The New York Times Just Sanewashed Trump's Sordid Sexual History (again)
Yesterday, The New York Times sanewashed Trump's extensive relationship with Epstein by turning his refusal to turn over the Epstein files into a problem for Democrats
According to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden,1 the Epstein files that the mad clown is fighting so hard to delete from public memory contain 4,725 wire transfers totaling nearly $1.1 billion involving just one of Epstein’s bank accounts.
That’s $1.1 billion that has been spent on sex trafficking Trump wants Americans to forget about. From one account. We know guys like that have more than one bank account. Hell, even I have more than one bank account, and I’m broke.
The mad clown is nothing if not brazen, which is why he’s chosen to focus his attention on crime as his major deflection point. He’s crazy and a pure-bred dumbass, but because this part of him has been baked in since his earliest days in public life, it’s now part of his DNA, which means it’s as natural for him to deflect like this as it is to flirt with young girls as they innocently glide down escalators.2
You’ve seen other Substackers reveal the truth about crime numbers. I won’t repeat the data here other than to say that the numbers are down, not just in D.C., but everywhere.
This makes sense, because the brief crime spikes came during the Covid pandemic, when everyone was at home and men were drinking a lot and hitting their domestic partners and kids, and sometimes killing people.
The mad clown started the pandemic crime wave when he foisted the virus upon us in the first place through his negligence and by removing key personnel from the CDC and even from China, the epicenter of Covid’s launchpad:3
In July 2019, per House Representative Lloyd Doggett:4
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency left the post, and the Trump Administration eliminated the role.
In other words, the spike in crime created by the pandemic, along with all of the other fallout from those horrible days, was created by Trump, because he created the pandemic.
Over the years, Trump has cultivated his own personal crime wave and gotten away with it to the point where he sits around late at night gurgling and dropping spittle over his Big Mac while spouting off on True Sociopath at all hours of the morning.
The press, as usual, has fallen right into his lap in response to the mad clown’s deflection from his one-man (but massive) crime wave into an urban crime wave that doesn’t exist.
Yesterday, an article by Jess Bidgood fell into my lap by way of a New York Times newsletter, which I still receive post-subscription-cancellation.
The newsletter was appalling in the way it portrayed Trump as some kind of tactical genius. It’s appalling how the author claims that Trump’s determination to make the crime story about something that doesn’t exist (an increase in urban crime) is a way to deflect from something that does exist (Trump’s longstanding relationship with Epstein and his own long, sordid life of crime).
Trump wants Americans to forget about his crimes, proven or alleged, and she’s actively helping him do it, beginning with a headline that implies strength instead of weakness, dementia, and, probably, outright clinical insanity:
I’m going to reproduce the newsletter I received with annotations (the newsletter’s original text is in italics). I’ll just go ahead and claim fair use in case some New York Times legal beagle is stupid enough to give me publicity by issuing a take-down order.
On the surface, it looks like her sanitization is my imagination. That’s the problem, though. She’s a good writer. She knows how to soften the blow to such an extent that she sounds like one of the good guys.
Without further ado, here’s the newsletter and my commentary:
The Fight Trump Wants Now
By Jess Bidgood
This summer has brought uncomfortable moments for President Trump.
I would have said something like, “This summer reminded Americans why they shouldn’t have voted for someone who is certifiably insane,” but I don’t have a nice place in the Hamptons to worry about like NY Times reporters do.
His administration’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein has divided his party.
Try this: “His concerted effort to block the release of the Epstein files has riled up some on the far right, who believed him when he lied about saying he wanted to get at the truth.”
Economic data has begun to sour as his economic policies have taken hold.
I’ll say one thing. I couldn’t think of a softer way to put this if I spent an hour trying. That said, at the very least, maybe try this: “Economic data has begun to sour as the taco-fed economic malaise, created by the whims of a mad toddler instead of any kind of cohesive policy, has taken hold.”
