I’ve only enjoyed writing a few articles more than this one from 2017.
It’s a speculative piece about why I thought the infamous “pee tape” allegation from the largely discredited Steele Dossier was nevertheless credible. The argument conflicted with Occam’s razor—a too-good-to-be-true story that can’t be corroborated or disproven is probably just made up—but at the time I would have bet a small amount of money on the pee-tape story being legit. I still might today. I consider myself pee-tape credulous, if not quite a peeliever.
My suspicion is rooted in a simple inference: The decadence described in the dossier reflects Trump’s character perfectly. Not necessarily his kinks or sexual deviancy (more on this below) but its depiction of a man obsessed with settling scores and demeaning people he hates—even if in the end he only hurts himself—matched his conduct as a political candidate and then as president.
Trump was fixated on reversing everything President Obama accomplished in office. Big policy swings are inevitable when partisan control of the White House changes hands, but Trump is not a movement-conservative ideologue with deeply held views about the ways Obama policies were bad, and he wasn’t moved by partisan loyalty to the Republican Party leadership, which knew setting fire to Obama’s presidency would demoralize Democrats and prevent Obama from achieving Transformational President Status in American discourse. No, Trump’s hatred for Obama had smoldered for years and years, through his coopting of the birther movement and Obama’s standup-routine clapback at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, and Trump wanted to shatter Obama’s legacy out of sheer spite.
Trump raised health-insurance premiums in MAGA country. He cost many more Americans their health plans altogether, and tried to uninsure perhaps 30 million more, all because he thought vandalizing or repealing the Affordable Care Act would make Obama feel bad. He ripped up an international agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords because Obama counted those things as achievements. But reversing them didn’t hurt Obama in any meaningful sense. It simply undermined U.S. interests and made Trump’s job as president harder.
As a psychological matter, this is indistinguishable from paying sex workers to pee in your hotel suite master bed because Barack Obama once slept in it. In Trump’s thinking, it would have been an incredible dis; in reality, he would have just been soiling his own linens. The pee tape seemed (and still seems) plausible, because we know how Trump’s addled mind works.
Well, similar inferential analysis suggests Trump may be leading a huge coverup of Jeffrey Epstein’s client list because he was a top client.
EPSTEIN-BARR VIRUS
In this case, the inference involves clues we have about Trump’s sexual proclivities and the defensive way he and his allies talk about and try to co-opt Epstein conspiracy theories.
With respect to the former: