You Can’t Shrink the Big Things

Faith, history, and justice don’t fit inside party branding, no matter how many files you seal or signs you remove.

Good morning! If you missed yesterday’s presidential press gaggle, you can recreate the experience at home by standing in your kitchen, declaring yourself “totally exonerated,” blaming Democrats for weather patterns, and then insisting gasoline costs $2 everywhere because you said “drill baby drill” out loud three times.

Returning from another taxpayer-funded weekend golfing vacation, the President opened with what can best be described as a Yelp review of his own administration. Inflation? “Very low.” Prices? “Way down.” Gas? “Less than $2 in many places a gallon,” apparently in the same many places where voter fraud is rampant and murder numbers are somehow “the best in 125 years.” Yes, we are now ranking homicide like it’s a vintage Bordeaux. “We have the best murder numbers since 1900,” he announced, a sentence that should probably not exist in any functioning democracy, and one that historians will one day frame under Things You Only Say When You’ve Completely Lost the Plot.

Iran talks? Easy. “It’s going to be very easy,” he said of the Geneva meetings, moments after describing Iran as “very tough negotiators” who are also somehow “bad negotiators” because we had to send in the B-2s. Ukraine talks? Easier. “Ukraine better come to the table fast. That’s all I’m telling you.” Cuba? A “failed nation” that “should absolutely make a deal,” though what that deal looks like remains classified in the same vault as Valentine’s Day flowers.

Gaza? Essentially peace, “you have some flames here and there,” but nothing a casual B-2 strike and a little optimism can’t smooth over. The USS Gerald Ford stretching past its normal deployment window? Not a problem. China? “I have a very good relationship with President Xi.” Hungary? “President Trump is deeply committed to your success,” Marco Rubio assured Viktor Orbán, because apparently that’s how alliances work now, personal endorsements like LinkedIn recommendations.

Marco? “Fantastic.” JD? “Fantastic.” Everyone’s fantastic. Melania? According to the President, she’s going to “go down as one of the truly great first ladies” for her consequential work on “Russia, Ukraine, and so many of the other things she’s doing,” which is both impressively vague and geopolitically ambitious. Valentine’s Day plans? “I better not tell you that,” he said, calling it “the toughest question.”

Indeed. When the hardest question of the day is about flowers, you know the rest of it has been graded on a curve.

And of course, the ritual incantation: “I’ve been totally exonerated” on Epstein. Totally. Completely. Utterly. So exonerated that he had to repeat it several times, just in case the universe didn’t hear him the first go-round.

While chanting on Air Force One, something inconvenient was happening back on Earth. Protesters gathered outside Trump Tower on President’s Day, demanding impeachment. Not exactly the Hallmark version of the holiday. The message was not subtle, as it rarely is when people feel the record isn’t being told straight.

Here’s the thing about “total exoneration”: it tends to involve the release of, you know, the full record. And yet we are now learning that what has been made public from the Epstein files may represent only a sliver of what exists. Reports and independent analyses suggest that the universe of material still withheld could be massive, not a tidy binder of 3 million documents, but potentially tens of terabytes of evidence that remain under federal control.

At the exact same time, Trump allies were promoting “God Bless America” Trump-branded Bibles on friendly media, encouraging viewers to pick one up for Easter. You could not script a more on-the-nose image if you tried. Sealed files and Bibles for sale.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so clarifying. Last night, on a YouTube interview that had to be moved off broadcast television thanks to the FCC’s suddenly revived interest in “equal time,” and Chairman Brendan Carr’s not-so-subtle hints that late-night exemptions might be on the chopping block, Texas State Rep. James Talarico sat down with Stephen Colbert anyway.

Talarico isn’t just some random backbencher. He’s a Democratic member of the Texas House, a Presbyterian seminarian, and now a candidate for U.S. Senate, the kind of young, articulate, values-forward politician who makes the right wing nervous for reasons that have nothing to do with paperwork. He recently appeared on The View, which promptly found itself under FCC scrutiny afterward, as if interviewing a state legislator is now a regulatory offense.

Colbert joked that the network lawyers had practically forbidden him from even showing a picture of the man, and Talarico didn’t exactly soften the stakes. He told Colbert he believes Trump is worried “we’re about to flip Texas,” pointing to a growing backlash against extremism and corruption, and to thousands of Texans showing up, many of them whispering like it’s contraband, “I’m not a Democrat.”

Then he dropped the line that should echo through this entire moment: you cannot fit something as big as God into something as small as party affiliation.

Stephen Colbert added the sharper edge: how must it diminish God to associate Him with something so small as a present political party?

That’s the scale problem of our time. Faith is being shrink-wrapped into branding. Patriotism is being reduced to loyalty, justice is being treated like a PR inconvenience, and transparency is being negotiated like a licensing deal.

Even as Trump repeats “exonerated,” New Mexico lawmakers have unanimously created an Epstein Truth Commission to investigate what happened at Zorro Ranch and why federal investigations failed to produce a full accounting.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury called it “breaking news in the Epstein investigation,” saying the commission’s job is to “bring forward a full picture of what happened here in New Mexico” and to understand why crimes “reported to federal and state authorities were never fully investigated.” She was explicit about the stakes: New Mexicans deserve to know “who knew about them, who was complicit in them, and ultimately why nobody was ever held accountable.”

The resolution passed 62–0. Bipartisan. Four members from each party on the commission, with full, subpoena power, public records and a dedicated budget. Not vibes and incantations. Not “I’ve been totally exonerated.” The opposite of “trust me.”

On President’s Day of all days, a federal court in Philadelphia reminded the executive branch of something that apparently now requires litigation: you do not get to govern the past. U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the reinstatement of the displays at the President’s House site identifying the nine enslaved people George Washington held in bondage while serving as president. The signage, which also told the stories of 18th-century Black Philadelphians, had been quietly dismantled on January 22 by federal workers, following Trump’s directive to purge what his administration calls “DEI extremism” and “restore truth and sanity to American history.”

Restore truth by removing historically documented slavery. Judge Rufe was having absolutely none of it. In a ruling that deserves to be framed and hung next to the Constitution, she wrote that the administration does not control historical facts. She even invoked Orwell’s 1984 including the slogan “ignorance is strength,” which is about as subtle as a judicial eyebrow raise gets. When a federal judge is citing dystopian fiction to describe your historical housekeeping, maybe it’s time to reevaluate the housekeeping.

The legal hook was deliciously straightforward: Philadelphia argued that longstanding federal agreements require the National Park Service to obtain the city’s approval before making changes. Translation: you don’t get to sneak in with a screwdriver and start unscrewing slavery because it makes you uncomfortable.

It’s impossible to miss the broader pattern. Transgender references scrubbed from Stonewall. Pride flags removed, native displacement softened, climate change interpretation edited. If it complicates the Founders-as-superheroes cinematic universe, it goes into storage.

Here’s the problem for Trumpism: the President’s House sits right next to the Liberty Bell. Freedom ringing over here, enslaved people sleeping in bondage over there. That contradiction is the whole American story, the promise and the hypocrisy, the liberty and the chains. It’s messy, uncomfortable and it’s real.

Reality, apparently, is now considered partisan, but this isn’t just about signage. It’s about control. Who controls history? Who controls the record? Who gets to decide what the public is allowed to see?

Which brings us, seamlessly and grimly, to Minnesota. While the White House assures us everything is under control, Minnesota authorities say the FBI is refusing to share evidence in the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a VA nurse killed during a federal immigration enforcement surge. The state had a judicial warrant for the crime scene and was still denied access. Governor Tim Walz put it bluntly: Trump’s left hand cannot investigate his right hand.

So whether it’s the past being dismantled in Philadelphia or the present being sealed off in Minneapolis, the throughline is the same: the executive branch asserting custody over the record, over what can be seen, what can be investigated, what can be remembered. History erased with a wrench, and evidence withheld behind a badge. You cannot disassemble history like it’s an IKEA bookshelf.

In the middle of all of it, Jesse Jackson died at 84. A man who stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with Martin Luther King Jr. the day before King was assassinated. Jackson reminded us that the arc of the moral universe is long but it does not bend on its own, you have to pull it.