A DISGUSTING PAIR OF LIARS

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Inside the Well-Funded, Likely Doomed Plan to Stop Mamdani

 

Inside the Well-Funded, Likely Doomed Plan to Stop Mamdani

 

Someone has to fold.

 

By David Freedlander, a features writer covering New York and national politics

July 12, 2025

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Photo-Illustration: Joe Darrow; Photos: Getty Images

Before launching in early July what he promised would be an all-out effort, one he would see “through the end, to the final day,” to keep Zohran Mamdani from winning the mayor’s office, Republican political megadonor John Catsimatidis had a phone call with the Democratic nominee himself.

“I said to him, ‘Look, you’re a very nice guy and, you know, a very smart guy,’” the 76-year-old billionaire owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain told me. “And he says to me, ‘Oh, when you get to know me, you might like me.’” Catsimatidis had called me from D.C., where he was attending the Senate confirmation hearing for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s nomination as ambassador to his beloved Greece. “I try to be a very civilized person. I’ve hired company executives for 40, 50 years, and, you know, he’s a nice kid, but he’s 33 years old. He’s not qualified. He’s a great debater and a great orator, but can he run the city?”

The fear that he cannot is shared by Establishment politicians, financiers, and real-estate developers, among others. It’s true that Mamdani would be the youngest mayor in a century. Most political and business elites are at best uncomfortable with the idea of turning the city’s reins over to a democratic socialist whose leadership experience, prior to a scant three terms in the State Assembly, consists of co-founding the Bowdoin branch of Students for Justice in Palestine. The greater fear, however, may be that Mamdani could succeed in running the city how he’s promised, which, in the eyes of the oligarchs, would mean letting criminals run as free as the buses, welcoming in terrorists, and garnishing Wall Street Christmas bonuses to fund collectivized farming.

On Monday, July 7, these concerns led Catsimatidis, the self-anointed mastermind of the movement to stop Mamdani, to summon a squad of would-be Municipal Avengers for a midtown press conference. It was a bit of a broken-wing crew, consisting of former governor David Paterson, who left office 15 years ago and whose tenure was mired in controversy; the shock jock Sid Rosenberg, who spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally; and Richard Weinberg, a character basically unknown to the city’s political class who was once chief counsel to Peter Vallone, former City Council Speaker.

The plan? To do nothing, they said. For now, at least. They aim to wait until September, see who among Mamdani’s competitors in the general election is polling the highest, and coalesce around that person — whether that’s Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani by 12 points in the Democratic primary; Eric Adams, the incumbent, who currently has an eye-watering negative-34 approval rating; or Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee and Guardian Angels founder who lost the 2021 mayoral election to Adams by nearly 40 points. The scheme, such as it is, was concocted by Jim Walden, a wealthy attorney who is also running for mayor and currently sits in fifth place, polling at one percent.

The strategy almost makes sense. While current polls show Mamdani leading the field, they also show him carrying only 35 percent of the vote. Get two of his three top opponents to drop out for the good of the city, and the non-Mamdani electorate would stave off the red menace.

But in a city of 8.5 million, it is hard to find three people less likely to take one for the team than Sliwa, Adams, and Cuomo. All three have been civic figures since at least the 1980s. Each one views the prize of City Hall as some combination of their rightful due and a chance at redemption.

“What do all three of these people have in common?” said one political operative who has worked with each. “They are all egomaniacal sociopaths. And to imagine that any of them would step down for the so-called greater good is to pretend that they are three completely different people.”

It’s hard to imagine a sharper contrast than that between Mamdani and the team laying out their plan to impede him: Since the primary, he had been blitzing the town, speaking directly to New York’s teachers union, to community groups, to hotel workers. Meanwhile the city fathers were standing athwart the choice of Democratic voters, yelling “stop.”

In the weeks since Mamdani’s shocking win, Adams, Sliwa, and Cuomo have in fact been ferociously attacking one another, vying for the lead position in taking on the young lefty. The argument in Sliwa’s favor is that he, unlike Adams and Cuomo, actually won a primary this year (in an unopposed race). For Cuomo, it’s that the polls show him the closest on Mamdani’s heels (this is why his camp tacitly supports the Catsimatidis plan). Adams is currently in fourth place, behind even Sliwa, but to his campaign chair, Frank Carone, the sitting mayor is the only plausible option: “It’s really the height of arrogance to ask the second Black mayor, who has a record of success, to do a poll and then somehow ask him to move out of the way to somebody who just lost in a convincing fashion.”

While the stop-Mamdani effort may be doomed, the city’s elite — many of whom have until now been blissfully unaware of the folkways of local politics — are preparing to pour cash into the fight. In recent days, political operatives have described a feeding frenzy among colleagues racing to get a cut of the new dumb money. Most of the more established, knowledgeable players, however, are keeping their distance, believing that the overall probabilities favor Mamdani and figuring that it’s better to be on the side of the likely new mayor than a scrum of misguided, discontented billionaires.

“I would just say that a lot of these guys are really feeling their feelings right now,” said one operative who advises big-money donors. “They are showing up late to this and are unaware of the expertise they don’t have, and they are not behaving rationally.”

Billionaire financier Bill Ackman may be one example. After the primary, Ackman originally promised on X to fund a “charismatic, intelligent, articulate, handsome, charming, young yet more experienced” centrist as a write-in candidate. According to one person familiar with the machinations, he was referring to Congressman Ritchie Torres, who was not interested. In a comment, Torres’s director of communications said, “There is no universe in which the Congressman would ever consider a write-in campaign for Mayor,” adding that “Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination fair and square.” Ackman has now pledged support for Adams.

“I really don’t understand it,” said another operative. “Here you have all of these guys who are worried about what Mamdani would mean for their bottom lines and their business, but they are also just willing to light money on fire.”

In September, if the non-Mamdani candidates decide they want to fall in line for the Catsimatidis plan, redirecting votes won’t necessarily be easy. Thanks to New York’s arcane laws, there are only a few ways that a candidate can be removed from the ballot at such a late date, including if they die or move out of state. Since the first is harmful to one’s future political prospects, operatives say that financiers should consider finding cushy jobs for candidates somewhere in Connecticut or New Jersey.

For now, a $25 million Cuomo super-PAC is considering retooling to focus on bringing moderates to the polls. Unification remains theoretical. But if there is anyone who can make it happen, it is probably Catsimatidis, who among his other holdings owns the radio station 77 WABC, where Sliwa hosts a show. He’s also close to Adams, and he may have incentives to dangle for Cuomo: The megadonor said he supported the idea of a Cuomo presidential bid. He additionally has Trump’s ear, which could certainly come in handy. (The president praised him during his most recent Cabinet meeting, referring to him as “a great guy, a rich guy,” who was concerned “his stores are going to be taken from him” under Mamdani’s plan for city-owned groceries.)

When we spoke, Catsimatidis was vague about how all this would play out. “What’s the name of that song? ‘See You in September,’” he said. “Something will happen. Hey, God saved America.” He was referring to Trump surviving assassination attempts and winning reelection. “We saved the free world. Now we have to save New York.”

 

Inside the Long Friendship Between Trump and Epstein

 

Inside the Long Friendship Between Trump and Epstein

For nearly 15 years, the two men socialized together in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla., before a falling out that preceded Mr. Epstein’s first arrest.

 

By Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein

• July 19, 2025

In the swirl of money and sun-tanned women that was their Palm Beach-and-Manhattan set, Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein spent nearly 15 years mingling side-by-side as public friends.

There were lavish dinners with boldface names at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on the Upper East Side and raucous parties with cheerleaders and models at Mr. Trump’s private club and residence at Mar-a-Lago. In between, there were trips back and forth from Florida to New York on one of Mr. Epstein’s private jets.

