Welcome back to TGIF. And a job listing: Are you a finance whiz? By which of course, I mean a person who understands Excel? We need you at The Free Press. Apply here.
→ We are all little piggies: Epstein is in the air, and everyone is talking like a creep. A female reporter asked Trump this week, “What did Jeffrey Epstein mean in his emails when he said you ‘knew about the girls’? ” Trump’s response:
“I know nothing about that. They would have announced that a long time ago. It’s really what did he mean when he spent all the time with Bill Clinton, with the president of Harvard. . . . With respect to all of those people that he knew including JPMorgan Chase. Yeah, Jennifer, go ahead, go ahead. Quiet, quiet, piggy.”
Piggy? Republicans remain baffled over why young women are allergic to the party. I can’t imagine why. I go over it again and again and come up with no possible reasons why women would feel weird with that response, and so I tell myself quiet, quiet piggy. Michelle Obama might’ve been correct that we are not ready for a Miss Piggy Presidency. I do think it’s funny that Dems are trying to make the Epstein files a Trump thing when the Epstein files are an everyone thing. And if we had to pick, this little piggy honestly seemed mostly to circulate in elite lib spaces (seemingly every professor at MIT and Harvard; heck, even I met him once right before the end, when he wanted an NYT profile). Sharon Waxman at The Wrap has a great take on this: “The Epstein Emails Show That Conspiracy Theorists Are Right: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Real.” She writes that it’s not partisan but almost worse, that Epstein’s emails show a vast American elite who were completely involved in his sexual exploits. Amid all the pressure, President Donald Trump went wee wee wee all the way home and announced on social media Wednesday night that he had signed a bill directing the Department of Justice to publicly release all its Epstein-related files. And apropos of nothing, The Phantom of the Opera was blasting at the White House the other day (why not double down on the creepy factor).
And then Trump posted something really alarming, more alarming than musical theater. Well, first a group of Democrats made a video arguing that the military should ignore illegal orders from Trump. Then Trump, never one to calm the nerves, posted that they should all be put to death for sedition—or maybe the soldiers should be if they disobey? Someone is being put to death here, and I don’t love that.
Normal late-November American antics. Cabals of sex criminals, presidents calling for death. Me, I’m just sitting in peace eating leftover mac and cheese, hoping it’s, like, all good out there.
