We have to begin today with an absurdity. It's been that kind of week....

This week, Donald Trump proved once again -- beyond the shadow of a doubt -- that his understanding of basic mathematics would be considered sub-par in any random fifth-grade math class in this country. Most 10-year-olds could spot Trump's glaring error, to put that another way.

Trump was speaking about lowering prescription drug prices when he veered off (as he is wont to do) into total absurdity. Here's how his boastful claim was reported (see if you can spot what is wrong with this statement):

We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000%, by 1,100%, 1,200%, 1,300%, 1,400%, 700%, 600%. Not 30% or 40% or 50%. But numbers likes of which you've never even dreamed of. We're gonna get the drug prices down. Not 30% or 40%, which would be great. Not 50% or 60%. No, we're gonna get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%. Numbers that are not even thought to be achievable.

Um... OK. Sure. Actually, there's a reason why those numbers "are not even thought be achievable." Let's say you have a prescription which normally costs you $50 at your local pharmacy. So let's do the math, shall we? If the price dropped by 500 percent (to take the lowball estimate Trump just gave), then you would pick up your prescription... and then the pharmacy would hand you two hundred dollars. If the price dropped by 1,000 percent, then they'd hand you $450. On the high end, if the price dropped by a whopping 1,500 percent, then you'd walk out of the pharmacy with your pills and a cool $700 in your pocket.

That's how percentages work. One hundred percent is the entire purchase price. Lowering the cost any more than 100 percent would mean they pay you instead of the other way around. So look for this to be yet another entry on the long, long list of unfulfilled Trump promises.

Speaking of unfulfilled Trump promises, we are now officially at the point of open mutiny in the Republican Party, over his continuing refusal to do what he promised when campaigning last year: release all the files from the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein. This issue is just not going away, no matter how much Trump flails around trying to distract everyone from his continuing refusal to do what he promised.

This week, things came to a head. Speaker Mike Johnson was getting jammed by the Democrats' insistence on attaching a bill (which would force Trump to release all the files to the public) to pretty much any piece of legislation that was moving forward. Republicans don't want to have to vote on such a measure because they know they'll lose -- there are enough Republicans in the House who would vote for it, if it ever gets to the floor. So they first just halted the Rules Committee from holding any further votes this week, because being approved by Rules is necessary for any bills heading to the floor. But then the Democrats did a sneaky sort of end-run around this by getting an oversight committee to vote to subpoena all the files anyway. Enough Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats for this to pass. This vote apparently caught Johnson by surprise, as it came at the end of the last day before they all scarpered off for a 5-week vacation -- a deadline Johnson had even moved up by a day in an attempt to prevent any such vote. In the end, it wasn't enough. The House has still not yet held a full vote on the measure to force public withdrawal (that is going to be first thing on their "to do" list when they return in September, however), but at least the Department of Justice will get a subpoena for all the files in the meantime.

It's hard to overstate the gravity of all of this, folks. House Republicans (some of them, at any rate) are now in open mutiny against Donald Trump. What's more, they are defying their Dear Leader because for once his rabid MAGA base is on their side, not Trump's. In fact, three-fourths of Americans now think Trump is in on the cover-up:

A striking 76 percent of voters, including 64 percent of Republicans, said they believe the Justice Department is hiding important information from its findings in the Epstein investigation, according to the survey conducted July 16-20. A 48 percent plurality of voters said they had no confidence in the department's investigation, while an additional 21 percent said they had little confidence. Only 23 percent of voters said they had complete confidence or at least some confidence in the department's investigation.

Those numbers are actually getting worse for Trump by the day, too. Here was another poll from earlier in the week:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Tuesday and Wednesday found 60 percent of Americans think the "government is hiding details about Epstein's death," including 55 percent of Republicans. And 69 percent said the federal government is hiding details about Epstein's clients, including 62 percent of Republicans.

. . .

The Reuters/Ipsos poll found 54 percent of Americans disapproved of how Trump was handling the issue, while just 17 percent approved. Republicans were split on Trump's handling of the issue, with 35 percent approving, 30 percent disapproving and 35 percent unsure or not answering the question.

So it's not like this mutiny just spontaneously happened. It happened because Republican politicians are downright terrified of what their constituents are going to say to them as they return to their home districts for their August break. So terrified that they are now willing to defy Trump -- which has never happened before, at least not in such dramatic and widespread fashion.

