Leave it to Nate to write a galaxy brained take about how the Republican president of the United States being credibly associated with a child sex trafficker is bad news for the Democrats.
I didn’t hear Nate say it was bad news for Dems. I heard him say it’s probably not as bad news for Trump as Dems would hope. I was unpacking groceries while listening - maybe I missed something.
Did you read the rest of the article, or just the one sentence and the headline? Were you alive during the Russiagate story in the late twenty-teens? Do you understand the basis of the comparison?
Plucking out a cherry picked sentence to justify your pithy comment isn't going to do much to dispel my concerns about bad faith.
The problem is, as Nate alluded, so have prominent Democrats including a former President. The media, like NYT, dismissed the entire matter as right wing propagandist for years only to take a convenient interest now. While he reserves the right to change his mind, he concedes the fact we’ve learned nothing really new about this scandal to date. It’s sort of like progressives have suddenly discovered a scandal that everyone else has known about for years, and now while being riled up about it are shocked nobody else whose known about it for, again, years, cares.
It’s like we’ve seen a wolf all along. It’s not their fault that Trump’s supporters fail to see the predator howling in front of them. His supporters truly have TDS.
Considering the fact that the Biden Administration had full access to all Epstein Files for 4 years and did and/or said nothing even when they were in a desperate situation in the 2024 election tells you all you need to know about what is in them regarding Trump, which is to say 'nothing damaging'.
If there was anything damaging about Trump in them, Biden and the entire Democrat Party would have used it against Trump LONG AGO.
The Epstein Files are a 'Click-bait' nothing burger.
Completely agree. I’d like to see the take on game theory that says holding information that your opponent is a pedophile, without disclosure, was a sane election campaign strategy.
More likely that Trump is now caught in a conspiracy of his own making, however large or small the fallout may be.
Prosecuting sex crimes is very difficult (see: Diddy, Clinton, Trump, Epstein himself, the entire history of law and sex crimes, etc etc) and evidence is held until there is a sufficient case. Otherwise releasing it would reveal the overt political motivations and discredit the evidence.
While they very by specific charge and by specific state and federal jurisdictions, the Statute of Limitations on sex crimes expires after 10 years from the date of the crime or the date the victim reaches the age of majority. Trump and Epstein had a "falling out" in 2004 when Trump banned him from Mar-a-Lago, meaning that the Statute of Limitations on any alledged sex crimes would have expired by 2014, long before even Trump's first term. So your theory about the DOJ holding information to enable any future prosecution in invalid. There is NO "there there".
Statute of limitations being passed doesn't just mean that evidence becomes public. There can be other connected cases, victim considerations, there is judicial review (see the Grand Jury testimony that even Trump couldn't get released) so thankfully the Justice Department isn't fully corrupted for political purposes yet.
If there is no there, then what is Ghislaine Maxwell guilty of? Do you support a pardon?
Probably an unpopular opinion, but my impression of the Epstein story is that it's a little too just-so to be believable in its entirety.
To be clear, the core accusations - i.e. that Epstein was a prolific pedophile and child sex trafficker, and that Ghislaine Maxwell was his willing accomplice - are almost incontrovertibly true. But once you get into details more fine-grained than that, that's when you start noticing how every last element of the story seems to line up absolutely perfectly, all uniformly unsubtle and scrupulously portraying certain people in a bad light, in a way that seems artificial. In real life, some situations are easier to figure out than others, but very rarely are things THIS clear-cut. It's an effect you might describe as analogous to pollster herding: even in a landslide election, there should always be a few outlier polls that paint a rosy picture for the eventual loser; and even in a slam-dunk case, there should always be a few outlier details that point to the possibility that maybe things aren't what they seem. But in the narrative about Epstein that's circulating in the media and among the public, absolutely no plot element is out of place, and that's grounds for suspicion.
