Another Man Without a Country

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.” - Kurt Vonnegut

I live in a country that has concentration camps and a convict felon president who sent his lawyer to have a conversation with a convicted child sex trafficker to seek cooperation with her. Game knows game, I reckon. Such a lead sentence might be absurdly unrealistic in a pitch proposal for a movie or a novel, but, instead, it is a statement of reality, and bile rises in my throat as the words appear on my screen. For a declarative sentence, it is also a frail descendant of warnings and dark visions from the writer Kurt Vonnegut, whose last book, “A Man Without A Country,” was a cerebral deconstruct of America, in particular, and humans, in general. A fan of Vonnegut’s science fiction, I had missed the 2005 publication of this collection of brief essays, and, they are, as is almost every word he ever wrote, worthy of time and attention.

Vonnegut’s thinking foreshadowed the American horror story presently unfolding in front of a planet where people once turned their eyes in our direction for hope. When the U.S. Supreme Court stole the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush, the author saw the beginning of our democracy’s decline. Americans did not even give the popular vote to Bush, and the suppression of minority voters, especially in Florida, was critical in the tally. The Ivy League C student then put together a merry band of sycophants who manufactured a fanciful tale of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which rationalized an invasion that set the wider Mideast to flame but put vast oil resources under control of the West. General Colin Powell committed reputational Hari Kari and destroyed his legacy when he supported the falsehoods before the United Nations. The liars of our government, Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney, cantered off into history, avoiding consequences. Thus, the road to infamy had been cleared of most obstructions.

And look how far we have come! The Supreme Court has given the current, and all future presidents, immunity, and we have a man in the White House who is lying about being a pedophile and hanging out with a character who facilitated acting on those urges. Not to be overlooked is the fine irony that American MAGAts were endlessly exercised by the odd fantasy that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats once ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor. Presented with overwhelming evidence of a real world pedophile president and his leading consort, they are suddenly sanguine about abused children; especially if they were cute girls and in their early teens. The woman who ran the scary-go-round for Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of charges related to operating a child sex trafficking ring and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Before she was sent off to the big house, Donald Trump said, “I wish her well.”

Of course, he did, because she knows the truth, and if Ghislaine Maxwell ever got angry at him, the rest of us would get closer to the facts, and that cannot happen. Despite all their ethical and intellectual failings, MAGAts stumbled over a line with Trump that they had never expected to cross and it involved the Epstein controversy. They can tolerate innocent people being arrested by ICE and held without due process, and a president demanding bribes from network news media, and even their tax dollars being used to expedite a genocide in Gaza, but they cannot abide their dear leader diddling underage girls. MAGAts are not, however, universally angry at Trump but their support has been split and they are eating each other’s loyalty over the crime of pedophilia. They don’t want to believe he is who he is, but, in this single instance, they want proof that he is not. Below is proof that he is, the video deposition of Katie Johnson who was only 13 when she claims she was sexually assaulted by Trump at an Epstein party.

Which is why a coverup became necessary and is unfolding before our eyes. Congress was experiencing overwhelming public pressure to release the Epstein files and to subpoena Maxwell and other potential witnesses. Instead, Trump picked up the phone and called his fellator-in-chief, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and told him it would be best if the reps were sent home for a long summer vacation without any further votes. The previous head fake had not worked when the president had ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to release any “pertinent grand jury information.” No such disclosures can occur without persuasive arguments before the presiding judge in the case, and even if they were let out into the public domain the weasel word “pertinent” means nothing harmful to Trump would ever appear in the documents. We can conclude as much because he had previously sent a reported 1000 FBI agents to pour through 300,000 pages of testimony and other materials with the assignment to “flag” all mentions of Trump.

The heat has not faded, though, because there are too many pictures and videos of Trump hanging with his long-time bestie Jeffie. Sadly, for Epstein, there was no guarantee he would stay quiet after being arrested and charged with crimes against children. His boudoir and island were frequented by the rich and powerful, and if he began to make lists and check them twice, the mighty would fall. If a man ever needed dyin’ for political reasons, Jeffie did. With the help of clandestine operatives, and a 24-hour video recording camera that was turned off for three minutes, Epstein hung himself.

The only remaining problem was all the files, recordings, appointment books, videos and other information he retained to keep the powerful compliant and wiring him money. How much money? According to an undisclosed U.S. Treasury Department file reviewed by the investigative staff of Oregon’s Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, there were 4,725 wire transfers in and out of a single bank account linked to Epstein. The total amount of cash moved was reported to be as much as $1.5 billion dollars. The Senator emphasized that the transactions were often routed through Russian banks that are now under sanctions and were clearly payments tied to women and girls and their pimps from countries like Russia, Belarus, Turkiye, and Turkmenistan. As Wyden points out, those are thousands of lines of investigation that could be followed if there were any true interest in discovering the facts of Epstein’s trafficking operation and Trump’s relationship to him and that business.

Tracing those wires will be just one of the arrows pointing at Trump. As the late U.S. Senator Robert Dole used to say, “You know it. I know it. And the American people know it.” Trump’s latest attempt to silence criticism was to send his former personal attorney, now a Deputy U.S. Attorney General, Todd Blanche, out to the prison to interview Maxwell. The performative part of that act is to pretend they have the goal of getting to the bottom of the mystery of who was involved with Epstein, which is funnier than a Nate Bargatze bit. Blanche quickly cut a deal with Maxwell and gave her limited immunity for her testimony on the record. In her case, limited probably means she can name any suspect she wants, other than Trump. If she is able to be convincing, the pedophile president will give her something in return. The best guess is that he will commute her sentence. A pardon would imply she was innocent, and her innocence is as non-existent as the president’s. Regardless, with commutation, Maxwell will be free to head off into the world and start recruiting more post-pubescent girls for a new pervert employer. Hell, Trump might even give her a pardon since he regards her work as public service.

This is where we find the precarious state of American democracy. The President of the United States, a serial philanderer, and his lawyers are negotiating with a convicted child sex trafficker, and you may be assured that she will get leniency out of those conversations. There is simply no other way for Trump to conceal his involvement. The Department of Justice and the FBI have almost certainly scrubbed all records or redacted any mentions of Trump in the Epstein files and the current stagecraft of a followup investigation is unconvincing. Maxwell has to be kept silent and a second murder would leave even the MAGAts skeptical. Nonetheless, after all his lies and felony convictions and complete detachment from reality, it is hard to believe the Maxwell show will cause Trump any permanent political harm. The country will burn to the ground but he will be just fine.

And I wonder what Kurt Vonnegut would have thought about that.