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Does it even matter? Even if you remove everything about Epstein and Iran from the conversation, he is still objectively a shitty person and one of the most incompetent and self serving people to hold high office in a country that elects its leaders.
You would probably have to go back 100 years to find someone that is the head of state in a country that is a major player on the world stage to find someone that is as unfit for the job as Trump.
If Donald Trump isn't an actual pedophile in the Epstein files, he is absolutely being blackmailed by pedophiles who are in the Epstein files.
The only other explanation is that he is so fantastically stupid that he is behaving like he is being blackmailed by pedophiles without actually being blackmailed by pedophiles. And while I wouldn't put it past him to be that stupid, I'm pretty sure he's either a pedophile and/or being blackmailed by pedophiles.
What are you going to blackmail him with? Being a foreign asset? Grifting and embezzling the fuck out of the country? Raping and trafficking children?
He already publicly does/did all those things. He isn't being blackmailed, he's just a run-of-the-mill rich dumbass.
Maxwell is living it up at what amounts to a college dorm room instead of where she should be, which is front and center on the gallows.
Why does Epstein look like he is photoshopped
He absolutely is beyond a shadow of a doubt in my mind. I would say the majority of the politicians in the west are. Thiel and palantir are a new Epstein/ghisine Mossad blackmail operation
The thing about people like Trump, is that they always do worse than the most vile speculations about them.
I’m sure over his life he has been blackmailed several times, starting when he was a teenager.
Why stop now? Nothing in his ordinary business stopped now, and I assume the question is not who is currently trying, but which agencies and people are not.
its horrifying to imagine what he has done that is so bad he can be blackmailed over it
That is your speculation. But he has to do worse than your speculation, isn't there a kind of infinite recursion there?
Almost all politicians are. And Epstein wasn't the only operator. Today's politicians act like they are, and Epstine's operation was too far in the past for most of them.
Blackmail mills blackmail a lot people. If you had political finance money, would you finance the campaign of someone who says they are aligned with you, or someone you know will stay aligned with you? Power isn't given to un-blackmailed people. And people who want power know this. So there is a long list of people willing to get blackmailed to get into power. They may even enjoy the part that gets them blackmailed.
No. Of course it's possible, but if the only evidence is that he's doing everything Israel wants, then does Israel also have something on the vast majority of Congress? Did they have something on Biden, Obama, Bush, etc?
The simpler and more likely explanation is that all these politicians support Israel for other reasons, because Israel serves as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US and a staging ground to conduct it's campaigns of terror and conquest across the MENA region. Look at how many countries in that region the US has destabilized: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and of course the Israelis themselves are attacking Palestine and Lebanon. Virtually every country that isn't already in the US sphere of influence. This is a consistent campaign of conquest that goes across decades of different administrations.
You don't have to blackmail US politicians to get them to bomb brown kids in the Middle East, it's what they all want to do anyway.
then does Israel also have something on the vast majority of Congress?
Isn't that well known? When did people forget Israel pays for the campaign of the vast majority of the politicians in the US?
We're talking about blackmail material. If AIPAC is sufficient explanation for why congress supports Israel, why do we need all this conjecture and supposition that Trump is being blackmailed, when we know for a fact that he takes AIPAC money too?
My guess it's because it's very likely that Israel has some very damning blackmail material on Trump.
But I do agree it's not necessary. There's enough publicly known reasons for Trump to support them to the death of the second-to-last US citizen without the need of any secret material.
The only thing is that the US hasn't really used Israel as a staging area for expeditionary action in the Middle East.
Both the Gulf and Iraq Wars used Saudi Arabia as a staging ground. Afghanistan was too far away for the US to use Israel. If anything, the US usually excludes Israel from any overt military action given the political blowback from using Israel in the region.
Israel is used as a destabilizing presence in the ME to prevent the region from uniting against Western imperialism. The point is not to use Israel as a staging ground for direct US action, but to allow it to do its thing so that the region is focused on the immediate threat of Israel and less able to respond to US soft power threats.
“Let us extract your resources, or we will allow Israel to assassinate your leaders and bomb your schools.”
