Bananas, Beef, and Bond Villains

Trump lowers tariffs, raises suspicion, and blames everyone but himself as the Epstein walls close in.

Good morning! It’s not every day that the American judiciary, the academic world, and basic decency all link arms to tell Donald Trump and his cabinet of cosplay autocrats to go pound sand, but here we are. A California federal judge just delivered what may be the week’s most satisfying act of resistance: U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ruled that Trump’s $1.2 billion shakedown of the University of California wasn’t just unconstitutional, it was “coercive and retaliatory.”

Trump had demanded that UCLA sign a “settlement” that would have forced the campus to muzzle protests, limit diversity admissions, and ban gender-affirming care at its medical center, all while hiring a bureaucratic hall monitor to ensure ideological purity. When UCLA refused, Trump froze half a billion dollars in science and health grants, proving once again that he views federal funding the same way mobsters view protection money. Lin wasn’t having it. Her injunction halts the extortion racket across the entire UC system and reaffirms a quaint little concept once known as academic freedom.

But don’t expect introspection from the regime that long ago replaced governance with grievance. While Judge Lin was busy defending the Constitution, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was busy defending her camera angles. ProPublica revealed that the self-styled cowgirl of Mount Rushmore fame secretly funneled part of a $220 million “border emergency” ad campaign to a Republican firm owned by the husband of her top DHS spokesperson. The firm, The Strategy Group, was quietly tucked behind a Delaware shell company called “Safe America Media,” created just days before the no-bid contract was signed.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Noem pulled the same stunt as South Dakota governor, when her office awarded the same firm $8.5 million in state funds to film her dressed as a plumber, a nurse, and, my personal favorite, a dentist. One can only imagine the OSHA violations involved. Now she’s running the same grift with a federal budget, posing in chaps on horseback while 50,000 TSA workers go unpaid during a shutdown. Pure political theater, but with better lighting. DHS insists all contracting was done “by the book,” though the book in question appears to be The Grifter’s Guide to the Galaxy.

And then there’s the emperor himself, melting down in public again. On Friday, Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of social-media rants declaring that everything related to Jeffrey Epstein is a “Democrat hoax,” while simultaneously ordering Pam Bondi and the DOJ to “launch an investigation” into Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and JPMorgan. You almost have to admire the commitment to inversion, because, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Trump’s name appears in more than half of Epstein’s 2,324 recovered email threads. The cache, released by Congress this week, shows Trump mentioned repeatedly between 2008 and 2019, often by Epstein himself, who obsessed over Trump’s political rise, shared articles about his presidency, and gossiped with associates about their mutual past in Palm Beach. Epstein even swapped notes with reporters and power brokers about Trump’s legal troubles, proving the fascination was mutual.

Epstein’s correspondence paints a grim tableau of the elite boys’ club: former Harvard president Larry Summers bantering about women, ex–Obama counsel Kathryn Ruemmler exchanging notes about Trump’s antics into 2019, and Epstein’s circle trading gossip like it was currency. Yet only one man, whose name dominates the archive, has spent the past week furiously insisting he was never part of the story. As the Journal put it with clinical precision: Trump’s name appeared in more than half the messages. That’s quite a footprint.

Some intelligence analysts have long suspected that Epstein’s lavish network functioned as a black-mail pipeline, and that Russia may have benefited from whatever he collected on Trump and others. No hard evidence has surfaced, but it would certainly explain the strange pattern of Trump’s servility toward Putin, the red-carpet treatment, the praise, the policy giveaways that always seem to run one way.

Naturally, Trump’s response is to blame the Clintons. It’s giving O.J. Simpson is out looking for the real killer energy. The same man who once praised Epstein for “liking women on the younger side” is now pretending he’s the hero investigator. Among the released messages, Epstein’s own brother reportedly warned friends, “Keep your daughter away from this guy.” When Jeffrey Epstein thinks you’re the creep in the room, it’s time to start auditing your soul.

The unraveling has reached Shakespearean proportions. Between false claims that Thanksgiving costs are “25% lower,” delusions about his tariffs “helping the little guy,” and a new order requiring all 44 million SNAP recipients to reapply for benefits so Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins can decide who’s “needy enough,” the self-proclaimed savior of the working class is waging open war on the poor. Even the GOP’s internal polling now shows inflation-focused voters swinging toward Democrats by double digits. Drudge’s headline said it best: Dark Days of the Don.

Speaking of darkness, Ghislaine Maxwell appears to be enjoying the full Mar-a-Lago treatment at her Texas prison resort, VIP status, puppy therapy, and warden-approved pardon paperwork. Employees who leaked her cushy correspondence to Rep. Jamie Raskin have reportedly been fired, and Maxwell’s lawyer is preparing a habeas petition using Trump’s own “Epstein hoax” rhetoric to argue her conviction should be overturned. It’s a feedback loop of depravity: Trump calls the investigation a hoax, and his co-conspirator-in-spirit uses his words to try to get out of prison.

The foreign policy stage looks like the second act of a Bond film that ran out of funding halfway through. Iran seized a Marshall Islands–flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, Hamas is quietly reasserting control in Gaza, and China is redirecting exports eastward while Trump scrambles to undo his own economic mess at home. After months of chest-thumping about tariffs as “America’s greatest weapon,” the White House has quietly begun rolling them back, lowering duties on beef, coffee, and bananas in a desperate bid to curb rising grocery prices before Thanksgiving. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent now calls them “strategic adjustments,” which is Washington-speak for we accidentally set the kitchen on fire. Australia and several Latin American exporters are celebrating; American farmers, not so much. Meanwhile, the same administration that declared victory over inflation is now begging fruit importers to bring back affordable caffeine and potassium.

The White House still insists it’s “considering options” for military operations in Venezuela, because apparently we haven’t learned a thing from the last twenty. Somewhere in there, Trump’s allies are on cable news claiming the U.K. “isn’t really our friend anymore.” The free world must be thrilled.

Through it all, Trump is pounding his chest about “the most secure border in American history,” while his DHS chief secretly launders ad contracts through her friends and his courts keep calling his policies unlawful. The regime is collapsing under the weight of its own theater. They’ve turned the federal government into a traveling sideshow: one judge stopping the con, one cabinet secretary filming the next, and one increasingly unhinged strongman yelling about Epstein to drown out the sound of the walls closing in.

Methinks Trump doth protest too much.