Everything Everywhere All at Once (Trump Edition)

Epstein accountability cracks open, redistricting implodes, the press caves, and measles returns from the dead.

Good morning! Some days in American politics are like watching a creeping landslide, the kind where you’re not sure whether to warn the neighbors or grab a lawn chair. Today is one of those days. Everything that Trump built, through intimidation, bluster, backroom pressure, and outright corruption, is beginning to slump under its own weight. And the pieces are all falling at once.

Let’s begin with the story consuming Washington: the political equivalent of a controlled explosion that accidentally takes out the entire neighborhood. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump and his loyalists have spent a year trying to bury deep enough to hide from God, passed the House yesterday by the biblical margin of 427–1. Clay Higgins heroically voted “no,” presumably because someone had to wear the villain cape, and seven others didn’t vote, probably because they couldn’t figure out which way Trump would flop before the clock ran out.

While waiting for the bill to amble over to the Senate, Chuck Schumer turned into a parliamentary arsonist. He announced he would bring the House bill up under unanimous consent, on camera, in public, with the C-SPAN fluorescence washing over every pore, and dared any Republican to object. And not one of them did. Josh Hawley didn’t raise his hand. Ted Cruz didn’t stage a monologue. Even Marsha Blackburn kept her powder dry. The bill sailed through so easily the clerk probably checked to make sure the microphones were on.

But before anyone uncorks champagne, Adam Schiff tapped the brakes hard enough to leave skid marks. Yes, the bill passed. Yes, Trump said he’d sign it. But the same people who claimed “no there there” for a year, Pam Bondi clutching her imaginary “client list” like a prop, Kash Patel insisting the FBI had nothing, nothing at all, are the ones now tasked with producing the files. And they are boxed into the most exquisite lose-lose scenario ever designed by democracy.

If Patel and Bondi release heavily redacted files, they’ll have to explain why they’re blacking out page after page of material they previously swore contained no prosecutable leads. If they release files with minimal redactions, they’ll have to explain why they lied earlier this year, and why their “no client list, no evidence” memo reads now like the world’s worst affidavit. Either way, the walls are closing in, and the wallpaper is beginning to peel.

Heather Cox Richardson zoomed out and reminded us that even if DOJ & FBI try to doctor or bury the files, this is likely to be the hardest cover-up of the modern era. Epstein’s orbit wasn’t a 19th-century ghost story, it was a global pipeline involving billionaires, pilots, banks, immigration records, and thousands of hours of seized video. Cover-ups work best when only a handful of people are in the room. Epstein’s rooms were full, and nearly all of them had surveillance systems. Even if the official files are “accidentally” thinned, the copies, the backups, the other jurisdictions, the civil litigants, the survivors, the pilots, and every institution that crossed Epstein’s path will now become gravitational forces in a story that has suddenly lost its gatekeepers.

The bill is a victory, but it is not the end. It is the beginning of accountability for the people who spent years lying about what existed in the first place.

While Trump’s legal and political universe was cracking open on the Epstein front, his other grand plan, his sprawling redistricting crusade, collapsed like a bad stage prop. In Texas, a three-judge federal panel blocked the new Trump-engineered congressional map, the one designed to give Republicans five new safe seats. The majority opinion, written by a Trump-appointed judge no less, was a meticulous evisceration of the White House’s race-based gerrymander disguised as partisan strategy. Trump’s own judge concluded the entire scheme was unconstitutional. And with that one ruling, the White House’s biggest redistricting prize turned into a bag of dust.

The loss is so devastating that California’s voter-approved Proposition 50, which quietly created five Democratic-leaning seats, now fully cancels out all of Trump’s national gains. Instead of expanding the House GOP majority, Trump may have just lost ground. Indiana is refusing to go along with his pressure campaign, North Carolina is in litigation chaos, and Missouri is wobbling. The redistricting juggernaut Trump promised his donors is stalling like one of his golf carts without the brake off.

So with the walls closing in on Epstein, redistricting slipping away, and multiple judges publicly calling his strategies illegal, how does Trump respond? By doing what he always does when cornered: he lashes out at the press, specifically women.

During a press gaggle on Air Force One, Trump called a female Bloomberg reporter “piggy”, yes, just straight-up misogynistic slur, then during his meeting with MBS tore into an ABC reporter for daring to ask MBS about his role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Trump screamed at her for doing her job, for questioning a foreign autocrat about the assassination of an American-based journalist. And the rest of the press corps? They stood there in silence, watching their colleagues get verbally assaulted by the President of the United States, and not one of them stepped in.

Not one said “that’s inappropriate.”
Not one said “answer her question.”
Not one stood between Trump and the target of his abuse.

A full summary of Trump’s meeting with MBS will post later today.

This is the central tragedy of the Trump-era press corps: they believe they can shame an autocrat into civility. They can’t. At some point, and that point has long since passed, the only meaningful thing the press can do is refuse to play their assigned role in Trump’s reality show. Walk out. Don’t show up. Deprive him of the narcissistic supply he craves more than air. A press corps that won’t defend each other is a press corps enabling him to escalate.

Finally, because this is the United States in 2025, we must end with the public health catastrophe unfolding behind all this political theater. The CDC confirmed the U.S. is just two months away from losing its measles elimination status, a milestone of failure so staggering it should be treated as a national emergency. The virus has been circulating continuously for ten months thanks to linked outbreaks in Texas, Utah, and Arizona. Vaccination rates in key counties have cratered to the low 80s. Public health workers are facing hostility, refusals to cooperate with contact tracing, and anti-vaccine propaganda flooding communities already vulnerable to misinformation.

The U.S. fought for decades to eliminate measles. All it took to lose it was an anti-vaccine movement empowered by a president who dresses hostility toward science as political identity. Canada has already lost its status. Now we’re next. It’s not just a backslide, it’s a preventable humiliation.

So that’s where America wakes up today: the legal system pushing back, the political system fracturing, the press failing its own members, the virus reclaiming lost territory, and the president at the center of all of it, spray-painting over the cracks as they spread under his feet.

Personally, I love a little schadenfreude with my coffee, and we are living in a moment when everything is revealing itself at once. And none of it is good for the man in the White House.