Notes on a Week
Hillary Clinton and the Grief of My Generation…Those Missing Epstein Interviews and Trump’s History of Abuse…The Cover-Up is Crumbling…and…Trump Declares War
Tuesday:
Today she’s being dragged to testify in a session (closed, of course; they dont dare risk interrogating someone who will actually tell the truth before the public) presumably because she’s mentioned in the Epstein Files (“mentioned”= Epstein commented during her 2016 campaign) but actually just because she’s Hillary Clinton, and “The Clintons” are the favorite go-to of the GOP whenever they want our eyes NOT on Trump.
We knew she’d burn them to toast, as she always did. That was her big “failing.” She refused to subordinate herself, to make herself smaller or smilier or less smart. It enraged the media, it enraged Putin, it enraged a lot of ordinary men. And too many younger people got conned by a man who convinced them he was offering “revolution.” The REAL revolution in this country would have been electing her.
With bitter remembering, allow me to share how I ended the introduction to my book on the 2016 election:
Between Sanders and the GOP witch-hunters, Hillary was blamed for every national disaster from racialized incarceration to the deaths of American diplomats during the raid on Benghazi. She was accused of having extraordinary powers that “enabled” her husband’s infidelity, influenced Wall Street through the spell of a few polite remarks in public speeches, and put an entire nation in danger by “recklessly” handling classified material (that had not, in fact, been marked as classified). Her vote alone, apparently, was responsible for the war in Iraq.
She even had her own “familiar”-her husband—with whom she frequently merged, shape-shifting into a slithery, elusive man-woman called “The Clintons.” This mythological creature lives by “rules of its own,” and lines its pockets with the lucre amassed through a supposed “charity” foundation.
Oh, yes, and as secretary of state she had a private email server in her basement. Basement? Private? What else might have been going on there? A child pornography ring? Feminist covens? Animal sacrifice?
Does this picture sound like it belongs in a gruesomely illustrated version of a Grimm’s fairy tale? It’s a central premise of this book that the Hillary Clinton who was “defeated” in the 2016 election was, indeed, not a real person at all, but a caricature forged out of the stew of unexamined sexism, unprincipled partisanship, irresponsible politics, and a mass media too absorbed in “optics” to pay enough attention to separating facts from rumors, lies, and speculation.
Of course, there was a flesh-and-blood woman there. But, like a reality show housewife, she was edited into a cartoon-with potent archetypal resonance. Cunning, deceptive, in league with the forces of greed and elitism over the “working people,” fueled by personal ambition: that was the “Hillary Clinton” who hovered in the air of this election, not only at Trump rallies, but also in the rhetoric of many Sanders supporters, in the charges of the GOP interrogators who hammered away at her during never-ending investigations into Benghazi and emails, and in the imaginations of those voters who voted for Trump (as one told Chris Hayes) simply “because he wasn’t Hillary.”
And so, we got someone who most definitely isn’t Hillary.
Wednesday:
Hillary’s opening statement and appearance before the press was brilliant. Did these guys have any idea who they were up against? She is fearless. And overflowing with brain power. Magnificent.
But the event made me sad/mad/depressed/weary and gave me bad dreams. I know many women of my generation must feel like this, too. In my nightmares I often convert the political to the personal, and in one last night a past lover—probably the fiercest passion of my life—was ignoring me for a younger woman, while I begged: “We had it once; we can revive it, I know.” He just shrugged.
In non-dreamworld, I have been wanting to call him, not to revive anything romantic as decades have passed and we are both married to other people, but just to see if he ever thought about our relationship or if it had just been disappeared in his life. But I won’t, because it all seems so irretrievably gone.
This is the terrible grief of my generation of women, who once had such hope, and watched our achievements, our passions, our great women warriors like Hillary and Kamala mocked and discarded. It’s the constant backdrop of all the more personal disappointments and griefs we’ve suffered. Layer upon layer upon layer of grief. To call it merely “political” is to demean the tragedy of it. It’s in our bones, our nerves, our aching backs, our nightmare breakthroughs.