Even if that's true, they are still in the US sphere of influence just like Saudi Arabia, and that's all that US politicians care about. They will happily overlook Israeli crimes just as they overlook Saudi crimes, and I don't see people suggesting the Saudis have blackmail material.
What do people mean by saying the US does whatever Israel wants? Sending them weapons to kill brown kids in Palestine, Lebanon, etc? The US wants to do that. Bombing Iran? The US wants to do that. Either you have to take the theory further and say that the whole reason the US wants to dominate the region is for Israel's sake (I don't know why they can't just want to dominate it for their own sake), or you have to ignore all the conflicts the US has gotten involved in in the region that aren't directly related to Israel, brushing them off as coincidence.
Either way, the simplest explanation is that the US is simply a militaristic state hellbent on domination and expansion through conquest, motivated by the same things that have always motivated imperial conquest, from Rome to Britain.
What do people mean by saying the US does whatever Israel wants? Sending them weapons to kill brown kids in Palestine, Lebanon, etc?
That Israel has invested in American politicians and American public opinion for decades. It doesn't absolve the US of its moral failing, but it provides an explanation.
And the US has done the same to other countries. And there are countless billionaires and corporations that influence US politics just as Israel does.
Maybe we should focus more on the general problem of class conflict rather than looking at it in terms of nations. If you got all the Israeli money out of US politics but did nothing about the other corporate money and corruption, it's hard to imagine much would change.
Why do you keep taking people talking about how something is working as them saying it is good and just?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Probably, but given that there are reams of files telling us the sort of things he's done, and nobody does a damn thing about it, you have to ask yourself why would he care?
Likely not. However, if Trump is being blackmailed, it would explain why Vance is leading the Iranian peace negotiations.
What makes you think he's being blackmailed? War is a business, they don't care about people, they are fine with what israel is doing and supporting it, being able to blame someone for it is a bonus point.
Absolutely no doubt about it he is or was being blackmailed to some degree. But now he's acting like he isn't. It's entirely possible that counter intelligence retrieved the blackmail that israel had on trump? Which would be easy to do ~~under the~~ ~~cover~~ with the chaos of iran war.
During the earlier portion of this conflict trump did several off again on again, changing his mind rapidly, kind of things. I find this very indicative of being blackmailed or coerced
Eh, I'd say he was being blackmailed, but its hard to imagine him giving a shit, or being cogent enough to give a shit now.
A) Trump's dementia is well known at this point; his positions literally always align either perfectly with or against the last person he speaks to. Man's brain is soup. His flipflopping on Iran comes down to whether he last spoke with Lindsay Graham, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Benjamin Netanyahu, or JD Vance. Graham walks in, graham walks out, we're at war. Hegseth walks in then out, now we're bombing kids. Rubio walks in then out, now we're open to negotiations (and invading Cuba). Netanyahu, back to bombing kids. Vance, now we're surrendering. Graham again, now we're threatening to kill diplomats.
B) For as soup as he is, I think he gets that no one he cares about gives a shit what he's done. Everyone already knows he's a pedophile, his supporters just don't care enough to grapple with it, and any meaningful opposition isn't capable of or willing to do a damn thing. Honestly I'm surprised he doesn't brag about it at this point.
Honestly I’m surprised he doesn’t brag about it at this point.
He probably insists to his close family that he isn't - none of them would like to think their dad, cousin, husband or uncke was a pedo. Deep denial there. Maybe his son donald junior knows and hence didn't invite him to his wedding.
Also, i think being attracted to minors is embarassing even for a glamour-pedo like Trump. Epstein files indicate they boast to one another, but they can't boast to general society, and on some level will feel bad for not having normal attraction.
Didn't someone have kompromat on him from like 2015 where he was pissing on escorts in a bed Obama slept in at a hotel or some petty, childish shit like that?
It was Putin, and it wasn’t trump pissing on escorts, it was trump ordering underage girls to piss on the bed Obama slept in as he watched. Reportedly, it didn’t stop there.
Trump was staying at a hotel in Moscow, and Putin, being ex-KGB, had cameras everywhere, and he provided the girls. Putin has video of trump raping girls in Moscow.
