, cannot be considered an original Trump supporter like Loomer and Greene and Owens and Jones—someone who is now seeing Trump for the protector of the upper class (or himself) that he is because Massie has
… made a name for himself for dissenting on GOP-backed legislation, including twice voting against the president’s “One Big Beautiful” spending bill.
Massie has also been highly critical of the U.S. backing of Israel over the war in Gaza and of Trump’s decision to target Iran’s nuclear facilities in airstrikes.
Trump hasn’t been subtle in expression [sic.] his hatred of Massie, and has frequently called for him to be primaried and voted out of office.
Yes, if you’re actually true to genuine conservative principles—the old-world ones—such as not blowing the national debt to the moon, standing for truth and transparency, respecting the constitutional limits on the powers of your office and respecting the other branches of government, and standing up for justice for the oppressed or the used and abused, instead of for “the man,” then you’re out!
However, it looks like people may be starting to remember the deep importance of character, and principles and convictions, as well as the courage of protecting young women who are legally still girls over rich people or even over yourself, may be returning over loyalty to a charismatic leader. Dare I dream?
Now, exactly matching my own point of view about Trump’s latest police-state actions in D.C., …
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