The fact is that anyone in Epstein's line of work is going to have a social circle that looks more or less like his did - hundreds if not thousands of casual acquaintances (i.e. the sort of people who'd be photographed next to him at a party or sign his birthday card) but few close friends. And given how reviled by society pedophiles are, it's just a little too easy to use someone's alleged inclusion in the "Epstein file" to besmirch their reputation in a way that's almost impossible to defend against. So yes, to answer the question posed by this article's headline, I think if the true facts of this case ever do come out in their entirety, it will look a lot like Russiagate - anticlimactic; lots of smoke but very little fire. I think the most likely answer is that Epstein was a sex addict who abducted and molested underage girls with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell AND that he was a jet-setting financier with friends in high places, but the idea that he allowed those two halves of his life to mix is something I regard as markedly less believable. He just had too much to lose.
The question is how did Epstein get so wealthy and prominent in the first place? You can do well doing concierge financial advice but “private jet/private island “ wealthy is incredibly unusual, as is the fact that his financial services business only had like 2 known clients.
Reading between the lines, it seems he managed to use connections he made during his time teaching at a ritzy private school to wangle his way into financial services job, then really lucked out later on by becoming the favourite of a (very possibly closeted gay) billionaire who put him in charge of his money, from which position he finally made it into the kind of social circles where he could meet other very wealthy people and position himself as the kind of fixer who hosted parties and events where it was worth while turning up to meet and network famous and rich types.
I don't think he was being run as any kind of an asset by intelligence services, no matter what is alleged to have been said. If he was freelance peddling gossip about the rich and famous types, then sure, intelligence agencies might take that up, but it doesn't make him an agent.
And yeah, I think he mingled his own interest in underage girls with finding pretty young women to be arm candy at the parties. I don't think he was supplying clients with fifteen year olds, but finding seventeen and older girls, with the promise of modelling careers or getting them a start in society, to turn up and be decorations at the parties and mix with the rich guys and be nice to them? Yes.
Think you're underrating what good longform fodder the story makes--and how that will drive coverage in the shaddow media. No mention of Schultz, Rogan, Von, etc.
Nate, for a lot of voters, both on the left and right, this is not about votes or political parties. We know that Trumps in there, Clinton too and probably Bill Gates. This is why it’s not showing up in the polling. But it’s everywhere on social media and everyone I talk to on the left and right is talking about it. It’s bad for Trump and it’s bad for the Republican and Democratic Party.
Will we get answers? There would need to be a leader who isn’t stained by the coverups of the last 20 years. That individual needs to survive a lot, and I mean a lot, of vested interests who are incredibly powerful.
You’re a statistician, what are the odds of that happening during Trump, Clinton’s etc life times?
I'm expecting it in the next 4 years, and you can see it if you pull back from trying to show off for this small group to see the wider world then this chunk of the internet.
I may not buy Mamdani being up 17 points right now, but I do buy that he's doing better with the Jewish vote that people are seeing. Hell, I was in a place called North Crossett in Arkansas, and when I ask who the locals were interested in as a politician they said Mamdani.
I was in the room when the Tea Party was born, and I got one of the earliest views of "Trump legitimately could be president, don't laugh this off" in 2015.
The age of the Moderate Democrat is coming to an end. There is a real danger that the timing of Trump is setting up the potential for a 12 to 14 year backlash against all forms of conservatism that as a libertarian *I would really like it if we avoided.* (Especially since Trump and the GOP are more communist than conservative at this point, but I digress)
That said, you may not be technically wrong. Both Clinton and Trump are at the end of their lifespans. It's entirely within the realm of reason that they could both pass in the next 4 years.
Most definitely voters are looking for radical change. That is very clear. I have no idea who will win, it entirely depends on who buys the algorithm from the billionaire class and what they’re asking for. I doubt releasing Epstein files will be top of their list.
I'm not hearing anybody in my real life (as opposed to online) talking about this, and it's the kind of gossip/salacious story that ordinarily would be "did you hear about?" fodder for break-time at work etc.
It is interesting that while you talk about the Russia Collusion hoax in this article, you fail to mention the growing evidence that Obama worked with Hillary in what many describe as a seditious conspiracy to impede Trump's first term with what was known by Obama, Hillary, and their merry gang of hoaxers to be false information. THAT is the biggest political story in the world right now, but the mainstream media (and you) appear determined to ignore it. All the Epstein noise is clearly intended to deflect from that story.
Also, no pedophilia is being stopped by any of this noise. Epstein has been dead for years, all that is happening now is political gotcha by Dems and some silly Republicans who don't realize that they are being useful idiots. The funny thing is that all this noise is only happening because they assume Trump will never release the documents. This might all be a game of rope-a-dope.
Some might call it treason to poison the incoming administration by lying and spying. Some might even say it wasn't a peaceful transition of power, which I thought is what "Our Democracy" is all about. Apparently you are going to be just fine when Vance or Rubio does the precise same stuff to whomever brings the Dems back from the wilderness in 11 or 15 years..... Right?
They all falsify intelligence to weaponize the government against the next president before they leave office? I'm not talking about stuffing ballots to steal an election (though they did do that in 2020). I'm talking about making up fake intelligence as a CIA-driven op to destroy the incoming President of the USA. You are simply wrong if you think that is business as usual, or had ever been done before 2017.
Oh come on. The cia involvement in candidates is well documented right back to the 60s. Fake intelligence, infilitration. You think they’re not doing it because you don’t hear about it? Lmao.
If you truly believe that, of what value is our democratic system of government? If it's dirty tricks all the way down, with no accountability, then what is the point of voting? I feel bad for you.
Seems to me that you have a point yet also miss a point.
As is always the case with things Trump, liberal media takes things to an extreme, and it grates on a lot of ears. Both those who are somewhat sympathetic to Trump, but also critical thinkers.
In this case, there's a lot of fantasizing about just how specific and bad hidden information could be about Trump, and then proceeding under the assumption that those fantasies are truth. Day after day, in breathless detail.
However, you seem to be overlooking a MAGA problem here. A fairly small but vocal and fanatical part of the red tent fervently believes in a very specific kind of conspiracy theory, namely that powerful elite Democrats run a vast pedophile ring and get away with it. And these people were encouraged by the Trump campaign, they heard promises specific to the Epstein case, and they watched as their kinds of people were, unlike 2016, given positions of power this time around. And now Trump and Bondi turn around and contradict themselves and say, "Nothing to see here."
It's not that this crowd is on the brink of turning to the Dems, nor even that they are likely to tell pollsters they dislike Trump. Rather, this is how revolutionaries start turning on each other, start battling to the death over who is the true inheritor of the MAGA mantle post-Trump. There will be those who remain pure to the conspiracy "ideal"; there will be pragmatists who want to move on so as to effectively enact anti-woke policy; and those who try to straddle the issue. The resulting schism is likely to have a long-lasting effect. Pre-social media, this sliver of the red tent would probably not have mattered, but now it does.
I feel like Nate has become something of a right-wing ideologue without intending to. No matter how bad the news is for Trump, he writes posts about how democrats will still fail just “because”. This is not what we expect from a statistician.
He never talks about how polls for 2025 and 2026 elections look very good for democrats and Trump’s approval is in the absolute toilet (-10 to -8 is hardly a “rebound”)
Yeah it's starting to feel that way for me too. This and another substack I thought was insightful - both seem to have turned into There's no stopping GOP!!!!
One small note: the discussion of partisanship is very good overall, but it's not just that partisanship is dynamic, measurement can be a function of approval. When bad things are happening to the party in power their partisans are less likely to answer polls and those that do are less representative of the population. (Andrew Gelman talks about this a lot.) So in theory you can be losing accuracy due to non-response bias.
Looking forward to Nate’s new metric for how news stories affect Trump’s rating: Expected Probability of Sabotaging Trump Evaluated for Incident-driven News (EPSTEIN).