But behind the tabloid glamour, questions have lingered about what Mr. Trump’s long association with Mr. Epstein says about his judgment and character, especially as his allies have stoked sinister claims about Mr. Epstein’s connections to Democrats. After their relationship ruptured, the disgraced financier ended up behind bars not just once, but two times, after being accused of engaging in sex with teenage girls.

One of the young women who later said Mr. Epstein groomed and abused her was recruited into his world while working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago. Another accuser recalled being eyed by Mr. Trump during a brief encounter in Mr. Epstein’s office, and claimed that Mr. Epstein had told Mr. Trump at the time that “she’s not for you.”

Another woman has said that Mr. Trump groped her when Mr. Epstein brought her to Trump Tower in Manhattan to meet him. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Epstein a note for his 50th birthday in 2003 that included a sketch of a naked woman and a cryptic reference to a “secret” the two men shared. Mr. Trump has denied writing the message and filed a libel lawsuit on Friday challenging the story. The New York Times has not verified the Journal report.

Mr. Trump has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the Epstein case, and has said he had “no idea” that Mr. Epstein was abusing young women. In response to a request for comment about the president’s history with Mr. Epstein, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Trump had barred Mr. Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club “for being a creep.”

“These stories are tired and pathetic attempts to distract from all the success of President Trump’s administration,” she said in a statement.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein largely went separate ways after a falling-out around 2004, taking drastically different paths — one toward jail and suicide, the other toward further celebrity and the White House.

 

As criticism of the handling of Mr. Epstein’s case mounted over the years, some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies promoted theories that the government had covered up the extent of his network to protect what they have described as a cabal of powerful men and celebrities, largely Democrats.

Now, that story has entangled Mr. Trump himself in what amounts to one of the biggest controversies in his second White House stint. The conflict has come primarily from his own appointees, who, after months of promoting interest in the files, abruptly changed course and said that there was no secret Epstein client list and backed the official finding that Mr. Epstein had killed himself.

Still, under mounting pressure from his own supporters to release the government’s files on Mr. Epstein, the president this week ordered the Justice Department to seek the unsealing of grand jury testimony in the criminal case brought against Mr. Epstein in 2019 and one year later against his longtime partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence on a sex-trafficking conviction. She has asked the Supreme Court to consider her appeal.

Even if they are released, the transcripts are unlikely to shed much light on the relationship between the two men, which did not figure prominently in either criminal case. What seemed to draw them together, according to those who knew them at the time, was a common interest in hitting on — and competing for — attractive young women at parties, nightclubs and other private events.

Palm Beach Neighbors

Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein appear to have met around 1990, when Mr. Epstein bought a property two miles north of Mar-a-Lago and set about staking a claim in Palm Beach’s moneyed, salt-air social scene. Mr. Trump, who had purchased Mar-a-Lago five years earlier, had already established his own brash presence in the seaside enclave as a playboy with a taste for gold-leaf finery.

 

The two had much in common. Both were outer-borough New Yorkers who had succeeded in Manhattan. Both were energetic self-promoters. And both had reputations as showy men-about-town.

 

Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in 1997.Credit...Davidoff Studios Photography/Archive Photos, via Getty Images

In 1992, an NBC News camera captured the pair at a Mar-a-Lago party that featured cheerleaders from the Buffalo Bills, who were in town that weekend for a game against the Miami Dolphins. At one point in the footage, Mr. Trump can be seen dancing amid a crowd of young women. Later, he appears to be pointing at other women while whispering something in Mr. Epstein’s ear, causing him to double over with laughter.

Months later, when Mr. Trump hosted a party at Mar-a-Lago for young women in a so-called calendar girl competition, Mr. Epstein was the only other guest, according to George Houraney, a Florida-based businessman who arranged the event. Mr. Houraney recalled being surprised that Mr. Epstein was the only other person on the guest list.

“I said, ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with V.I.P.s,” Mr. Houraney told The New York Times in 2019. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”

Mr. Houraney’s then-girlfriend and business partner, Jill Harth, later accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct on the night of the party. In a lawsuit, Ms. Harth said that Mr. Trump took her into a bedroom and forcibly kissed and fondled her, and restrained her from leaving. She also said that a 22-year-old contestant told her that Mr. Trump later that night crawled into her bed uninvited.

Ms. Harth dropped her suit in 1997 after a related case filed by Mr. Houraney was settled by Mr. Trump, who has denied her allegations.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were spotted again at a 1997 Victoria’s Secret “Angels” party in Manhattan. The lingerie company was run by Leslie H. Wexner, a billionaire businessman who handed Mr. Epstein sweeping power over his finances, philanthropy and private life within years of meeting him.

 

Court records show that Mr. Trump was among those who got rides on Mr. Epstein’s private jet. Over four years in the 1990s, he flew on Mr. Epstein’s Boeing 727 at least seven times, largely making jaunts between Palm Beach and a private airport in Teterboro, N.J., just outside New York.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Mr. Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

An Encounter at Mar-a-Lago

In 2000, court records show, Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite who had long been tied to Mr. Epstein, struck up a conversation with a 17-year-old girl outside a locker room at Mar-a-Lago.

Her name was Virginia Giuffre, and she was a spa attendant at the club, having gotten the job through her father, who worked there as a maintenance man. According to Ms. Giuffre, Ms. Maxwell offered her a job on the spot as a masseuse for Mr. Epstein after seeing that she was reading a book about massage, telling her that she did not need to have any experience.

She said that when she was brought to Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home, she found him lying naked on a table. Ms. Maxwell, she claimed, instructed her on how to massage him.

“They seemed like nice people,” she later testified, “so I trusted them.”

But over the next two years or so, Ms. Giuffre claimed that she was forced by Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell to have sex with a series of famous men, including Prince Andrew, a member of the British royal family. Prince Andrew has denied the accusations and declined to help federal prosecutors in their investigation of Mr. Epstein.

 

Ms. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, always maintained that she was trafficked to the prince and other men, once telling the BBC that she had been “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s powerful associates.

Some women who were in Mr. Epstein’s orbit have said they encountered Mr. Trump during this period.

One woman, Maria Farmer, who has said she was victimized by Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, described an encounter with Mr. Trump in 1995 at an office that Mr. Epstein once kept in New York City.

An art student who had moved to New York City to pursue a career as a painter, Ms. Farmer recalled in a 2019 interview that when she was introduced to Mr. Trump, he eyed her, prompting Mr. Epstein to warn him, “She’s not for you.”

Ms. Farmer’s mother, Janice Swain, said her daughter had described the interaction with Mr. Trump around the time it occurred.

Stacey Williams, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, has said she was groped by Mr. Trump when she was introduced to him by Mr. Epstein, whom she was dating at the time.

It was 1993, she said, and she was on a walk with Mr. Epstein on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, when he suggested that they pop into Trump Tower to say hello to Mr. Trump. Ms. Williams thought nothing of it at the time because, as she later put it, “Jeffrey talked about Trump all the time.”

After Mr. Trump greeted them in a waiting area outside his office, Ms. Williams said, he pulled her toward him, touching her breasts, waist and buttocks as though he was “an octopus.”

She said she later wondered whether she had been part of a challenge or wager between the two men. “I definitely felt like I was a piece of meat delivered to that office as some sort of game,” she recalled to The Times last year. At the time, Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign denied that the incident had occurred, calling the allegations “unequivocally false” and politically motivated.

In an interview Friday, Ms. Williams said she was upset to hear Mr. Trump referring to some of the Epstein story as a “hoax” and “boring” news. “I mean, it’s absurd,” she said of him speaking dismissively of the case.

The Break

Eventually, in late 2004, Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein ended up squaring off — this time, over a piece of real estate. It was the Maison de l’Amitié, a French Regency-style manse that sat along the ocean in Palm Beach.

The two hypercompetitive men each had their lawyers bid on the property. Ultimately, Mr. Trump came out ahead, purchasing it for $41.35 million.

There is little public record of the two men interacting after that.

