Spells are all the rage.
As Bloomberg reported this past week, brides are buying $14 spells from witches on Etsy to ensure that their $100,000 weddings are not marred by blizzards or downpours.
The Blumhouse low-budget horror sensation “Obsession” — which is helping lure Gen Z back to theaters — is about a young man who buys a “One Wish Willow,” a magic stick that promises to grant a wish once you snap it in two. He desires to win the love of a comely young friend. But the obsession goes gruesomely awry.
If President Trump takes a break from his frenzied, late-night Truth Social screeds, he might try scrolling Etsy for bespoke spells.
Nothing else is working to banish the creepy specter of Jeffrey Epstein from his life.
Many in Trump’s conspiracy-prone base feel they have not gotten the full story on the heinous pedophile — and they haven’t.
Whether Trump’s lack of candor was to protect his friends, as Marjorie Taylor Greene said he told her, or to protect himself, it’s all still murky. Trump knows who he is and what he did with his longtime pal, but he’s doing his best to keep it from us.
No amount of macho beatdowns in the U.F.C. cage matches on the White House lawn will make anyone forget Epstein’s depredations.
But after a week bristling with lurid revelations about the slimeball, one thing is clear: No matter how much Trump wishes him away, Jeffrey Epstein is continuing to haunt Trump and is persisting as a national obsession.
Trump’s special ability to create a distraction and an alternative narrative is failing him here. No one will look away from the ghoul who was Trump’s swingers-style wingman in Manhattan and Palm Beach.
The House Oversight Committee had closed-door meetings this week trying to get to the bottom of the murk, which Democrats on the committee called “the biggest cover-up in American history.”
One of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates, continued his humiliating, marriage-busting confessions about Epstein, telling the committee that the spidery pedophile tried to blackmail him over his affairs.
Some posts online compared the cover-up on Epstein to Watergate. Funny that Trump has his own Watergate even as he’s fighting his way out of his own Vietnam-esque quagmire in Iran.
As it turns out, the president and his advisers were just as obsessed with Epstein as everybody else. Although Trump once sharply dismissed the story as “a Democrat hoax that never ends,” he knew there was a real risk that it would consume his presidency.
In an article in The Times based on reporting for their upcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan conjured a story that sounds like a farcical fable. It limns a group of stupid, craven, power-hungry people who inflame a panic about pedophilia among the elites, propelling Trump forward, before it all goes sideways and comes back to bite them.
Many in the White House, including the president and Pam Bondi, “had either grossly underestimated or simply been blind to the voracious appetite of the MAGA base for information about Epstein.” They were shocked, shocked that the president’s bro-y friendship with a monster concerned the very same people whom Trump world had been stoking up for years on this subject.
The authors reveal the stunning scene where Trump advisers met clandestinely one July day last year to figure out how to get control over the Epstein story.
JD Vance, Susie Wiles, Todd Blanche, Steven Cheung, Karoline Leavitt and others gathered, blasphemously, in the Situation Room — a place designed to steer combat operations, not political rescue missions. Bondi and Kash Patel joined via speaker phone.
Talk about a situation! The vice president was panicky, the authors wrote. He seemed to subscribe to “the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class.” He had been pushing for the release of all the files.
“Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in prison,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.”
Even as Trump used the government to exact petty revenge, Epstein was posthumously getting revenge on Trump for trying to shake him off and claim they weren’t that close and that he was “not a fan.”
“Behind the scenes,” Haberman and Swan wrote, “the Epstein crisis was paralyzing the Trump administration to a far greater extent than the public knew.” (After their article ran, 19 Epstein survivors came out against Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general over his participation in the secret meeting.)
In the Situation Room, someone mentioned an uncorroborated accusation about Trump and a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who told another victim that she had sex with Trump and that he had a predilection for nipples, aggressively sucking and flicking hers. (This was surprising since Trump’s previous comments had him focused on grabbing another part of women’s anatomy.)
Vance argued for releasing the nipple-related documents, while Wiles swatted him down, saying the president would not like it.
One official called it surreal “to be discussing nipples in the White House Situation Room,” Haberman and Swan wrote.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, has to be one of the most surreal paragraphs ever printed in The New York Times.
The president and his team did their best to nip the Epstein story in the bud. But no spell on earth can make it end.
