The Friday Brief, July 18, 2025

Trump Panics Over WSJ Leak. It's Going To Get Worse!

Inside:

WH and MAGA Panic Over WSJ Epstein Leak
Trump’s Approval Ratings: Ouch
Jerome Powell and Trump’s Memory
Bondi Fires Epstein Prosecutor
Emil Bove for SCOTUS?
Putin Won’t Quit: He Must Be Defeated
China Is Getting Better At Everything
China Keeps Dropping New AI Models
Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism, Part 6,722,892

The Big Picture

Is Trump Dying? In Every Way That Matters, Absolutely.

Of course Donald Trump is dying. In fact, we all are, technically speaking, slogging onward toward our inevitable appointments with the undertaker. The actuarial tables, grim and humorless things, have held a solid 100 percent accuracy rating since humanity first tallied our mortal scorecards.

Unless the tech bros of Silicon Valley have quietly cracked immortality in some subterranean bio-hacking lab beneath Palo Alto - and if they have, God help us all, because an immortal Peter Thiel is the last thing we need - Trump is no exception to the universal rule. But this particular question, when posed today, carries implications far richer and stranger than the mere physical breakdown of an obese septuagenarian gutsack who treats exercise like vampires treat sunlight.

Trump is dying this week, all right, but not merely in the banal, biological sense. He’s dying in that uniquely Trumpian way, with spectacular explosions of flame, betrayal, scandal, and rage. He's dying politically, spiritually, psychologically, and perhaps neurologically, too. And, true to form, he's going down kicking, screaming, and bleeding orange foundation onto the White House carpets.

Politically speaking, Trump’s iron grip over the party he seized in a fit of populist fever back in 2015 cracked this past week in ways previously thought impossible. For those of us hardened veterans of the Never Trump wars, those weary souls who lived through the hundreds of premature declarations that “this will finally end Trump” in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, and, well, you get the idea, skepticism comes naturally. We've grown accustomed to watching Trump’s voters gaze upon the charred wreckage of their illusions, shrug, and ask politely for more gasoline.

Yet something profound shifted with this Epstein fiasco. The Epstein affair landed like a hand grenade in the middle of Trump’s MAGA picnic, scattering the faithful, burning the drapes, and utterly ruining dessert. For nearly a decade, the Jeffrey Epstein files have achieved a kind of mystical, holy-grail status within Trump’s political base.

His allies built their grift on tantalizing hints about dark conspiracies, whispered secrets, and imagined perversions of every liberal figure they despised. Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, a dark sorceress in the bowels of Comet Pizza. Joe Biden was an irredeemable deviant, Barack Obama surely must've been in there somewhere, the villainous rogues’ gallery was complete and ready-made, and Trump voters lapped up every drop of conspiratorial nonsense like starving raccoons in a roadside trash bin.

But then, suddenly, the files are no longer safely hypothetical.

The Epstein revelations landed in Trump’s backyard, a radioactive payload of awful truths threatening to incinerate Trump’s carefully curated narrative of victimhood. Trump's desperate cries of “hoax” and “Democrat plot” fall flat, a symphony of pathetic excuses losing their audience mid-performance. Trump supporters (the same tribe that proudly chanted “Lock her up!” at every gathering from arena rallies to casual Sunday church services for a decade) find themselves forced into the painful awareness that their orange savior might be more of a villainous amusement park manager, whose Scooby-Doo mask is finally ripped off to reveal the predictable face of a small-time crook.

Admit it: there’s something undeniably pleasurable, something deliciously ironic, in watching MAGA-world implode under the weight of reality. Even their dopamine-addled, Facebook-poisoned neurons sense that Trump’s absurd denials ring hollow. You can almost see the gears turning, slowly and painfully, in their small, fevered minds: "Wait...have we been had?"

Yes, folks, you have. Trump has played you as surely as a Times Square hustler working the three-card Monte table. And now you're left holding a losing hand, wondering where your wallet went.

Then came Trump’s health diversion, a transparent attempt to distract the nation with a new shiny object…or rather, a swollen, bruised, and frankly disturbing object. The physical evidence has been obvious to anyone with working eyeballs: Trump’s legs look as though someone inflated them with a bicycle pump, his ankles swollen grotesquely with edema.

His tiny hands - those infamous lemur paws - show alarming bruises and crusty sores usually reserved for medieval plague victims or late-stage Bourbon kings. The official