These aren't the only scary poll numbers Trump has been getting this week. Gallup just released a new poll showing Trump with only 37 percent job approval (with 58 percent disapproving). Since he took office in his second term, Trump has seen his standing slide among independent voters by a whopping 17 points, down to 29 percent, which matches "his lowest rating with that group in either of his terms." Trump is now only three points above the worst poll he got during his first term, where he only got 34 percent approval after the January 6th insurrection attempt.

The numbers all boil down to one inescapable conclusion: Trump is weak. He is vulnerable. And (for once) Democrats are exploiting his weakness in every way they can think up.

What's also unprecedented about Trump in such dire political straits is that Trump seems to have totally lost his ability to change the subject. His distractions just aren't working. Nothing he's attempted has moved the Epstein files out of the headlines.

If this were any kind of normal week -- and if Trump were any kind of normal president -- then this column today (as well as just about every other political column written this week) would have highlighted the stunning and unprecedented spectacle of a sitting United States president accusing a former U.S. president of treason. Complete with a fake A.I. fantasy video of Barack Obama getting arrested in the Oval Office, even! But even that didn't distract anyone's attention. It was scoffed at and everyone moved on. Here's how one columnist dismissed the impact of Trump's wild claim:

The absurdity of this investigation is underlined, too, by the fact that Mr. [Barack] Obama is almost certainly immune from prosecution -- thanks to Mr. [Donald] Trump and the Supreme Court. In its decision last year in Trump v. United States, the court held that there was a presumption that former presidents could not be prosecuted for any "official" conduct during their time in office. The preparation and dissemination of intelligence findings are certainly official functions of the presidency, and accordingly, they would be off limits as the bases for any criminal charges.

But pointing this out seems almost unfair to Mr. Obama; it suggests that he would escape prosecution only because of the lamentable technicality established by the Supreme Court in the Trump case. The more important reason is simpler: Mr. Obama committed no crime.

Even Trump releasing hundreds of thousands of previously-classified files detailing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was barely even a blip in the news cycle. Trump has finally gotten himself into a scandal so deep that his superpowers of distraction are worthless and impotent. Even South Park made the news this week, by opening their new season by ripping Trump in the most graphic and demeaning fashion imaginable. Trump is left to rage while everyone ignores his commands to please pay attention to something (anything!) else.

But none of it is working. Trump has met his own personal kryptonite. Nothing he tries is working -- he's still losing support from his own MAGA base, as well as MAGA influencers and podcasters.

Being the nature of a conspiracy theory, nobody knows where it will lurch next. Will speculation by Epstein's own brother that the autopsy was part of the cover-up and that his brother was actually murdered become the next bit of headline-bait? Stay tuned! How about the fact that the Department of Justice ordered over 1,000 workers to review 100,000 pages not once, not twice, but four times earlier this year (working round-the-clock 24 hour shifts, no less!) -- will that be the next chapter in the scandal? Will Trump say something even more monumentally swampy protecting the Deep State? Will Trump or the attorney general offer Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon and release her from jail if she'll only testify to Congress that Trump barely knew Epstein? Your guess is as good as ours! What will be next? More doodles? Photos? Videos?

You'll have to forgive us for our rather blatant schadenfreude, but this is the first time Donald Trump has been this vulnerable. It is still way too early to predict it'll wind up being "his downfall," but so far it's certainly doing more damage than anything else that has been thrown at him up until now.

It certainly does seem like poetic justice for Trump to experience this much political fallout from a conspiracy theory that he fanned the flames of. And the best thing about it is that the lion's share of the rage and disappointment is coming from within his own base of voters. So we certainly can hope that this scandal just continues to drag Trump down, throughout the entire August congressional break.

 

There were plenty of Democrats who had plenty to say about the situation with Trump and the Epstein files, but we'll get to a few of them in a moment.

California Governor Gavin Newsom earned at least a Honorable Mention this week for getting a Fox News personality to actually apologize on the air to him. The apology was pretty grudging (it was described as "mealy-mouthed," which seems about right), so much so in fact that Newsom will not be dropping his lawsuit in response. Newsom had filed a $787 million lawsuit against the network, which is coincidentally what they had to pay out to Dominion Voting Systems after spreading lies about them and getting sued. Newsom's response to the non-apology was succinct: "Discovery will be fun. See you in court, buddy."