No, that’s giving Trump too much credit. He’s shown us over and over that he’s interested in personal gain, easily manipulated, and is fine with outright bribery. Blackmail seems like the hard way of getting things done
No. I think he's just the most visible psychopath in the room.
The true horror of Trump is not just the things he's done. Its that everyone now knows what he's done - and seemingly quite a lot of people don't really care.
Blackmailed yes, stupid yes, a pedophile yes, a Russian spy yes.
Looks like israel has compromising material. Also russia. Also that absurd iran deal? Likely they bought intel on him. Probably costed about 300m.
It depends how you use the word, i see it as people being forced to do something they don't want to do, you don't say "I blackmailed you into buying a better product", in same way i don't say "Trump was blackmailed to be corrupt and make a fortune out of market manipulation"
The way blackmailing works is, the blakmailer threatens the blackmailee to reveal their secrets.
Trump's secrets are already out there: he's a convicted rapist and his name appears more than a million times in the unredacted Epstein files - i.e. if he's not a fucking pedo, I'm the King of England. No blackmailer has anything on him that everybody doesn't already know.
So no.
The thing is, there’s no public smoking gun evidence that would put him away for a long time. I think the fact that the unredacted Epstein files haven’t been released means that the evidence does exist, and the oligarchs are using that to manipulate policy. It’s likely policy that Trump himself already wants because he can profit off of it, but I do think there is kompromat out there that is being used.
You don't think there's maybe Israeli or Russian ... or even CIA dossiers on Epstein/Trump, that include say, very explicit and direct photos or videos of Trump doing extremely illegal things to children...
... you know, the kind of things its Kash Patel's job to censor and deny?
Epstein was basically into 'triple agent' territory, where he had so many allegiances and connections that he essentially had to start playing the intel game for himself, as himself.
To me it seems highly likely that much of the information on/around Epstein exists within Mossad, the FSB... they probably have a lot of the same stuff as what the FBI has, but of course, they have their own decision making process for what they would or would not publicize, deny, censor, etc.
If you’re being blackmailed you also need to be worried about the consequences of the information being revealed, like legal consequences.
Trump dgaf about any of that, nobody's prosecuting him for the existing things he’s done.
Do you not realize, that there could be worse things out there of him? Unreleased and unredacted.
Do you think there is anything unknown at this point that'd actually make a difference? Even saying Trump could rape a child live on Fox News wouldn't hurt him is old hat now. I don't buy into the idea that his voter base and staff will magically grow a conscience in response to...anything. The people opposed to him, is there something that gets them to actually organise and do something about the rot? I'm on the outside looking in so idk.
So far he’s shown no sense of shame or even that his victims are people, and his followers don’t seem to care
Yeah, there's a fair chance that he might be a murderer also. That's also out there.
I thought at first that he was likely being blackmailed by Israel - it's near certain that the Israeli government has at least as much evidence of his serial child rape as the US government does.
Mostly based on the way the whole war played out though, I tend more toward a different theory now.
I think Bibi convinced him that overthrowing Iran would be a cake walk - that just like Venezuela, they could go in fast and bomb the shit out of things and get rid of the Ayatollah and take over, and then Trump could get Narges Mohammadi out of prison and she'd be so thankful that she'd give him her Nobel medal, and then he'd be the bestest President ever in the history of ever because he'd have two Nobels (well - technically, he'd only have two Nobel medals, and claiming that he has a Nobel because he has a medal is sort of like claiming he's a Super Bowl champion because he has a ring, but he's too stupid to realize that).
And everything played out just as intended, right up to the point that Iran didn't collapse and instead just calmly set about replacing the Ayatollah and systematically bombing American bases and property all around the Middle East. And he's been desperately flailing around and throwing tantrums ever since, because that wasn't what Bibi promised.
I agree with you but I really wish people would stop calling him 'Bibi'. He's not our buddy, or some boisterous but quirky and lovable uncle figure from reality TV. He's a war criminal responsible for genocide, aided and abetted by other politicians who have been so close to him for so long that they have an affectionate nickname for him.