Panties, Giraffes, and a Billion-Dollar Joke

While Trump rambles onstage, damning testimony stays hidden, Epstein files stall, and accountability is delayed by design

Good morning! The White House wanted an “economy speech.” What America got instead was a guided tour of Donald Trump’s interior monologue, delivered in North Carolina last night like a man trapped in a furniture catalog, a medical exam room, and a grievance loop all at once.

Trump assured the crowd, repeatedly, urgently, almost plaintively, that everything is fine. Also, he is fine, and his brain is fine. In fact, his health is perfect. As a rule of thumb, people with perfect health do not feel compelled to repeat dozens of times in public.

“I had perfect health,” Trump declared, pausing only to complain that the media finds that suspicious. “I feel the same that I felt for 50 years. I really do.”

He then launched into a long riff about cognitive tests, how many he’s taken, how hard they are, how nobody else could possibly pass them, how Joe Biden couldn’t even identify a giraffe. At one point, Trump walked the audience through what he described as the opening question of the test, complete with animals.

“They show a lion, a giraffe, a fish, and a hippopotamus,” he said. “And they say, ‘Which is the giraffe?’”

The man running the world’s largest economy is publicly bragging that he can identify a giraffe, and is doing so unprompted.

From there, the speech drifted, not metaphorically, but physically, into upholstery.

“I don’t even look at women anymore,” Trump announced, apropos of absolutely nothing, explaining that noticing women is now “the sign of death in politics.” But chairs, chairs are different. Chairs are safe.

“I do look at the arm of a chair,” he said, reenacting imaginary craftsmen chiseling wood while he narrated, “bing, bing, bing, bing.”

He followed this with a stern warning about thread quality. Gold thread: good. Mustard-colored thread: unacceptable, totally inferior, and possibly even a crime.

“We don’t accept those hats,” Trump said. “When you have a mustard-colored thread, don’t accept it.”

As someone currently keeping warm under a wonderful mustard-colored wool throw, I strongly disagree.

The economic claims themselves were untethered from anything resembling math or reality. Trump bragged, once again, that his administration had cut prescription drug prices by “300, 400, 500, even 600 percent,” a statement that requires prices to fall not just to zero but into a negative alternate universe where pharmaceutical companies pay you to take pills.

“Prices will be dropping 300, 400, 500, 700%,” he later repeated online, because if you’re already defying arithmetic, why not go bigger?

This was delivered on the same day his Justice Department quietly failed to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, an actual law with an actual deadline, by releasing a partial, heavily redacted document dump while promising the rest later. Trump, when asked about it, did not clarify. He walked away. Then he posted about Jake Paul.

While Congress waits for Epstein documents that DOJ admits are incomplete, Trump is telling rally crowds that he might award himself a billion dollars from a lawsuit he is suing himself over.

“I hereby give myself $1 billion,” he said, laughing. “Actually, maybe I shouldn’t give it to charity. Maybe I should keep the money.”

For anyone wondering what on earth he was talking about: Trump is referring to his own civil lawsuits against the federal government, including claims tied to the Mar-a-Lago search and other DOJ actions. Those cases were filed before he returned to office. Now, as president, he is in the absurd position of being both the plaintiff suing the United States and the official who ultimately controls whether and how the government settles those suits.

In normal reality, this would be an obvious conflict of interest requiring recusal, independent review, and strict ethical firewalls. Under the Trump regime, it becomes rally banter.

There is no mechanism for a president to simply “give himself” money from the Treasury, and no court has awarded Trump anything remotely resembling a billion dollars. Any settlement would require legal findings, appropriations, and review, steps Trump conveniently skipped in favor of joking about cutting himself a check and maybe keeping it.

The joke lands because it rests on something darker than humor: the casual suggestion that public money is personal money, and that legal accountability is optional if you control enough levers of power. The crowd laughed, and no one asked a follow-up question, and that, too, is part of the problem.

The larger context is darker, and far more serious than Trump’s rally rambling suggests. This week, former special counsel Jack Smith spent more than eight hours behind closed doors testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. He asked to testify publicly, but Republicans refused.

According to reporting on portions of his opening statement and the substance of the deposition, Smith reiterated that his team had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election, not just through lies and pressure campaigns, but through coordinated efforts to subvert the certification of lawful votes, and that Trump repeatedly attempted to obstruct justice to conceal his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Smith’s claim is that January 6 was not an accident, not a riot that got out of hand, and not a misunderstanding, but the endpoint of a deliberate criminal plan. He wants the full videotape of his testimony released. Jim Jordan does not. Transparency, it turns out, is very popular, right up until it threatens the narrative Trump loyal Republicans are trying to bury.

At the same time, the Justice Department’s long-awaited Epstein files release landed with a thud. Thousands of pages were published, yes—but DOJ has already acknowledged the release is incomplete, with entire categories of documents missing, extensive redactions beyond what the law appears to allow, and no firm timeline for full compliance. Much of the most revealing Epstein material to date hasn’t come from DOJ transparency at all, but from Epstein’s estate, forced into the open through congressional subpoenas.

Normally, speculation isn’t helpful. But at some point, absence becomes evidence of its own. If the Epstein files were merely embarrassing, if they implicated reputations rather than crimes, they would have been dumped years ago. The extraordinary caution now suggests something far more serious: material so damaging, and so widely implicating powerful people, that public shaming alone would be insufficient. The kind of material that carries criminal exposure.

It is also fair to acknowledge that Epstein’s death may have complicated prosecution. With the central defendant gone, cases may have become harder to build. Cooperation vanished, but trauma remained. But complication is not impossibility, and Epstein did not act alone. He did not traffic children in isolation. Documentary evidence, financial records, flight logs, and witness testimony still exist.

This all feels like institutional avoidance, a reliance on delay, redaction, and public fatigue to do what prosecutors would not.

Taken together, the pattern is hard to miss: keep the most dangerous testimony behind closed doors, release just enough documents to claim compliance, and rely on spectacle, rallies, jokes, furniture monologues, and self-awarded billions to exhaust attention before accountability arrives. Trump may be betting that delay carries him to the end of his term, or the end of his life, whichever comes first.

While Trump was busy talking about “undergarments… sometimes referred to as panties,” lingering over the contents of his wife’s underwear drawers in bizarre and unnecessary detail, the administration quietly announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

NCAR is not some ideological think tank, despite White House spin. It is, as one atmospheric scientist put it, “the beating heart of the atmospheric science community.” For more than six decades, the center has developed the models that predict hurricanes, extreme cold snaps, aviation wind shear, floods, droughts, and long-range climate risk, the invisible infrastructure that keeps planes from crashing and communities from being blindsided by disaster.

Antonio Busalacchi, head of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which oversees NCAR, said bluntly that the decision appears “entirely political,” adding that “our job is to state what the science is, not to advocate or prescribe policy.” In other words: they measure reality, others decide what to do with it.

American Meteorological Society President David Stensrud warned that dismantling NCAR would cause “a great deal of hurt in terms of our ability to continue to improve forecasts and the future.” Translation: forecasts will get worse, warnings will come late, and lives will be put at risk.

Jason Furtado, a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma who relies on NCAR’s models, called the center “world-envied” and said bluntly, “In some way, every atmospheric scientist has a connection to NCAR.” Ken Davis of Penn State put it more starkly: without NCAR, much of modern weather research would be “totally impossible.”

Finally, a small moment of light. At Corewell Health Children’s Hospital in Michigan, volunteers gather each night during the holidays to shine flashlights up toward patients’ windows. The tradition is called Moonbeams for Sweet Dreams. Kids stuck in hospital rooms look out into the dark and see moving points of light, proof that someone is there, thinking of them.

So tonight, or tomorrow, or Christmas Eve, if the weight of the news feels heavy:
Hold up your flashlight out a window or on a porch aimed high toward the sky. Think moonbeams for peace, for sweet dreams, and for the kids who can’t be home, and for the rest of us trying hard to keep our moral bearings.

Marz and I send love, and we will be shining our light each night, right along with you. Oh, and I promise to share some new Christmas photos of him in his Santa hat just as soon as he cooperates.