His signature domestic policy bill has proved unpopular, and foreign conflicts he had promised to end — including in Gaza and Ukraine — are still raging.
Where do I start? His signature domestic policy? Anywhoose, let’s rewrite this sentence, shall we? Mine is longer, but it’s a newsletter. You can add words until it all works (or, sometimes in my editor-free case, never does). Here’s my attempt:
“Project 2025’s seizure of the congressional budget bill that he brazenly called The Big Beautiful Bill, but which is instead a template for the destruction of America, has received the kind of withering criticism from Americans of all walks of life you’d expect. (See Charles Bastille’s Substack Ruminato article for more on Project 2025’s progress):
He’s actively cheered on Netanyahu’s genocide and Putin’s three-year effort to destroy Ukraine and kill its people and infrastructure, proving that the lies of his campaign that he’d end both conflicts were conspiratorial loads of bullshit.”
Sigh.
His extraordinary effort to take over law enforcement in Washington, D.C., which is ramping up as it enters its second week, helps nudge the political discourse toward what he has long seen as more favorable terrain: A fight with Democrats over crime. (And they are determined not to take the bait.)
Ms. Bidgood tried to save herself here with that last bit in parentheses. But she started the paragraph with a spectacular fail: “His extraordinary effort to take over law enforcement in Washington, D.C.” The problem with the word “extraordinary” is that it implies strength, often while overcoming malignant forces. Strictly speaking, this kind of positive energy is not part of the definition of “extraordinary,” but modern lexicon has passed a heroic second meaning into the word.
“Extraordinary” is a word that should never be used in any sentence referring to Trump. It should be reserved for kids who save their elementary school budget with a bake sale. It should be saved for Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Martin Luther King Jr.
The word suggests to the casual reader that he’s strong. He is not. He’s weaker than a pool noodle in a swimming pool at the Hamptons. The AP and Chicago stylebooks, which are referenced by newspaper critters for style questions, even say so (I’m lying here, but they should).
Ms. Bidgood also, again, promotes the narrative of a clever president when she writes that the D.C. takeover “helps nudge the political discourse toward what he has long seen as more favorable terrain: A fight with Democrats over crime.”
Oh, come on. He would not even be able to read that sentence, much less implement it.
If she insists on taking this stance, Ms. Bidgood should at least refer to the history of Trump’s sordid relationship with African Americans and crime, beginning with the Central Park Five. This was a 1989 case in which Trump called for the execution of 15-year-old Yusef Salaam for a crime he didn’t commit: the rape of 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili.5
Trump’s racist background is rock solid. It began long before he went crazy. It should be part of the background story each time a story needs to be written about things like D.C. crime. It is a moral responsibility to build this context into “crime” stories involving Trump.
Ms. Bidgood continues:
It wasn’t so long ago that Trump was praising the nationwide drop in the murder rate — or even that one of his own officials in Washington was specifically touting the drop in violent crime there. By deploying National Guard troops to patrol the streets and seeking control of the local police, his opponents say, Trump is transparently stoking fear for political gain, and exaggerating statistics to justify a power grab.
One paragraph that reflects reality. Quit while you’re ahead, maybe?
No, I guess not:
But public safety is tricky territory for Democrats, as my colleague Lisa Lerer and I wrote this morning, and Trump knows it.
It’s tricky because mainstream media doesn’t pound facts into people’s heads and allows a guy who tried to bury a 15-year-old to run point on the discussion.
Trump knows that he can dupe the American public with his crime wave stories because it has worked for him for years, and it’s almost reflexive for him now. It has nothing to do with knowledge or smarts.
Republicans seized on the pandemic crime spike to win control of the House in 2022 and to help expand Trump’s coalition in 2024, even though rates of violent crime had, by then, begun to recede.
This sentence makes no sense. How did they seize on a spike that didn’t exist in 2024? Also, why not discuss how brief that initial spike was?
For Trump, the argument that Democrats have let lawlessness run rampant in the cities and states they run goes back even further, as have his efforts to invoke race in his discussions of crime, which my colleague Erica Green wrote about today.
