Trump: ‘Believe Me, Not Your Lying Eyes’
In 1984, George Orwell ominously warned how totalitarian regimes demand their pliant followers fully abandon reality: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
In the house of mirrors known as MAGA-World, this dictum reached fruition last week. The Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster article that revealed Trump sent underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein a birthday note. It contained a sketch of a nude woman with a typewritten note that included the ominous line, “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey…may every day be another wonderful secret.”
I’m going out on a limb, but I’m guessing the great secret between the two scoundrels wasn’t grandma’s recipe for Christmas cookies. Trump immediately denied the Wall Street Journal report, bleating on Truth Social, “I don’t draw pictures.”
Contrary to his vehement denial, it turns out Trump was more than just a con artist. The woman’s body he allegedly drew on Epstein’s birthday card was part of a much larger body of work. The New York Times quickly revealed many drawings, one which sold for more than $16,000.
Although his paintings are amateurish and juvenile, the fact that they were sold makes Trump a professional artist. Indeed, the profit from his scribblings far surpassed that of VanGogh, whose only documented cash sale of a painting during his lifetime was “The Red Vineyard”, which sold for approximately $2 000 adjusted for today’s money.
In response to Trump’s brazen lie, the New York Times published multiple pictures of Trump’s hand drawn artwork, with each piece including his signature. Yet instead of MAGA Monkeys rebelling for being disrespected and abandoning Trump for nakedly fibbing, they trained their ire at the Wall Street Journal for publishing the truth.
This case is literally Orwell come to life.
Trump’s Art on Display with his Signature
Art Imitating Life. The Greedy Trump Sketches a Sketchy Money Tree
The surreal facts I just laid out are so terrifying that they are worth reiterating: A newspaper publishes a story claiming Trump drew a picture. Trump angrily dismisses the story and says he doesn’t doodle. A second story comes out with actual pictures of Trump’s signed art. The cult pretends they don’t see multiple drawings that clearly exist. Instead of blaming the liar, they rabidly attack the messenger and choose to believe Trump instead of their own eyes.
What exactly are sane Americans supposed to do with this information?
If this weren’t evidence enough of Trump’s malfeasance, Epstein’s brother Mark appeared on CNN to confirm that Trump and Epstein were pals:
“They were very close. They were good friends,” Mark Epstein said to CNN’s Erin Burnett. “Jeffrey used to sometimes tell me things that Donald said that were funny. I know Donald was in Jeff’s office a lot back in the ’90s.… It’s documented that Jeff—Donald flew on Jeff’s plane a number of times. I don’t know if they ever checked, but I know Jeff flew in Donald’s plane also, I don’t know if they’ve ever looked at his flight logs. They were good friends.”
The Epstein saga reconfirms that MAGA is a hardcore cult. It is made up of deranged people who can’t be reasoned with. These apparatchiks are largely impervious to evidence and will twist the truth to conform to Trump’s obvious lies. What we are dealing with are zombies who have checked out of reality and live in a fantastical fantasy bubble.
In the 1978 film Halloween, Dr. Samuel Loomis recounts meeting psychopath Michael Myers as a child and says: “I spent eight years trying to reach him…I realized that what was living behind the eyes of that boy was purely and simply…evil.”
It pains me to say this about fellow Americans, but I feel like Dr. Loomis when debating MAGA cult members. They have a blank stare, a gaze as empty as their rhetoric and are, with few exceptions, incapable of being reached. In the name of unflinching loyalty, they are capable of unadulterated evil.
America is really screwed because democracy depends on compromise. But how can you compromise with people who are so chronically allergic to facts and who treat realism as optional? In a best-case scenario, MAGA will self-destruct when the base finally realizes it debased itself for the glory of a malignant narcissist who doesn’t care about them.
The Epstein saga, however, reveals that these dupes are so lobotomized they will most likely have to be defeated by outside forces. Unfortunately, too many of our elite leaders and institutions, including key universities, prestigious law firms, business innovators and politicians, have retreated to cowardice at a time when courage is required.
David Pressman, the most recent Ambassador to Viktor Orban’s authoritarian Hungary, chillingly explained how America’s power centers are succumbing to autocracy, just as he witnessed leaders do in Hungary:
Those best positioned to uphold democratic norms chose the comfort of an illusion over the courage of action. They were and are invisible by choice — and that choice disfigured them and ultimately their country.
The lesson of Hungary is this: We cannot claim to care about democracy only when it costs nothing. President Trump, like Mr. Orban, no doubt believes that everyone can be bought. America’s elites are proving him right. There is a Hungarian phrase I heard often: “Van az a penz” — “There’s always a price.”
The most vivid example of timidity and corruption is House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). When the MAGA base erupted, after Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Jeffrey Epstein files would not be released, he initially took responsibility.
“We should put everything out there and let the people decide,” Johnson had said on “The Benny Show” when asked about the Justice Department’s investigation into Epstein. “I agree with the sentiment that we need to — we need to put it out there.”
Democrats pounced, trying to force a procedural vote that would call on the Justice Department to make the Epstein files public. After a barrage of browbeating by Trump, Johnson, the born-again Chrisitan scold, easily folded, choosing to protect the president over exposing pedophiles.
He desperately pleaded with his divided caucus for blind obedience to the president.
“There is no daylight between the House Republicans,” Johnson lied, trying to quell dissenters within his ranks. When that didn’t work, Johnson made the radical decision to close shop and send Congress home for an early vacation.
“We’re done being lectured on transparency,” Johnson whined at a news conference where he complained of the “endless efforts to politicize the Epstein investigation”, even though it was Q-Anon Republicans—egged on by MAGA influencers–who obsessed over the Epstein files.
Johnson continued, “We’re not going to play political games with this.” even as he played a game of Twister, tying himself up in knots. The House Speaker’s credibility has crumbled so thoroughly, that even crazed Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) sounded like the voice of reason.
“Crimes have been committed,” said Rep. Greene. “If there’s no justice and no accountability, people are going to get sick of it. That’s where people largely are.”
Obviously, Trump has something hideous to hide with Epstein. He has become the Deep State keeper of dark secrets that his paranoid fans have always claimed to abhor. To distract them he sued the Wall Street Journal, urged release of the Epstein grand jury testimony, that will only provide a small fraction of the information demanded by his cult, threatened to jail Barack Obama and menaced Rosie O’Donnell with suggesting he could revoke her citizenship.
But Rosie is a smart cookie and fled the United States to live in Ireland. What Rosie understood was that MAGA’s Orwellian delusions would soon lead to catastrophic public policies that would first corrupt and eventually collapse the United States.
For example, this destructive make-believe-world was on full display, with the Trump administration defying scientific consensus by denying that greenhouse gasses lead to climate change. The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan.
The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives.
That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet.
If the MAGA fools can be made to believe that Trump doesn’t draw, even after they are shown drawings—or that climate change is a hoax, even as they have experienced increased natural disasters and oppressive summer heat, what aren’t they willing to believe? What crime aren’t they willing to commit to prove their fealty to our Felon-In-Chief?
I’m afraid we are about to find out.