I hadn't thought about Russiagate with this but it could be a good analogue. Obviously the subject matter and crime are very different but I'm starting to think the end result here will be the same. Months of coverage, congressional hearings, etc., then once it's finally out there...an incomplete result that shows some shady activity but isn't quite enough evidence for anyone to go to jail. If there was truly ironclad evidence that Trump (and Clinton and any number of other powerful people) were guilty the files would've been mysteriously deleted and Maxwell "committed suicide" a long time ago.
I am not a Russia-gate truther but the fact is we never really got to the bottom of what happened in 2016, Paul manafort took the blame, served part of his sentence in silence, and was pardoned after… the mueller report identified multiple instances where trump and trump associates obstructed justice.
Generally the adage that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up” is totally inaccurate, there are many bad scandals that are blatantly covered up, at which point publuc interest drifts away or it becomes sufficiently difficult to prove the facts.
Which brings this to epstein… it is hard to say what exactly happened. But it appears trump is trying to use the pardon power to get ghislaine Maxwell to offer a statement exonerating trump. This seems facially fairly scandalous, but given how good he is at focusing attention, it might work…
Also isn’t it obvious that this is a bigger story with trump as president? Biden wasn’t one of Epstein’s friends!
The democrats should prepare and release a series of ads (all with the same branding and visual language) talking about all of Trump’s major gifts (pardons, aircraft from Qatar, crypto). Run then in about a year. No one has ever monetized the White House like Trump has. I'd like to think that people mostly understand a simple "bribery is bad" message. Epstein is just bread and circuses; fun to watch, but not satisfying or nutritious
Another aspect about Epstein is a hypocritical moral scandal has buried a real legal scandal.
I think pretty much everyone writing about Epstein knows that there are high-end brothels all over the world and that lots of rich and powerful men patronize them. Most of them are illegal, and most involve some coercion and exploitation of minors and other vulnerable workers. I haven't seen anything suggesting Epstein's operation was worse than other high-end brothels.
If you think all prostitution is a scandal, fine, but it's much bigger and older than Epstein. If you think all coercion and exploitation are scandals, same comment. Personally I blame the problems on criminalization of voluntary sex work, which means sex workers cannot complain to police about rape, robbery, coercion or workplace abuse; and means operations are run by criminals; and the field is immune to regulation.
The Epstein-specific scandal is how powerful people shielded him from prosecution for many years, not that he ran a particularly coercive or exploitive high-end brothel. If you want to see his customers exposed, great, but let's publish all customers of prostitutes, including journalists, not make this into a partisan-sniping game.
Leave it to Nate to write a galaxy brained take about how the Republican president of the United States being credibly associated with a child sex trafficker is bad news for the Democrats.
I didn’t hear Nate say it was bad news for Dems. I heard him say it’s probably not as bad news for Trump as Dems would hope. I was unpacking groceries while listening - maybe I missed something.
You didn't miss anything. Spinning the post in the way Scalebane did is just a bad faith critique of what Nate actually wrote.
This is a sentence from the article: "I’ll assert that Russiagate didn’t end well for Democrats, but I’ll admit that’s hard to prove."
This is the headline of the article: "Is Epstein the new Russiagate?"
I don't understand how a plain reading of the content, tone and headline of a piece can reasonably be described as a bad faith critique.
Did you read the rest of the article, or just the one sentence and the headline? Were you alive during the Russiagate story in the late twenty-teens? Do you understand the basis of the comparison?
Plucking out a cherry picked sentence to justify your pithy comment isn't going to do much to dispel my concerns about bad faith.
Because they aren’t reading it plainly. They are using motivated reasoning from an emotional perspective.
The problem is, as Nate alluded, so have prominent Democrats including a former President. The media, like NYT, dismissed the entire matter as right wing propagandist for years only to take a convenient interest now. While he reserves the right to change his mind, he concedes the fact we’ve learned nothing really new about this scandal to date. It’s sort of like progressives have suddenly discovered a scandal that everyone else has known about for years, and now while being riled up about it are shocked nobody else whose known about it for, again, years, cares.