I search for signs of hope. To be honest, I can’t find them. Every possibility is wrapped tightly inside a knot that’s hard to imagine we can loosen. Doesn’t mean I will stop trying. If Hillary can talk back and fight back after being so disgustingly battered for decades by those so inferior to her, we all have an obligation to follow her lead. But I won’t put on the happy, normalizing face of the tv commentators. What’s happened is a tragedy.
Wednesday:
We await the transcripts of both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton depositions, but an item making the news this afternoon is a tweet by Maxwell Frost describing Bill Clinton’s recall, in his deposition of a conversation in which Trump has said he broke with Epstein over a “land deal.”
That of course contradicts Trump’s account that he had kicked Jeffrey Epstein out for “stealing” employees. But according to the research I’ve done for various stacks, it’s what actually happened. Why did Trump change his story?
I provided an answer in an August 2025 stack of mine. Here’s an excerpt:
There was a big problem with the “land deal” explanation. The feud referred to—over an oceanfront property both of them coveted—occurred just fifteen years ago, and if that were the case, Trump couldn’t claim, as he often has, that he “knew nothing about anything.” Epstein had been released in 2009 after serving 13 months of an 18 month “sweetheart deal” worked out between Epstein’s attorneys and Alex Acosta, then the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. The timing was a problem. Fighting over real estate with a registered sex offender? Didn’t look so good. So after several days of telling journalists the real estate feud was “too complicated” to explain, Trump came up with a new explanation.
This one—unlike the real estate feud—also gave Trump the opportunity to perform a little moral outrage. Epstein had been “stealing” employees of “his” from Mar-a-Lago. Very, very “inappropriate”! Had to be stopped! No respectable businessman would let that go on!
Trump, as usual, tried to get away with vague allusions to the events in question. But reporters had come armed with specifics, and knew that the one employee on record (there of course may be many more) as having been recruited while working at Mar-a-Lago was Virginia Giuffre, who later went on to play a prominent role in exposing her years of abuse being “passed around like a platter of fruit” by Maxwell and Epstein (including a well-publicized suit against UK’s Prince Andrew).
“Virginia Giuffre?” Reporters asked Trump, who after a foggy moment did a mental scan and either actually remembered or decided to go along. “Yeah, I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her.” So “I told Epstein to stop taking our people, spa or not spa.” (An attendant at the spa was lowly, but hey, property is property.) But Epstein wouldn’t listen: “Not too long after he did it again and I said ‘outa here.”
The only glitch with this explanation, setting aside the disgusting but unsurprising description of his employees as though they were cheap spa equipment, was that the “inappropriate” “poaching” of Giuffre occurred in 2000 and Trump’s (well-documented) friendship with Epstein went on for many, years after that.
It was all clearly just more of the same weaseling, self-serving Trump bullshit, and could easily have been dispensed with by informed commentators. Instead, they chewed over the differing accounts ad nauseam. Spending time fact-checking Trump has mostly become a useless exercise. Those of us who already know he’s a pathological liar don’t need to have that done, and those who don’t get (or don’t care) that he’s a pathological liar (hard to believe but they exist) are not very likely to be convinced by some journalist’s run-down.
That Trump is a liar IS NOT NEWS. It’s what the media calls “baked-in.” So let’s get back to talking about the obvious:
OF COURSE these guys were besties. Even before the “Epstein Files” trickled out, there were numerous photos, videos, comments and other evidence of that in the public domain. Trump and Epstein were clearly two of a kind: spoiled, rich princes basking in the privileges of money and maleness. That post-war combination of old-fashioned sexism (women are there to serve men’s needs) and the new Playboy ethos of rebellion against mama-wife-schoolmarm (they just want to domesticate and tame you) was their credo. Don’t let them squash your manhood. Whatever you want, just take it, no permission required.
I’m sure you remember:
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Within several days after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, over a dozen women came forward—journalists, beauty contestants, receptionists—alleging that Trump kissed and groped them against their will. A small sampling:
Jessica Leeds told The New York Times in 2016 that Trump “grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt” when the pair were seated next to each other on a flight in the early 1980s, when Trump was married to Ivana.
“He was like an octopus,” Leeds told The Times. “His hands were everywhere.”
In 2016, People magazine’s Natasha Stoynoff alleged that Trump pushed her against a wall and “shoved” his tongue “down her throat” when she went to Mar-a-Lago to interview him and the very-pregnant Melania in December 2005.
Miss USA and Miss Universe contestants said that Trump harassed and assaulted them in 2006, inspecting them before the pageants and grabbing them without consent.
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” said Trump “very aggressively” kissed her, groped her breasts, and began “thrusting” his genitals at her in a 2007 meeting at The Beverly Hills Hotel.
More famously, columnist E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. She describes the attack in her excellent book, quoting from the trial transcript:
A. His head was beside me, breathing. First, he put his mouth against me.
Q. Do you mean he kissed you?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you kiss him back?
A. No. I didn’t consider it a kiss. It was such— it was a shocking thing for him to suddenly put his mouth against mine. I thought what? What? What? No.
Q. Were you afraid while this was happening?
A. I was in-this is going to sound strange. I was too frightened to think if I was afraid or not. I was stamping. My whole reason for being alive in that moment was to get out of that room…
…I was stamping and trying to wiggle out from under him. But he had pulled down my tights and his hand went-his fingers went into my vagina, which was extremely painful, extremely painful. It was a horrible feeling because he curved, he put his hand inside of me and curved his finger. As I’m sitting here today,I can still feel it. It was—
Q. Then what happened?
A. Then he inserted his penis.
Q: What did you do in that moment?
A. I tried—
Q. Do you need a moment, Ms. Carroll?
[I did not need a moment. I have had enough moments.]
A. You asked me what I did in that moment? I always think back to why I walked in there to get myself in that situation, but I’m proud to say I got out. I got my knee up. I got my knee up and pushed him back.
Q. You said you got your knee up. What happened next?
A. Once I could get my knee up, I could get him to back off. I could actually move his body. I was quite strong. I was an athlete. I could push him back by putting that knee up.
Q. What did you do after you were able to push him off?
A. I exited the room, and I got out of the store as quickly as I could.
Q. I think you were touching on this Ms. Carroll, but sitting here today, how do you feel about your decision to go into that dressing room?
A. It was stupid. I know people have been through a lot worse than this, but it—it left me. It left me unable to ever have a romantic life again.
No one who actually followed or researched Trump’s history of sexual abuse should be surprised at his desperate efforts to conceal his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Most recently, as first reported by NPR and confirmed by members of the House Oversight Committee, his “justice” department withheld 50 pages of notes from several interviews the FBI conducted with a woman who alleged that when she was around the age of 13, Epstein and Trump sexually abused and physically assaulted her:
Those pages contain the FBI’s notes on a series of interviews detailing an allegation, summarized elsewhere in the files, that Mr Trump forced an Epstein victim’s head “towards his exposed penis, which she subsequently bit”.
The woman told investigators she was between 13 and 15 at the time and claimed that after the incident Mr Trump “punched her in the head and kicked her out”.
Unlike most of the tips received through the FBI’s National Threat Operations Centre, this one was actively followed up.
FBI agents spoke to the woman in question four times, starting in 2019, according to documents uncovered by Roger Sollenberger, an independent journalist. It is not clear if each of these interviews pertained to her allegations about Mr Trump.
Ultimately the woman “refused to co-operate” in a potential investigation into Mr Trump, one New York FBI agent emailed a colleague in July 2025.
The Epstein files do contain the notes on one interview that agents conducted with the woman, in which she details how she was groomed and abused by Epstein. In this interview, her attorney said the woman was “concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation”. The FBI agents noted that, in identifying Epstein, she handed them a “widely distributed” photograph of the disgraced financier that had been cropped to remove Mr Trump.
Those of us who have been following credible allegations against Trump that have surfaced on internet sources recognized, after comparing dates and details, that the woman whose interviews had been withheld was almost certainly “Katie Johnson” (a pseudonym), a young woman who filed civil lawsuits in 2016 accusing Trump and Epstein of sexually assaulting her in 1994, when she was 13 years old.
This testimony has been transcribed and published in several reputable substack publications.1 Yet for reasons that aren’t clear to me—“Katie”s appearance and voice are disguised—there’s been no mention of it in the mainstream media. It’s even rare to find mention of those few details that appear in the slide presentation created by the FBI/NYPD task forces:
“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” [REDACTED] would have been 13-15.”
Instead, as Bill Scher reports, “most reporters simply made vague references to multiple unsubstantiated claims.”
“We don’t have enough evidence to conclude guilt,” Scher continues. “But we have more than enough circumstantial evidence—combined with a disturbing pattern of behavior—for reporters to press Trump and his allies with the same intensity of coverage media outlets have devoted to others in the Epstein files who merely exchanged chummy emails.”
More than two dozen women have accused the president of sexual misconduct. A jury has found Trump liable for sexual abuse.
Donald J. Trump is not someone who has earned the benefit of the doubt.
Friday:
It was clear that the cover-up was beginning to shred. So while I may have been a bit reductionist, it wasn’t entirely without evidence or reason that my first thought, when I woke up Friday morning to see Trump on the screen declaring his intention to become the savior of the Iranian people, was this:
A little later, after I’d had some coffee and taken my Xanax, I posted this:
People’s brains are going to feel scrambled this morning.
I know mine are.
And I’ve decided it’s the most appropriate response.
Journalists like to say “both things can be true at the same time.”
And that’s true.
But when it comes to this war, many more than two things are true.
You can wish to see the people of Iran liberated from a tyrannical theocratic regime and see Israel/the world made safer, yet be skeptical over whether this war will actually result in any of that. You can be “for” the death of the Iranian leader, yet worry what fresh monster from hell might take his place. You may want to heart the comments of your Israeli friends who are cheering—yet are unable to, because an immoral, infantile man is in charge of how this will proceed, has made himself in charge, and cares nothing about any “people” other than himself.
Whether you are “for” the war or against the war, you would be foolish to trust any war that has Trump as “commander-in-chief.” This is not just a question of his motives—which I’m certain are utterly self-serving and likely corrupt—it’s a question of what any thinking person has to know (have you forgotten in the “fog of war”?) is his untrustworthiness, incompetence, impetuosity, and obliviousness to the suffering of others.
You think he gives a damn about the Iranian people?
Get real.
He partied at Mar-a-Lago and was giddy with anticipation moments before he announced his latest ploy to snooker the American people into believing he is what he isn’t: a world leader. In reality, to him war is just a pivot that he hopes will save his television show. He’s desperately wanting better ratings. Have you forgotten about those transcripts we were waiting for? The interviews that the “justice” department is hiding? That was last season’s plot; we’ve got a new one now.
One moment it seems as though the Epstein cover-up is about to collapse. His numbers are crashing. His SOTU is a mess. The next moment he’s in a baseball cap at his golf resort proudly announcing bombs away. People may die but that just the way it is. Rise up, Iranian people! This is your chance! I, Donald Trump, the only president who has ever had the courage to do so, is giving you your chance.
Does your brain feel scrambled?
Mission accomplished.
Weekend:
“56 Days” (mindless but entertaining) “The Pitt” (second season, second time around) “Paradise” (First three episodes second season)
Hopefully, will have enough wits left to write about them in a few days.
Today:
I don’t want to hear about coordinated efforts.
I don’t want to hear about precision strikes.
I don’t want to hear about re-deployment of resources.
I don’t want to hear about synchronized waves with fancy phallic names.
I don’t want to hear about “projecting power.”
I don’t want to hear ANYTHING from the mouth of Pete Hegseth talking as though he’s the hero in a World War II movie or marching to the music of the finale of “Les Miserables.”
I will NOT be discussing whether this is a “righteous” war. I’m NOT going to discuss Israel except for prayers in my heart and in private messages with trusted friends. I’m not going to discuss the deplorable Iranian regime or the people who have suffered under it. I’m not going to speculate about what might happen next.
I WILL talk about what continues to happen in THIS country. What we AREN’T talking about now that we are at war.
What we AREN’t seeing that we were promised.
How inept and dangerous our “commander-in-chief” is.
How corrupt and deplorable and frightening and repressive our own regime is.
Yeah! I'm liking this new format...