Make Extortion Great Again

Trump reopens the government, rewrites math, and reminds us why truth still needs a discharge petition.

Good morning! If you thought the shutdown was the story, think again. The government may have reopened, but the rot remains in session. Forty-two days of bureaucratic starvation ended not in triumph but in surrender: a stopgap bill with the moral nutrition of a vending-machine sandwich. Trump signed it, smirked, and declared victory,“we’re sending a clear message that we will never give in to extortion… the Democrats tried to extort our country”, while insisting “Republicans never wanted a shutdown and voted 15 times for a clean continuation.” He slapped a fantasy price tag on the standoff,“This cost the country $1.5 trillion dollars”, and even tried to sell hardship as a bargain, thanking Walmart for a “fantastic study” and claiming “the cost of Thanksgiving… [is] 25% lower this year than we were a year ago under Sleepy Joe Biden.” Then came the encore economics: “Costs are way down. Energy is way down. Gasoline is at $2.50 a gallon… we think we’re going to hit pretty close to $2,” plus the campaign unicorns of “no tax on tips… no tax on Social Security… no tax on overtime.” And for dessert, a power grab masquerading as reform: “Terminate the filibuster… it’ll never happen again.”

Economist Justin Wolfers didn’t mince words. After Trump proclaimed the U.S. economy was “doing phenomenally well” under his leadership and claimed “prices are down…,” Wolfers responded that “every word the President just said is a lie.” He added, “It’s such a lie that I worry there’s literally a break with reality inside the man’s mind.” Wolfers pointed to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing prices are still rising across nearly every category of goods and services, grocery items included. The takeaway: the storyline Trump is selling doesn’t just misrepresent reality, it rejects it.

And that “Walmart study” was nothing more than an ad for a holiday meal and that 25% reduction now comes with 50% less food than under “Sleepy” Joe Biden.

Moments later, he told Fox’s cameras that “millions of Americans went hungry because Democrats wanted to protect Obamacare handouts”, an impressive inversion of reality, given that it was his own administration that froze food-stamp payments and furloughed the workers who process them. Asked about the missed paychecks for air-traffic controllers and the weeks of grounded flights, he shrugged: “People understand sacrifices. They love this country. The Democrats don’t.”

It’s the Trump doctrine distilled: sabotage the machinery, starve the nation, then brag that the wreckage proves your point. What’s a little hunger when you can claim victory over an imaginary enemy?

Washington’s lights flickered back on just in time for something far more illuminating, the discharge petition that pried open the vault on the Epstein files, detonating beneath the marble floors of a government still trembling from its own cowardice.

The 218th signature came from the newest member of the House, Adelita Grijalva, sworn in fifty days late after the Trump White House blocked her seating. She took her oath, crossed the aisle, and signed her name before even finding her desk. In that moment, she didn’t just claim her seat, she reclaimed the spine of Congress. Thomas Massie shook her hand and apologized for his own party’s obstruction, a rare flicker of decency amid the procedural ash.

Speaker Mike Johnson, who had spent weeks pretending the petition didn’t exist, now calls it “a totally pointless exercise.” Funny how every crusade for truth sounds pointless to the people it threatens. He says it’s moot. The survivors in the gallery say otherwise.

And then the floodgates opened.

House Oversight dropped twenty-thousand pages of Epstein estate documents, including emails where Epstein referred to Donald Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked.” Ghislaine Maxwell replied, “I’ve been thinking about that,” confirming that they both knew precisely what silence they were discussing, and what leverage it carried.

Now comes the photo. Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, released an image he’d sent years ago to Jeffrey himself, Trump’s face plastered under the caption: “Would you trust this man with your daughter?” It’s not explicit; it doesn’t need to be. It says the quiet part in typeface.

This is the rot we keep pretending we don’t smell, the bipartisan deodorant of denial. Trump knew what Epstein was. Everyone did. The documents prove it, the survivors testified to it, and the White House still tried to kill the vote, even dragging Lauren Boebert into the Situation Room like she was a national security threat instead of a congresswoman with a pen. She refused to un-sign. So did Nancy Mace. So did Marjorie Taylor Greene. And in that refusal, the dam broke.

Ro Khanna said it best: “It’s not about Trump anymore. It’s about the Epstein class, the rich and powerful who rig the rules for themselves and ignore forgotten Americans.”

For one brief moment, you could almost feel democracy stir, yawn, and remember what sunlight feels like.

But moral decay doesn’t just bloom in sex scandals. It’s also in the small, quiet betrayals, like the one buried deep in the same bill that reopened the government. The administration slipped in a clause effectively banning industrial hemp and hemp-derived composites under the banner of “anti-narcotics enforcement.” In other words, sustainability is now contraband. You can sell oil but not photosynthesis. You can subsidize the carbon that’s killing the planet, but you can’t grow the plant that could help heal it.

It’s the same sickness as the Epstein cover-up, just wearing a different tie, the protection of predatory power at the expense of everything alive.

And yet, amid all that moral gangrene, something human flickered this week. You saw it in Adelita’s voice when she invoked the survivors in the gallery: “Our democracy only works when everyone has a voice.” You saw it in Massie’s apology, in Khanna’s persistence, in the stubborn light of journalists who refused to look away.

Because make no mistake, this story survived not because corporate media chased it, but because independent journalism refused to die. The Substackers, YouTubers, streamers, and citizen sleuths, the ones who don’t need a producer’s permission to name names, kept this fire alive when the networks called it “too conspiratorial.” They connected the dots, published the emails, booked the survivors. They did the work.

The truth, finally, has found its 218th signature.

The government has reopened, but maybe what really reopened this week was our collective conscience. The question now isn’t whether we can reclaim our decency; it’s whether we’re willing to live with what it shows us when we do.

Because sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. And this country, God help us, needs a full dose.