From Billion-Dollar Bedtime Stories to Felony Sandwiches

Inside Trump’s week of Epstein denials, DOJ walkouts, Maxwell’s quiet deals, and a federal takeover of D.C. all served with extra grass

Good morning! The First Lady is clutching her legal pearls and demanding a billion dollars from Hunter Biden because he dared to say out loud what’s been whispered for years: that she met Donald through Jeffrey Epstein. Melania’s lawyers insist this is “false, disparaging, defamatory and inflammatory”, four words that also describe Donald’s average Tuesday. They’ve sent out demand letters like they’re RSVP cards for Mar-a-Lago’s buffet, insisting on retractions, apologies, and presumably a lifetime supply of artisanal silence. Officially, the Trump-Melania origin story begins in 1998 at a modeling agency party. Unofficially, it’s well-documented elsewhere that their first intimate encounter took place on Epstein’s plane, a detail the White House would very much like to keep locked in a file marked “Do Not Open Until 2099.”

And while Melania was firing off legal threats, Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team was out here playing three-dimensional chess with the Wall Street Journal. According to Allison Gill, yes, that Allison Gill, whose nose for buried leads remains unmatched, Maxwell may have been quietly cleared for work release at her new Club Fed. That’s the kind of “minor” development you slip in under a friendly byline, right next to a story calibrated to flatter Trump while sanding off Maxwell’s sharper edges.

It’s not her first attempt at a self-serving deal, either. Before Trump’s reelection, Maxwell reportedly tried to cut an arrangement with the Biden administration, dangling “dirt” on Trump like it was the last golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory. But Biden’s DOJ wouldn’t bite, in their view, negotiating with a convicted sex trafficker wasn’t just politically toxic, it was a moral sinkhole with no bottom. That door slammed shut, leaving her to try the next best thing: shaping the press narrative from the inside.

So what did she leak? The WSJ piece carried just enough intrigue to satisfy the “Epstein files” appetite without damaging the main characters. It offered selective details meant to paint Maxwell as a fount of insider knowledge while sidestepping any new revelations that could meaningfully hurt Trump. The timing wasn’t accidental, paired with her possible work-release clearance, the story worked as both a rebrand and a soft launch for her reentry into society.

And here’s where it’s worth stepping back and looking at the bigger machine. Trump’s DOJ has been bleeding talent like a deflated bounce house. Top lawyers and career prosecutors are walking away in droves, some shoved out, others leaving before they’re ordered to sign something unethical. Former DOJ official Harry Litman describes a workforce running on fear, loathing, and alienation, stripped of the sense of mission that once defined the department. The old culture, where you’d take a pay cut for the honor of serving, is gone. In its place: a grim mix of political henchmen, unqualified loyalists, and empty desks. Even Jeanine Pirro, now running the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office like an after-hours Fox segment, admits they’re down 90 prosecutors and 60 investigators. The result isn’t just low morale, judges no longer assume DOJ attorneys are acting in good faith. That credibility is gone, and with it, the guardrails that kept political vendettas from becoming policy.

The Epstein orbit isn’t just about sex crimes anymore; it’s about information crimes, controlling the drip-drip of scandal so it lands exactly where it’s most useful and least damaging. When you’ve got a convicted trafficker potentially walking out of prison early and simultaneously hand-feeding content to one of the nation’s top financial papers, you’re not just watching a story play out you’re watching the pilot episode of a new season called Elite Immunity: How to Launder Your Reputation in 10 Easy Headlines.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Washington, D.C., the federal occupation is producing the kind of criminal threat that clearly justifies extraordinary emergency powers: a man throwing a Subway sandwich. That’s right, one meatball marinara, hold the lettuce, now upgraded to a felony assault charge carrying up to a year in prison. The alleged attacker’s crime, besides his lunch-based projectile, was yelling “fascists” at Customs and Border Protection officers stationed on a city street like props in an authoritarian pageant. Pirro, now moonlighting as the Trump administration’s designated Law & Order raconteur, gravely informed the public to “stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else,” proving that the nation’s capital may be running low on lawyers, but never on punchlines. It’s almost too on-the-nose: plant heavily armed federal agents where they’re not wanted, watch tensions spike, and when someone finally mouths off or lobs a six-inch turkey club, claim victory in the War on Crime.

The Wall Street Journal captures the broader scene with a “split screen”: Mayor Muriel Bowser, calling Trump’s takeover an “authoritarian push” in a private Zoom with community leaders, while publicly welcoming the extra manpower because her police department is strapped. Violent crime is at a 30-year low, but Trump’s been describing D.C. like it’s the set of Escape from New York, complete with “700,000 scumbags and punks” and neighborhoods he says should be bulldozed. Bowser’s strategy is pure survival politics, talk tough about autonomy, but accept the 500 extra federal personnel because her cops are outnumbered and the guns aren’t going to take themselves off the street. The whole thing plays like an uneasy buddy cop movie where one partner is a career public servant and the other is a reality-TV authoritarian obsessed with his image. As Bowser warned parents, even ordinary teen mischief could be turned into political theater for “good TV.” And given the administration’s hunger for viral “crime” clips, she’s probably right.

And then there’s Trump himself, providing the most surreal possible backdrop for all of this at the Kennedy Center. As MeidasTouch gleefully documented, the man managed to fold together plans for military deployments to majority-Black cities, turf-management tips from his golf courses, and a bizarre self-penned saga about how he “reluctantly” agreed to host the Kennedy Center Honors all in the same presser. Two women in evening gowns unveiled photos of Sylvester Stallone while Trump rambled about the “lifetime” of grass and congratulated Lindsey Graham on his poll numbers. In between, he brushed off a question about Russian hacking of U.S. court systems with a casual “that’s what they do,” as if he were talking about squirrels stealing birdseed.

MeidasTouch also reminded viewers of the global context: Zelensky meeting with European allies to declare they will not allow Trump to trade away Ukrainian land to Putin or, as the Telegraph reports, toss in Alaska’s natural resources and Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as part of the bargain. While people in Belgrade risk their lives fighting a Putin-backed regime, Trump is trying to import the aesthetic here at home, swapping cobblestone squares for 90,000-square-foot ballrooms and freshly laid sod.

And the economic backdrop? The Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee, EJ Antoni, is a January 6 bystander-turned-Trump loyalist with a giant picture of Hitler’s favorite battleship in his office. Inflation stats are now “estimates” since Trump gutted the data teams. The agricultural trade deficit just hit a record $291 billion, farmers are bracing for another bailout, and the overall deficit is already up 7 percent from last year. But sure, let’s keep talking about grass.

From billion-dollar lawsuits to work-release whispers, felony sandwiches to federalized streets, the throughline is the same: everything’s a performance. The script shifts from bedroom farce to street-level police drama to gala-night absurdity, but the direction never changes, control the narrative, reward the loyal, punish the dissenters, and never let reality get in the way of a good show.

And before I sign off, a heartfelt thank you to everyone who sent good wishes for Marz. He came home from surgery a bit wobbly, his eye swollen, but after a long nap his appetite roared back because nothing, not even anesthesia, can keep a Cane Corso from a good meal for long. Now the real challenge begins: teaching him to navigate the world while wearing that damned cone for the next few days. If you hear the sound of a large dog clanging into doorframes somewhere in Oregon, that’s just Marz, plotting his revenge against the vet.