Mr. Trump later told associates he had another reason for breaking from Mr. Epstein around that time: His longtime friend, he has said, acted inappropriately to the daughter of a member of Mar-a-Lago, and Mr. Trump felt compelled to bar him from the club. Brad Edwards, a lawyer who has represented many of Mr. Epstein’s victims, said Mr. Trump told him a similar story in 2009.

Not long after the standoff over the beachfront mansion, the Palm Beach police received a tip that young women had been seen going in and out of Mr. Epstein’s home.

Four months later, there was a more substantial complaint from a woman who claimed that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been paid $300 by Mr. Epstein to give him a massage while she was undressed. That led to a sprawling undercover investigation that identified at least a dozen potential victims.

Mr. Epstein hired a team of top lawyers to defend him — among them, Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who would later represent Mr. Trump, and Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

The two men helped negotiate a lenient plea deal with R. Alexander Acosta, who was then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Under the deal, Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution. In exchange, he was granted immunity from federal charges, as were all of his potential co-conspirators. He also had to register as a sex offender.

In the end, Mr. Epstein wound up serving almost 13 months in jail before he was released.

For his part, Mr. Trump largely steered clear of the controversy. But in February 2015, as he was gearing up for what would end up being a hard-fought campaign against Hillary Clinton, he sought to connect Mr. Epstein to her husband, the former president.

Mr. Clinton has “got a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein,” Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, referring to Mr. Epstein’s private island where he resided and allegedly trafficked underage girls. “A lot of problems.”

Mr. Clinton has denied visiting the island or having any knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s criminal behavior, and has said he wishes he had never met him.

‘I Wasn’t a Fan’

In July 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested again. Prosecutors from the public corruption unit of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan charged him with sex trafficking and a conspiracy to traffic minors for sex.

Mr. Trump, then in his third year in the White House, immediately sought to distance himself from his old friend.

“I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Mr. Trump told reporters after the charges were revealed. “I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him in 15 years. I wasn’t a fan.”

The new charges brought renewed scrutiny to the original plea deal. Days after Mr. Epstein’s arrest, Mr. Acosta, who had become Mr. Trump’s labor secretary, announced he would resign amid criticism of his handling of the case.

Speaking to reporters about Mr. Acosta’s decision, Mr. Trump reiterated that he had broken off his ties with Mr. Epstein “many, many years ago.” He added: “It shows you one thing: that I have good taste.”

When asked if he had any suspicions that Mr. Epstein was molesting young women, Mr. Trump replied, “No, I had no idea.”

The next month, after Mr. Epstein was suddenly found dead in his jail cell in Manhattan in what was later ruled a suicide, Mr. Trump weighed in again, reviving what was by then a years-old effort from his first campaign. He shared a social media post that attempted to link the death to Mr. Clinton.

Days later, when pressed about his unfounded claims of Mr. Clinton’s involvement, Mr. Trump did not let up, calling for a full investigation, even though he offered no facts to support his allegations.

“Epstein had an island that was not a good place, as I understand it,” he said. “And I was never there. So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island?”

When Mr. Trump was asked about the arrest of Ms. Maxwell in the summer of 2020 on charges that included the enticement and trafficking of children, his answer left some of his own allies confused.

“I wish her well, whatever it is,” Mr. Trump said.

In recent weeks, right-wing influencers and Mr. Trump’s rank-and-file supporters expressed outrage over his administration’s conclusion that there were no revelations to share about the case — not least because some of the president’s top law enforcement officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, had promised to reveal more information about Mr. Epstein’s crimes.

Mr. Trump sought to quiet the demands, calling the Epstein scandal a “hoax” made up by his Democratic adversaries. He also described it as a subject unworthy of further scrutiny.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Mr. Trump asked reporters with exasperation at a cabinet meeting on July 8. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFFREY - LOVE, YOUR FRIEND DONALD

 

Trump Caught in His Own Trap

 

Trump Caught in His Own Trap

By Mona Charen

July 18, 2025  6 min read

 

A new poll, on a matter that adamantly should not be decided by untutored public opinion, finds that 79% of Americans believe all of the documents relating to the Epstein case should be disclosed. A shocking result? Not quite. Ask Americans, who've been hearing wall-to-wall accusations about secret sex abuse cabals, celebrity client lists and government cover-ups whether they want to know the full story and — whaddaya know — they say yes.

