A bunch of new tariffs go into effect today. Expect unemployment and prices to go up while the quality and variety of good deteriorate. We all have reason to be worried, but perhaps none more than William Wiatrowski, acting head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose boss was just fired for reporting accurate numbers, and who many soon be in the position of reporting even worse numbers. Happy Thursday.

Dinner Is Off. The Scheming Continues.

by William Kristol

Dinner on a summer evening at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory here in Washington can be a very nice occasion. The food and service are, of course, first-rate; drinks before dinner on the porch can be very pleasant, if it’s not too hot; and it’s a relief to get away from the pressure and hubbub of the White House complex a couple miles away, to unwind a bit in a more relaxed environment.

So when I read yesterday morning that there was to be a dinner hosted by Vice President JD Vance at the residence, fond memories (if indistinct ones—it was a long time ago!) came back of occasional dinners hosted by my former boss, Vice President Dan Quayle, which I had the privilege of attending. There’d usually be some guests from outside the administration as well as some colleagues from within, gathered to informally discuss issues of our day—perhaps the end of the Cold War, or the economy, or the first Gulf War, or Murphy Brown(!). The guests were impressive, the sessions stimulating.

But I don’t think we ever had, at one time, the White House chief of staff, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That was to be the A-list dinner Vance hosted last night, with Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel and others assembled to decide how to handle Donald Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein problem. Multiple outlets reported that the event was scheduled to happen.

Until, alas, the dinner was cancelled. Their planned high-level strategy session was called off after word of it leaked out. They’ll now have to get together in less pleasant surroundings to tweak their Epstein coverup.

But why, you might wonder, the need for a coverup in the first place? After all, their boss, President Trump, explained yesterday that the whole Epstein files controversy “is a hoax. It’s put out by the Democrats . . . [It’s] something that’s total bullshit.”

But if the files are harmless or meaningless, why not just release them (obviously with survivors’ names and personally identifiable information redacted)?

Well, because, as Trump explained earlier in the week, he’s concerned about not embarrassing people who haven’t done anything wrong. He doesn’t mean the victims, of course; he’s never expressed any concern about them. Trump’’s worried, he said, about those people who might be mentioned but “aren’t involved” and who could “be hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”

This excuse is, to quote the president of the United States, “total bullshit.” The names of many of the big shots who associated with Epstein, but who claim not to have been involved in or aware of his sex trafficking, are already out there. If the files mention those people once again, and they were simply innocent guests, associates, or bystanders on the fringes of Epstein’s dark world, they’ll have no problem explaining that. They’ve done it before.

It won’t be so easy for the ones who weren’t simply innocent bystanders.

Which brings us to one Donald J. Trump.

It’s worth recalling that after reviewing the files, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel ordered FBI agents to black out every mention of Trump, according to Bloomberg News. Why did they do that? After all, if Trump only pops up occasionally in the files as an innocent bystander, or as a subject of third-party hearsay with no supporting or corroborating evidence, why the need to blackout the mentions? If Trump did nothing “concerning” while spending time with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—as Ghislaine Maxwell is reported to have told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche before being moved to a far nicer federal prison facility—then what’s the problem? Why not just release the files, let Trump debunk whatever unverified suggestions may be in there, and avoid accusations of a coverup?

Perhaps because the files tell us more about the Trump-Epstein relationship? Perhaps because they suggest Trump has something to hide?

That would be the simplest explanation of Trump’s own behavior over the last several months. That would be the simplest explanation of the behavior of Bondi and Blanche and Patel. That would be the simplest explanation of why they thought there was a need for such a high-level dinner to figure out how to salvage their unraveling coverup.

The dinner was cancelled. But the coverup is still on. And the questions about the files aren’t going away.