He is so edgy and contrarian!
Yeah lol opinions that run counter to the safe acceptable mainstream are le epic fail Xd.
The problem is the number of times the Dems and the MSM have cried wolf.
It’s like we’ve seen a wolf all along. It’s not their fault that Trump’s supporters fail to see the predator howling in front of them. His supporters truly have TDS.
This goes back to Reagan, or maybe Nixon. This is not a new problem.
Remember when Reagan blew up the whole Earth? That was terrible.
And you're a paying subscriber.
Considering the fact that the Biden Administration had full access to all Epstein Files for 4 years and did and/or said nothing even when they were in a desperate situation in the 2024 election tells you all you need to know about what is in them regarding Trump, which is to say 'nothing damaging'.
If there was anything damaging about Trump in them, Biden and the entire Democrat Party would have used it against Trump LONG AGO.
The Epstein Files are a 'Click-bait' nothing burger.
I don’t disagree but that doesn’t explain why the Trump administration is stonewalling a rabid part of their own base that is demanding disclosure
I think because nothing ever existed. Trump created or furthered a conspiracy theory and is now caught in it himself.
1. Trump can't run again because of term limits so he doesn't care about his "Base".
2. The Epstein File drama is a convenient 'nothing burger' distraction from anything Trump wants to distract form.
Completely agree. I’d like to see the take on game theory that says holding information that your opponent is a pedophile, without disclosure, was a sane election campaign strategy.
More likely that Trump is now caught in a conspiracy of his own making, however large or small the fallout may be.
Prosecuting sex crimes is very difficult (see: Diddy, Clinton, Trump, Epstein himself, the entire history of law and sex crimes, etc etc) and evidence is held until there is a sufficient case. Otherwise releasing it would reveal the overt political motivations and discredit the evidence.
While they very by specific charge and by specific state and federal jurisdictions, the Statute of Limitations on sex crimes expires after 10 years from the date of the crime or the date the victim reaches the age of majority. Trump and Epstein had a "falling out" in 2004 when Trump banned him from Mar-a-Lago, meaning that the Statute of Limitations on any alledged sex crimes would have expired by 2014, long before even Trump's first term. So your theory about the DOJ holding information to enable any future prosecution in invalid. There is NO "there there".
Statute of limitations being passed doesn't just mean that evidence becomes public. There can be other connected cases, victim considerations, there is judicial review (see the Grand Jury testimony that even Trump couldn't get released) so thankfully the Justice Department isn't fully corrupted for political purposes yet.
If there is no there, then what is Ghislaine Maxwell guilty of? Do you support a pardon?
"... Do you support a pardon..."
Of course NOT. Let her rot in prison.
Great, I think so too. What about her clients?
If the DOJ hasn't charged them then there's not enough evidence to proceed.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but my impression of the Epstein story is that it's a little too just-so to be believable in its entirety.
To be clear, the core accusations - i.e. that Epstein was a prolific pedophile and child sex trafficker, and that Ghislaine Maxwell was his willing accomplice - are almost incontrovertibly true. But once you get into details more fine-grained than that, that's when you start noticing how every last element of the story seems to line up absolutely perfectly, all uniformly unsubtle and scrupulously portraying certain people in a bad light, in a way that seems artificial. In real life, some situations are easier to figure out than others, but very rarely are things THIS clear-cut. It's an effect you might describe as analogous to pollster herding: even in a landslide election, there should always be a few outlier polls that paint a rosy picture for the eventual loser; and even in a slam-dunk case, there should always be a few outlier details that point to the possibility that maybe things aren't what they seem. But in the narrative about Epstein that's circulating in the media and among the public, absolutely no plot element is out of place, and that's grounds for suspicion.