We also have a Honorable Mention for Representative Summer Lee, who made the motion in the House Oversight Committee to subpoena the Epstein files. This apparently caught everyone by surprise (otherwise Speaker Johnson would have found some way to prevent it from happening, assumably) and it got the support of three Republicans on the committee (including Nancy Mace). Johnson's "kick the can down the road until after the August break" tactics almost worked -- but they were derailed in a big way by this vote, which caused the GOP mutiny to become inescapable for all of August and beyond. That's pretty impressive, we've got to admit!

And we almost gave the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award this week to Roy Cooper, who announced that he will be running for the open Senate seat in North Carolina (due to Thom Tillis retiring). This is the best news possible, since Cooper will have a solid shot at flipping the seat to the Democrats. He served four terms as the state's attorney general and two terms as governor, and represents the best chance for Democrats to swing this purple state into their column next year.

But instead we are going to give the award to a man who is not (to the best of our knowledge) an openly-admitted Democrat. But if you listen to pretty much any of his monologues, it's pretty obvious which way he leans politically. So we decided "close enough" and are giving the MIDOTW award this week to Stephen Colbert.

Last week, Colbert was sadly forced to announce that The Late Show was being cancelled next year. He would be out of a job in ten months, despite being the highest-rated late-night host around. This came mere days after he ripped into the corporate overlords of his own network (CBS, Paramount) for paying a multimillion-dollar "bribe" to the Trump administration to get a big corporate merger approved.

Ever since, support for Colbert has been swelling. This week, hosts of various other late-night shows made cameo appearances in solidarity with Colbert, and he's obviously going to use the whole fracas as a running gag from now until the day he leaves. They're not just giving Colbert the boot, they are planning on just shutting down the show that David Letterman put on the television map, which is the closing of a big chapter in late-night history.

Colbert's got ten months to get his corporate bosses to see the error of their ways. Now that the merger deal has indeed been approved, maybe saner heads will prevail. Months later, when we've all moved on from the Paramount bribery story, perhaps a quiet announcement will be made that The Late Show has been un-cancelled. One can only hope, since Colbert still performs a very valuable service to the American public -- that of a "court jester" who points out the idiocy emanating from the White House on a daily basis.

We need that sort of comic relief at this point. We need corporations not to just do everything Donald Trump demands. So far, Colbert's cancellation has only seemed to make him stronger. We hope this continues until that un-cancellation announcement actually happens. But for now, Stephen Colbert is indeed our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week.

[Congratulate Stephen Colbert via The Late Show's web page (which doesn't have a specific contact page for the show, but does have a generic "contact CBS" link at the bottom), to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

 

This is so disappointing that we are finding it hard to express in words. Perhaps we are prejudging things, since the report is not actually out yet (maybe they'll pleasantly surprise us in the end), but the signs are definitely not good from what leaked to the press this week.

Here's the story:

The Democratic National Committee's examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election is expected to mostly steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups, according to interviews with six people briefed on the report's progress.

The audit, which the committee is calling an "after-action review," is expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him, according to the people briefed on the process so far.

Nor is the review expected to revisit key decisions by the Harris campaign -- like framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism, and refraining from hitting back after an ad by Donald J. Trump memorably attacked Ms. Harris on transgender rights by suggesting that she was for "they/them" while Mr. Trump was "for you" -- that have roiled Democrats in the months since Mr. Trump took back the White House.

Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign -- which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.

We find that we cannot improve on that last snarky line.

Later, the article contains one of the most jaw-dropping head-in-the-sand statements we think we've ever heard, from Jane Kleeb, the head of the association of state party chairs: "We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives. We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward." Translation: "We are going to ignore the 800-pound-gorilla-in-the-room problem completely, meaning any fixes we come up with will be laughably inadequate." The focus of the report is going to be "more on outside groups and super PACs" than the actual campaign teams.

As we said, we are left without words to adequately describe such short-sightedness. "Let's put these deck chairs over here, then the Titanic will surely not sink," is about the best we can do, at this point.

Supposedly there will be two other autopsy attempts (from groups outside the party structure) which may actually take a look at the main problem, but both of those "are not expected to be made public."

Sigh.

In any case, it was a pretty easy call this week to hand the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award to all those who were instrumental in the decision to limit the 2024 campaign autopsy report from the Democratic National Committee to only point fingers at outside groups instead of tackling the real problems within the party, the party structure, the party establishment, and the campaign teams which fell woefully short in last year's election.

Words fail us.

[Contact the Democratic National Committee on its official contact page, to let them all know what you think of their actions.]

 

Volume 805 (7/25/25)

Last weekend, Trump passed the six-month mark in his second term. This is a fairly grim thing to say, but: "One down, only seven more to go!" We are only one-eighth of the way through this nightmare, folks.

Since that was so grim, here's something to cheer everyone up. Fortunately, in all of this, we don't have to reinvent the wheel, since "Fan The Flames Of The Conspiracy Theory" is a game that is pretty easy to play. In fact, Fox News made it into their business model decades ago, so we're just going to follow in the "just asking questions" footsteps of people like Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson here (two of the undeniable masters of this particular game). It's easy to play, folks! You can join in and play at home, even!

 

   What is Trump hiding?

Start with the generic, and then get more and more specific.

"What is Trump hiding? What is in the Epstein files that he doesn't want Americans to see? Whatever it is, it must be pretty incriminating stuff, since we already know Trump and Epstein were the bestest of buddies for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain knew Trump's name was going to be all over the Epstein files -- so what else is in there that he is hiding? Boy, it must be pretty explosive, whatever it is! Trump is now leading the cover-up, folks. He promised everyone he'd release the files and now suddenly he isn't going to. So what is in those files that Trump desperately wants to stay hidden? The American people deserve to know!"

 

   Drip, drip, drip...

It's the scandal that just won't go away....

"As more time goes on, more revelations seem to appear on a daily basis. There is a drip, drip, drip of facts and photos and videos showing what great friends Trump and Epstein were, back in the day. But each one of these isn't the final shoe to drop, because this is only going to continue. Trump can continue to cover up the Epstein files, but he can't cover up his very public relationship with Epstein. He can bribe Ghislaine Maxwell with a literal "Get Out Of Jail Free" card to get her to say anything under the sun, but nobody's going to believe that will be the end of it. Since she's serving a 20-year prison term, it's pretty obvious she'll say the sky is green and the sun rises in the west if that's what Trump wants her to say. But she wasn't the only one -- not by far -- who witnessed Trump and Epstein's friendship back then. And as time goes on, more and more of it keeps coming out. Drip... drip... drip...."

 

   Billionaire buddies

Playing this game is easy, as those Fox News hosts have shown us all over the years, since all you have to do is frame everything as: "I'm just asking questions...."

"Which of his billionaire buddies is Trump protecting? Maybe that's his problem -- we already know Trump's in the files, but who else is in there that Trump doesn't want the public to know about? It could be any number of Trump's buddies, really, when you think about it...."

 

   He was president...

Which leads us in to a few choice Democratic talking points from the week. Democrats (as we wrote about earlier this week) are doing a pretty good job of tying the Epstein scandal to what they had expected to be using as their main attack lines against Republicans all summer long. Here are just a few examples, the first one from Senator Amy Klobuchar, getting a good zing in and then pointing out the facts of the timeline (which tend to get lost in the fray at times):

The president blaming Democrats for this disaster... is like that C.E.O. that got caught on camera blaming Coldplay.... OK, like this is [Donald Trump's] making. He was president when Epstein got indicted for these charges and went to prison. He was president when Epstein committed suicide.

 

   Protecting even the pedophiles

This next one is from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who always has a way with words:

The reality is that it's all connected from the standpoint of Donald Trump. His administration and House Republicans have delivered nothing more than a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. It's reasonable to conclude that Republicans are continuing to protect the lifestyles of the rich and shameless, even if that includes pedophiles.

 

   Just like what they did with Medicaid

This next one is from a Democrat running for a House seat in New York, Alissa Ellman. It was the best Democratic quote which wove the Medicaid cuts in the Republican budget into the mix.

Republicans are shutting down Congress to hide what's in the Epstein files. This is part of a clear pattern of doing the bidding of billionaires while screwing over the American people. Just like when Republicans pledged to protect Medicaid, then slashed it, they are doing the bidding of [the] rich and powerful while breaking their promises to Americans.

 

   Have fun, guys!

And this one is just to twist the knife.

"Are there any Republican members of Congress left who are still brave enough to face their own voters? We're soon going to see... To all the Republicans in Congress who are headed back home for five weeks, Democrats would certainly love to see you answer some questions from the MAGA base in your district. So as we wave goodbye to them for now, we'd just like to say to all of them: 'Have fun at your town hall meetings, guys! See you in September!'"

-- Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground