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1. Enigmas and Secrets
Before we start, a few thoughts about the WSJ story on Trump’s alleged letter to Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump has three possible defenses:
The letter doesn’t exist.
The letter is a fake.
The letter doesn’t mean anything.
Until yesterday, Trump had held to #1, insisting that he barely knew Epstein. The Journal story makes that inoperable, so he’s moved on to #2.
“The letter is a fake” line can’t hold up, for the following reasons:
It’s part of a collection of similar letters, which are in the process of being authenticated. If the entire book was a bunch of fakes, that would be one thing. But the proposition that Trump’s is the only fake in the bunch? Dog won’t hunt.
Who is supposed to have done the forgery? Ghislaine Maxwell? Why? What was her motive? Or does Trump mean to suggest that Maxwell was duped by someone else who forged the fake letter and passed it off to her as genuine? Which would mean it was someone in Trump’s office—a trusted assistant or secretary—who claimed to have been delivering a Trump letter to Maxwell, but who instead had concocted a forgery? This also makes no sense.
The only other possibility is that it’s the Wall Street Journal that faked the letter. This won’t hold, either. There are too many sources for this story and too much evidence.¹
Which means that at some point Trump will have to pivot to claiming that his alleged letter doesn’t mean anything.
Will he get away with it?
I don’t know. The fact that he’s shifted his story rather than telling the whole truth is a problem. Also a problem is that this story comes from a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper.
Fox News is a key part of Trump’s defensive perimeter. I trust that Fox will ignore the story as hard as it possibly can. But will Rupert’s Fox attack the credibility of Rupert’s Journal? I doubt it.²
So the next phase of this story will be the Trump pivot to insist that the “secrets” and “enigmas” he mentions in the alleged letter don’t have any meaning. That they’re just poetic nonsense, or locker-room talk.
Sarah and I taped a Secret Podcast about all of this at Zero Dark Thirty. It’s pretty good. I even have my own little conspiracy theory as to who might be behind this story.
The show is here for Bulwark+ members.
But now let’s get to the real conversation.
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2. Never Give Up
Yesterday we talked about the possibility that maybe people get—maybe America gets—what they deserve. But I promised I’d make the opposite case today. When I’m done I want you to unpack all of it together, and come to your own conclusions, in the comments. Sound good?
Good.
Now I want to share a story with you.³
A few months ago I got an email from a Bulwark reader I’ll call Matt.
Matt was an immigrant living in the American heartland. He came here for college and while he was studying, the situation in his home country changed. His ethnic group went from being casually discriminated against to being seriously persecuted. We’re talking about people getting butchered with machetes, in public.
Pretty quickly it became clear that returning home would put Matt’s life in danger. He started the process of petitioning for asylum.
The process dragged on for almost a decade. In that time, Matt suffered mental health challenges. He was alone, far from home. He found work and built a life, but it was hard. Damn hard.
Then Trump got elected for the second time. Mass deportations began. The administration started revoking temporary protected visas and looking for any excuse to revoke peoples’ legal status.
It was in this atmosphere that Matt got a letter informing him that the government was finally ready to adjudicate his request for asylum.
You can imagine his terror.
Matt traveled to the immigration office in a nearby state and went through his final interview. At the end of it, they told him that he would be called back to the office to pick up his decision in a few weeks time.
At that point, his asylum claim