The fact is that anyone in Epstein's line of work is going to have a social circle that looks more or less like his did - hundreds if not thousands of casual acquaintances (i.e. the sort of people who'd be photographed next to him at a party or sign his birthday card) but few close friends. And given how reviled by society pedophiles are, it's just a little too easy to use someone's alleged inclusion in the "Epstein file" to besmirch their reputation in a way that's almost impossible to defend against. So yes, to answer the question posed by this article's headline, I think if the true facts of this case ever do come out in their entirety, it will look a lot like Russiagate - anticlimactic; lots of smoke but very little fire. I think the most likely answer is that Epstein was a sex addict who abducted and molested underage girls with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell AND that he was a jet-setting financier with friends in high places, but the idea that he allowed those two halves of his life to mix is something I regard as markedly less believable. He just had too much to lose.
The question is how did Epstein get so wealthy and prominent in the first place? You can do well doing concierge financial advice but “private jet/private island “ wealthy is incredibly unusual, as is the fact that his financial services business only had like 2 known clients.
Reading between the lines, it seems he managed to use connections he made during his time teaching at a ritzy private school to wangle his way into financial services job, then really lucked out later on by becoming the favourite of a (very possibly closeted gay) billionaire who put him in charge of his money, from which position he finally made it into the kind of social circles where he could meet other very wealthy people and position himself as the kind of fixer who hosted parties and events where it was worth while turning up to meet and network famous and rich types.
I don't think he was being run as any kind of an asset by intelligence services, no matter what is alleged to have been said. If he was freelance peddling gossip about the rich and famous types, then sure, intelligence agencies might take that up, but it doesn't make him an agent.
And yeah, I think he mingled his own interest in underage girls with finding pretty young women to be arm candy at the parties. I don't think he was supplying clients with fifteen year olds, but finding seventeen and older girls, with the promise of modelling careers or getting them a start in society, to turn up and be decorations at the parties and mix with the rich guys and be nice to them? Yes.
Think you're underrating what good longform fodder the story makes--and how that will drive coverage in the shaddow media. No mention of Schultz, Rogan, Von, etc.
Nate, for a lot of voters, both on the left and right, this is not about votes or political parties. We know that Trumps in there, Clinton too and probably Bill Gates. This is why it’s not showing up in the polling. But it’s everywhere on social media and everyone I talk to on the left and right is talking about it. It’s bad for Trump and it’s bad for the Republican and Democratic Party.
Will we get answers? There would need to be a leader who isn’t stained by the coverups of the last 20 years. That individual needs to survive a lot, and I mean a lot, of vested interests who are incredibly powerful.
You’re a statistician, what are the odds of that happening during Trump, Clinton’s etc life times?
I'm expecting it in the next 4 years, and you can see it if you pull back from trying to show off for this small group to see the wider world then this chunk of the internet.
I may not buy Mamdani being up 17 points right now, but I do buy that he's doing better with the Jewish vote that people are seeing. Hell, I was in a place called North Crossett in Arkansas, and when I ask who the locals were interested in as a politician they said Mamdani.
I was in the room when the Tea Party was born, and I got one of the earliest views of "Trump legitimately could be president, don't laugh this off" in 2015.
The age of the Moderate Democrat is coming to an end. There is a real danger that the timing of Trump is setting up the potential for a 12 to 14 year backlash against all forms of conservatism that as a libertarian *I would really like it if we avoided.* (Especially since Trump and the GOP are more communist than conservative at this point, but I digress)
That said, you may not be technically wrong. Both Clinton and Trump are at the end of their lifespans. It's entirely within the realm of reason that they could both pass in the next 4 years.
Most definitely voters are looking for radical change. That is very clear. I have no idea who will win, it entirely depends on who buys the algorithm from the billionaire class and what they’re asking for. I doubt releasing Epstein files will be top of their list.
I'm not hearing anybody in my real life (as opposed to online) talking about this, and it's the kind of gossip/salacious story that ordinarily would be "did you hear about?" fodder for break-time at work etc.