Hey, it’s okay to say he’s a racist. This is well documented. Burying a link that sort of hints at it is hardly sufficient.
In the late 1980s, Trump took out ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino men who were accused of raping and beating a woman in Central Park (The men were later exonerated; he said he would not apologize.)
Oh, there you go. Finally. Except they weren’t men. Yusef Salaam was 15. Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson were 14, Antron McCray was 15, and the old man of the group, Korey Wise, was 16. Pat Buchanan, who was maga before maga was cool, wanted the 16-year-old “tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park by June 1”6
They may or may not have entered Central Park that night to cause trouble. The teenage years can be restive ones for people living in poverty or without good schools or healthcare.
Maybe the New York Times should consider a six-part story on how poverty affects teenagers? Not that anyone would read it these days.
Meanwhile, it is your civic duty to remind your readers, constantly, that Trump displayed his propensity to make furious racist attacks long before he became a presidential candidate, and to do so without couching it in terms of political strategy.
He’s been racist since the days he and his pops denied housing for Black folks during the before times when politics bordered on being normal.
Ms. Bidgood continues:
As a presidential candidate in 2016, he called himself the “law and order” candidate and took office by describing gangs, drugs and inner-city blight as “American carnage.”
And mainstream media ate it up, with nary a reference to his long history of racism. Even today, most of you can’t bring yourself to use the term “racist” in describing the racist pedogerm who resides in the Oval Office under criminal circumstances.
Four years later, when Black Lives Matter protests swelled across the country, Trump once again ran against crime in urban centers, describing living in cities like Baltimore, Oakland and Detroit as “like living in hell.”
Today, Washington, D.C., and all of the other cities to which he has mused about expanding his crackdown are led by Black mayors.
“Mused?” That is another blatant attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. Please. Rewrite that last sentence: “Today, Washington, D.C., and all of the other cities to which he has delivered his racist tropes, are led by Black mayors.”
I’ll just annotate directly into the next few paragraphs, if you don’t mind too much, Ms. Bidgood:
Other Republicans have caught on to the politics (of racism), seemingly aware their participation
in the crackdownin racist tropes could help them curry favor with the president. Over the weekend, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, who has made no secret of his differences with Trump in the past,sent 150 National Guard troops to Washington. He has not deployed troops to patrol the streets in his own state, even though it was only a few weeks ago that Vice President JD Vance criticized local authorities in cities like Columbus, Akron and Canton for allowing “lawlessness to run wild.”Three other Republican governors — in South Carolina, Mississippi and West Virginia — have also sent National Guard troops to Washington to answer the racist dog whistles.
It is all exasperating to those who have actually overseen a significant drop in the rate of violent crime.
Apparently, not exasperating enough to formally call out the blatant racism.
“The last time the homicide rate was this low in Baltimore City, I was not born yet,” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, told me, adding, “If he wanted to have a serious conversation about violent crime, he should have to pay attention to the work we’re doing in the state of Maryland to be able to address the issue.”
His party is treading carefully, though, well aware that people’s perceptions of issues like crime (and the economy) don’t align with the statistics.
And why is that? Because you continue to let a felon control the narrative. Because your newspaper continues to coddle him in between stories that don’t.
“Politics is the domain of emotion,” Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx told me.
And it’s not just crime. Immigration enforcement has become increasingly central to the takeover, my colleagues Jazmine Ulloa and Christina Morales report.
Is that what you call the growth of the American Gestapo? Immigration enforcement? No wonder I cancelled my subscription months ago.
With that, the president may be seizing on a second issue he successfully ran on in 2024 — and sees an opportunity to weaponize it again in the midterms.
And you’ll be there for it, handing him a platform like the corporate lapdogs that you are.
When will the New York Times understand that its writers can’t write about Trump and crime without talking about his crimes and alleged crimes? You can’t write about crime and ignore January 6 and the civil suit by E. Jean Carroll in which a judge and a jury of Trump’s peers declared that he committed sexual assault. You can’t ignore his years of friendship with Epstein. You can’t ignore 34 felony convictions or the unfinished indictment regarding election interference still waiting for him in Georgia.
The best way to avoid all this is to simply not report on his comments about crime. Ignore them completely. They are not “newsy.” The only crime news we, the people, are interested in is this: Where are those Epstein files, and what the hell is in them?
Enjoy the Hamptons while you can, Ms. Bidgood, and remember this as I borrow loosely from Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the undocumented immigrants And I did not speak out Because I was not an undocumented immigrant Then they came for the darker documented immigrants And I did not speak out Because I was not a darker documented immigrant Then they came for Blacks And I did not speak out Because I was not Black Then they came for non-white women And I did not speak out Because I was a white woman. Then they came for me, Jess Bidgood And there was no one left To speak out for me. And as they hauled me away, I looked at the newscast At a picture of Trump and Epstein Smiling like predatory vampires And they were looking at me.
Final thoughts
He’s insane. That must be the starting point of every conversation about Donald Trump. Mainstream media needs to lead off every story about Trump with the truth behind his declining faculties if they want to be taken seriously by the growing crowd finally coming to terms with it.
If you don’t believe that the majority of people don’t realize it now, post two words anywhere on social media: “He’s insane.” Everyone will know who you’re referring to.
Update
This morning, I received this incredible sanewashed newsletter piece via Semafor:
This is what we are up against, folks. Not MAGA, not even Trump. A corporate media populated by butt sniffing journalists with no principles.
Footnotes
It’s notable that Trump’s contemptible behavior is so firmly embedded into the American consciousness that two of the footnotes are derived from Congressional sources.
“As Trump Downplays Epstein, Wyden Unveils Details of Treasury’s Undisclosed Epstein File | the United States Senate Committee on Finance.” 2025. Senate.gov. July 17, 2025. https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/as-trump-downplays-epstein-wyden-unveils-details-of-treasurys-undisclosed-epstein-file.
Mehta, Seema. 2016. “Tribune Archive: Trump Told 14-Year-Old Girls, ‘in a Couple of Years, I’ll Be Dating You.’” Los Angeles Times. October 13, 2016. https://www.latimes.com/nation/ct-donald-trump-girls-chicago-tribune-archive-20161013-story.html.
This is an eye-opening timeline that clarifies how deeply responsible Trump was for the damage done by the Covid pandemic through a combination of negligence and outright deviance:
“Timeline of Trump’s Coronavirus Responses.” 2022. Congressman Lloyd Doggett. March 2, 2022. https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-coronavirus-responses.
Five boys (the Central Park Five) were exonerated after a serial rapist serving a life sentence for murder, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime after DNA evidence pointed to him being Meili’s rapist. See:
Laughland, Oliver. 2016. “Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: The Racially Charged Rise of a Demagogue.” The Guardian. The Guardian. February 17, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york.
From the article:
Nearly three decades before the rambunctious billionaire began his run for president – before he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, for the expulsion of all undocumented migrants, before he branded Mexicans as “rapists” and was accused of mocking disabled people – Trump called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York following a horrific rape case in which five teenagers were wrongly convicted.
The miscarriage of justice is widely remembered as a definitive moment in New York’s fractured race relations. But Trump’s intervention – he signed full-page newspaper advertisements implicitly calling for the boys to die – has been gradually overlooked as his chances of winning the Republican nomination have rapidly increased. Now those involved in the case of the so-called Central Park Five and its aftermath say Trump’s rhetoric served as an unlikely precursor to a unique brand of divisive populism that has powered his rise to political prominence in 2016.
The Guardian, ibid
Glad I canceled my subscription
There's a reason the NYT and WaPo have lost so many subscribers. I don't miss them at all. Well, maybe Alexandra Petri, but she left too.
Corporate media is dead to me.