They're wrong, and I'll come back to that. But first, there is someone who is less enthusiastic about disclosing all available records, and that person is President Donald Trump. Asked last April whether he would release whatever information the government has about a number of A-list conspiracy theories, Trump was unequivocal ... until it came to Epstein.

Q: Would you declassify the JFK files?

A: Yeah. I did a lot of it.

Q: Would you declassify the 9/11 files?

A: Yes.

Q: Would you declassify the Epstein files?

A: Yeah, yeah, I would.

Q: All right.

A: I guess I would. I think that less so because you don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least —

Q: You think that would restore trust, help restore trust?

A: I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others, certainly about the way he died. ... But I'd go a long way toward that one. ...

On the matter of releasing the results of investigations, the man is right.

There's a reason we have a tradition in this country (formerly a nation of laws) that strongly discourages the government from releasing the results of investigations that do not result in a criminal charge — precisely because these investigations unearth unsubstantiated gossip, bad faith accusations and other potentially damaging information — and if there is no criminal procedure, the citizen will be denied an opportunity to rebut the charges. So Trump is correct that a responsible government should tread carefully before releasing the results of criminal investigations or other inquiries, taking care to redact names or other identifying information about innocent people.

Now let's come back to the world we actually inhabit. That's not Trump's motivation. Trump has done more than anyone to demolish the laws, traditions and basic decency that should govern in these matters. He has himself spewed the kind of incendiary accusations about people (of treason, of vote stealing, even of murder) that undermine faith in the system. Even on the topic of Epstein, Trump was happy to pile on with MAGA forces in stoking suspicion. In 2019, he retweeted a post suggesting that Bill Clinton might have been involved with Epstein. Asked to elaborate, he resorted to the "just asking questions" dodge: "So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island? That's the question. If you find that out, you're going to know a lot."

He and the forces he unleashed have destroyed the norms and rules that protect innocent people from unjust accusations and flagrant incitement. He cannot hide behind those destroyed norms now. They're gone. MAGA influencers have stoked the Epstein conspiracy theories and countless other lies and calumnies with Trump's blessing for years. In 2023, Kash Patel confidently explained why the Biden administration hadn't released the Epstein files: "Simple, because of who's on that list." Talk show host Dan Bongino, now deputy director of the FBI, repeatedly demanded to know "what the hell they were hiding."

Epstein was an adjudicated pedophile. But that was just the springboard to suggest a far more comprehensive corruption deforming elites in America. MAGA foot soldiers like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Benny Johnson piled on, encouraging their audiences to believe that Jeffrey Epstein was a deep state operative who ran a pedophile ring that serviced every liberal or Democrat MAGA despised.

Trump has never shown anything like concern for the innocent — just the opposite. If the innocent are in his way, he will mow them down without a backward glance. If you're a law-abiding, legal immigrant unjustly detained or even deported to a foreign prison by ICE, don't expect this president to pause for a moment. If you are a legal permanent resident wrongfully detained by immigration authorities for exercising your First Amendment right to speak, don't turn to this president for relief. If you've been defamed or targeted or even had a violent mob sent after you shouting "Hang Mike Pence," don't expect concern for your innocence to cross Trump's mind.

No, the only person whose privacy and reputation Trump has any concern about is Trump. And that's why his uncharacteristic reticence about releasing the Epstein files is suspicious. He was happy to encourage the most reckless speculation about a deep state pedophile conspiracy while he was running for office, but now that the worm has turned, he's suddenly concerned about "innocent" people being hurt. It is impossible to imagine that his reticence arises from anything other than self-interest. He seems to be running scared.

It's poetic justice.