It is interesting that while you talk about the Russia Collusion hoax in this article, you fail to mention the growing evidence that Obama worked with Hillary in what many describe as a seditious conspiracy to impede Trump's first term with what was known by Obama, Hillary, and their merry gang of hoaxers to be false information. THAT is the biggest political story in the world right now, but the mainstream media (and you) appear determined to ignore it. All the Epstein noise is clearly intended to deflect from that story.
I don't read this site to hear people spout fact free conspiracies and that is all this post is.
I would encourage you to go read the documents Tulsi has released so far. Decide for yourself what the facts are.
They are the same documents that have already been released…
Just proving that you have not bothered to review them. Sad!
Noise? Sorry, pedophilia ranks higher on pretty much anyone’s list than who stole what election or who investigated whom.
Also, no pedophilia is being stopped by any of this noise. Epstein has been dead for years, all that is happening now is political gotcha by Dems and some silly Republicans who don't realize that they are being useful idiots. The funny thing is that all this noise is only happening because they assume Trump will never release the documents. This might all be a game of rope-a-dope.
You take any moment to hold any of them accountable.
Don't hold your breathe.
Clearly…this is just the tip of the iceberg.
lol that’s called politics
Some might call it treason to poison the incoming administration by lying and spying. Some might even say it wasn't a peaceful transition of power, which I thought is what "Our Democracy" is all about. Apparently you are going to be just fine when Vance or Rubio does the precise same stuff to whomever brings the Dems back from the wilderness in 11 or 15 years..... Right?
They all do it. There’s history going far back. Stolen elections on all sides right up to ‘20 and ‘24.
They all falsify intelligence to weaponize the government against the next president before they leave office? I'm not talking about stuffing ballots to steal an election (though they did do that in 2020). I'm talking about making up fake intelligence as a CIA-driven op to destroy the incoming President of the USA. You are simply wrong if you think that is business as usual, or had ever been done before 2017.
Read up on Reagan and Iran and Nixon and LBJ / Vietnam sometime.
Oh come on. The cia involvement in candidates is well documented right back to the 60s. Fake intelligence, infilitration. You think they’re not doing it because you don’t hear about it? Lmao.
If you truly believe that, of what value is our democratic system of government? If it's dirty tricks all the way down, with no accountability, then what is the point of voting? I feel bad for you.
Funny to talk about Democracy when this administration only cares about it when it benefits them.
Seems to me that you have a point yet also miss a point.
As is always the case with things Trump, liberal media takes things to an extreme, and it grates on a lot of ears. Both those who are somewhat sympathetic to Trump, but also critical thinkers.
In this case, there's a lot of fantasizing about just how specific and bad hidden information could be about Trump, and then proceeding under the assumption that those fantasies are truth. Day after day, in breathless detail.
However, you seem to be overlooking a MAGA problem here. A fairly small but vocal and fanatical part of the red tent fervently believes in a very specific kind of conspiracy theory, namely that powerful elite Democrats run a vast pedophile ring and get away with it. And these people were encouraged by the Trump campaign, they heard promises specific to the Epstein case, and they watched as their kinds of people were, unlike 2016, given positions of power this time around. And now Trump and Bondi turn around and contradict themselves and say, "Nothing to see here."
It's not that this crowd is on the brink of turning to the Dems, nor even that they are likely to tell pollsters they dislike Trump. Rather, this is how revolutionaries start turning on each other, start battling to the death over who is the true inheritor of the MAGA mantle post-Trump. There will be those who remain pure to the conspiracy "ideal"; there will be pragmatists who want to move on so as to effectively enact anti-woke policy; and those who try to straddle the issue. The resulting schism is likely to have a long-lasting effect. Pre-social media, this sliver of the red tent would probably not have mattered, but now it does.
I feel like Nate has become something of a right-wing ideologue without intending to. No matter how bad the news is for Trump, he writes posts about how democrats will still fail just “because”. This is not what we expect from a statistician.
He never talks about how polls for 2025 and 2026 elections look very good for democrats and Trump’s approval is in the absolute toilet (-10 to -8 is hardly a “rebound”)
Yeah it's starting to feel that way for me too. This and another substack I thought was insightful - both seem to have turned into There's no stopping GOP!!!!
'anything other than Epstein is (a) distraction that Trump coverts'
I'm sure you meant covets, right? Or are you being covert?
Nate literally uses ChatGPT as his "editor".
One small note: the discussion of partisanship is very good overall, but it's not just that partisanship is dynamic, measurement can be a function of approval. When bad things are happening to the party in power their partisans are less likely to answer polls and those that do are less representative of the population. (Andrew Gelman talks about this a lot.) So in theory you can be losing accuracy due to non-response bias.
Looking forward to Nate’s new metric for how news stories affect Trump’s rating: Expected Probability of Sabotaging Trump Evaluated for Incident-driven News (EPSTEIN).
I hadn't thought about Russiagate with this but it could be a good analogue. Obviously the subject matter and crime are very different but I'm starting to think the end result here will be the same. Months of coverage, congressional hearings, etc., then once it's finally out there...an incomplete result that shows some shady activity but isn't quite enough evidence for anyone to go to jail. If there was truly ironclad evidence that Trump (and Clinton and any number of other powerful people) were guilty the files would've been mysteriously deleted and Maxwell "committed suicide" a long time ago.
I am not a Russia-gate truther but the fact is we never really got to the bottom of what happened in 2016, Paul manafort took the blame, served part of his sentence in silence, and was pardoned after… the mueller report identified multiple instances where trump and trump associates obstructed justice.
Generally the adage that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up” is totally inaccurate, there are many bad scandals that are blatantly covered up, at which point publuc interest drifts away or it becomes sufficiently difficult to prove the facts.
Which brings this to epstein… it is hard to say what exactly happened. But it appears trump is trying to use the pardon power to get ghislaine Maxwell to offer a statement exonerating trump. This seems facially fairly scandalous, but given how good he is at focusing attention, it might work…
Also isn’t it obvious that this is a bigger story with trump as president? Biden wasn’t one of Epstein’s friends!
Nate. Your choice of words. Specifically the second sentence of the subhead. No I'm not saying any more.
The democrats should prepare and release a series of ads (all with the same branding and visual language) talking about all of Trump’s major gifts (pardons, aircraft from Qatar, crypto). Run then in about a year. No one has ever monetized the White House like Trump has. I'd like to think that people mostly understand a simple "bribery is bad" message. Epstein is just bread and circuses; fun to watch, but not satisfying or nutritious
Gonna be hard when ppl associate Pelosi etc with insider trading.
There it is. All the cumulative crap Trump does is ok because Pelosi did that. (Understand I don't like her, or that she did it).
Democrats need a message that makes ppls lives better. Clearly the majority of voters don’t care, or think both parties are just as bad as each other.
I totally agree.
Another aspect about Epstein is a hypocritical moral scandal has buried a real legal scandal.
I think pretty much everyone writing about Epstein knows that there are high-end brothels all over the world and that lots of rich and powerful men patronize them. Most of them are illegal, and most involve some coercion and exploitation of minors and other vulnerable workers. I haven't seen anything suggesting Epstein's operation was worse than other high-end brothels.
If you think all prostitution is a scandal, fine, but it's much bigger and older than Epstein. If you think all coercion and exploitation are scandals, same comment. Personally I blame the problems on criminalization of voluntary sex work, which means sex workers cannot complain to police about rape, robbery, coercion or workplace abuse; and means operations are run by criminals; and the field is immune to regulation.
The Epstein-specific scandal is how powerful people shielded him from prosecution for many years, not that he ran a particularly coercive or exploitive high-end brothel. If you want to see his customers exposed, great, but let's publish all customers of prostitutes, including journalists, not make this into a partisan-sniping game.