According to an Epstein email, Trump spent hours at Epstein’s house with a victim. This is where Epstein called Trump “that dog that hasn’t barked”.
In another email between Michael Wolff and Epstein, Wolf suggests that Trump has been on Epstein’s plane and at his house in such a way that Epstein could save Trump by keeping secret about it.
This is all in the context of Trump being uncharacteristically resistant to releasing files about Epstein, even pressuring Republican congress people to not do it; in the context where Trump openly said that Epstein likes them young; in the context where Trump has had many many sex scandals; and in the context where the Trump administration has moved Epstein’s coconspirator to a more comfortable prison.
It looks like Trump was either involved in Epstein’s crimes, or knew about them and kept silent when he should not have. It’s possible that Trump didn’t really do or know anything, and just doesn’t want Epstein or Maxwell to make him look bad.
“In a 2019 email to Wolff, Epstein wrote that “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. [O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
The message appears to reference Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted Epstein co-conspirator currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for crimes connected to Epstein.
The following year, Epstein and several associates received word that Reuters was readying a story about a lawsuit filed against the disgraced financier and Trump over an alleged sexual assault from 1994.
“Well, I guess if there’s anybody who can wave thus [sic] away, it’s Donald,” Wolff wrote. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
These quotes seem too vague to draw strong conclusions from.
“The Food and Drug Administration plans to approve a new use for the generic drug leucovorin in the coming weeks to treat kids with “cerebral folate deficiency and autistic symptoms,” according to a POLITICO Magazine opinion piece by federal health leaders published on Monday.
The officials — FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, National Institutes for Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz — pointed to research they say suggests leucovorin, also known as folinic acid, may help children who are deficient in folate, a vitamin. They said there was evidence leucovorin, which is currently used to treat cancer and anemia patients, can help children with autism improve their verbal communication. But they emphasized in the opinion piece that the drug “is not a cure for autism.”
While scientists say leucovorin, a form of vitamin B, could be promising for a subset of autism patients, they cautioned that the current data is limited and the drug needs more research.”
“Many more families might have benefited over the past couple of decades from similar treatments pioneered a quarter of a century ago, except that handwringing bioethicists helped to persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to essentially ban them.”
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“Had the FDA stayed out of the way, many more families would have had the opportunity to use these and similar assisted reproduction technologies to have healthy children over the past 25 years.”
“Portuguese culture grants special privileges to children and families, and those privileges really do make a big difference. We’ve been to Lisbon, surf towns to the west, the Azores, and even Cabo Verde, the African island nation and former colony, where many of the same norms apply. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people traveling with young kids get special lines for airport security and customs, ushered through as fast as possible. Native Portuguese will get offended if they see you in the normal line, instructing you to go to the priority line and sometimes getting the attention of the customs officer to make sure the system is adhered to—the only time Southern Europeans have ever been rule-abiding!
Though their Northern European neighbors are strict about taxi cab car seat rules and paranoid about child safety on buses (in Norway they made me use a car seat), the Portuguese are relaxed about it, allowing parents to make whatever choices they deem best. This is helpful for those of us who don’t travel with car seats, preferring to use public transit wherever possible.
Their playgrounds allow lots of risky play. We availed ourselves of Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela, which had plenty of climbing structures, including one extending more than 15 feet in the air, full of kids as young as 5 jousting for the top spot.
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In Lisbon, the public park facilities even had a miniature bathroom for potty-training kids, but you could also freely change a diaper on a park bench. The nearby day cares dressed kids for rain or shine, and they seemed to make outdoor time a habit. The moms did not hover—a refreshing contrast to Manhattan and Brooklyn—and there was a healthy mix of moms and dads handling the kids.
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At home in New York, I keep a list of fancy restaurants that tend to be welcoming toward babies and toddlers (Bonnie’s in Williamsburg, Cafe Gitane in Lower Manhattan), precisely because it feels like a rarity: Several restaurants have adopted policies disallowing children (Jean-Georges, Bungalow). In Portugal, it’s standard to see families out to dinner, and out quite late. Though the families don’t tend to be huge—Portugal has not been immune to the sinking-birthrate issues that have plagued the rest of the developed world—they are rebounding a bit from a 2013 low of 1.21 births per woman.
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But the Portuguese in particular grasp something I fear American parents miss: You don’t have to recede from society once you have children, relegated only to explicitly kid-friendly spaces. The way to get children to learn how to fly and dine in restaurants and act civilized in public is to include them, and to let them practice again and again. Of course, those reps are easier gotten when you have a surrounding culture that acts like children are a gift, not a burden. The grace with which Portuguese culture treats families makes it easier to bear when your kid inevitably messes up in public; everyone who witnesses the tantrum or the spilled glass seems to realize that this is a normal part of living alongside kids—a little cost worth bearing to have a society that’s warm and friendly and growing.”
“The first possibility is that the most senior officials in the Trump administration — including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel — exploited a terrible child sex trafficking tragedy for their personal political and financial gain. Some of these officials, perhaps all of them, knew that there was no elaborate government conspiracy or cover-up surrounding Epstein’s crimes or his death, but they intentionally misled millions of Americans for years to make money, get Trump back in the White House or both. And now that they’re in office, they’re dealing with the mess they made.
A second possibility is that the Justice Department’s review of the evidence in the Epstein case turned up references to Trump — on something akin to a “client list” or otherwise — and that the government is now engaged in a cover-up to protect the president. This cannot be ruled out given Trump’s social history with Epstein prior to Epstein’s arrest; Trump has previously been referenced in public documents released in court cases surrounding Epstein, though Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the matter. Also potentially notable is Trump’s hyper-defensive attempt to turn the page at a Cabinet meeting last week by claiming that the public needed to ignore the conspiracy theories and move on — a striking position for a man who is famous for his own conspiracy theories and never moving on from things.
Still a third possibility is that the administration has been telling the truth from the start — that officials believed the conspiracy theories they had fueled and are only now discovering there is no Epstein “client list” and no evidence that Epstein blackmailed anyone. In this scenario, Trump and everyone else were all just as surprised by these revelations as many of Trump’s supporters are, and now they’re struggling with the fallout.”
“Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” includes a gift to millions of families: $1,000 in an investment account for every eligible newborn.
The new savings vehicles, akin to Individual Retirement Accounts, are designated for children who are U.S. citizens born from 2025 through 2028. In addition to the one-time government contribution, parents and others can chip in as much as $5,000 a year to the accounts, which beneficiaries can access at 18, with some constraints.
The seed money is a boon for recipients and will grow tax-deferred. Financial planners say parents and guardians might do better putting their money into existing investment vehicles such as a 529 plan, a savings plan designed to cover college expenses. But 529s are limited to education, while backers say the new accounts can help their recipients beyond college.
Republican lawmakers call the accounts “Trump accounts,” though the Senate’s plan to officially name them after the president did not make it to the final version of the legislation, which was signed Friday. They deliver on an idea that both Democrats and Republicans have floated for years: to invest money for all children at birth.
Withdrawals from a 529 are not subject to state or federal taxes as long as the funds go toward qualified education expenses – a feature the new investment accounts don’t share. And in the new accounts, parents’ deposits don’t qualify for a tax deduction, notes Greg Leiserson, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New York University. “You have this very slight or minimal-to-nonexistent tax benefit,” he said. “What is the point here?”
Financial adviser Amy Spalding of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said she will continue to steer her clients to 529s. “It’s better from a tax standpoint,” Spalding said. “And there are more investment options. And then there’s a higher contribution limit.” (For 2025, a single person can deposit as much as $19,000 a year into a beneficiary’s 529, while married couples can contribute as much $38,000.)
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withdrawals will be taxed at typical income rates, not at the capital gains rate of a taxable brokerage account. “For most people, this is going to be worse than what they could do in a taxable account,” he said.
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The law requires the new investment accounts to track a U.S. stock index
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“If you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to start school in the fall’ – if the market falls over the summer, the planning you were doing about how you were going to pay for college is totally messed up, because the money you thought would be there, isn’t.”
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account holders cannot touch the funds until they turn 18. After that, the rules are the same as those of an individual retirement account – withdrawals are taxed like income, plus an additional 10 percent tax penalty on any withdrawals before age 59½ except for certain qualified uses.
Those uses include paying for college, supporting themselves if they become disabled, or recovering from domestic abuse or a natural disaster. Beneficiaries also can withdraw as much as $10,000 to buy their first home, and up to $5,000 when they have a new baby themselves.
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Even one of the Trump accounts’ biggest proponents in Congress, Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah), said in an interview that for many parents, the new account design offers more benefits for retirement than for college expenses.”
Population growth isn’t a primary cause of environmental damage or global warming. Other things matter much more. So, the environment is not a good reason to not have kids!
France had modestly successful pro-natal policies, so such policies can work! They were implemented in 1939. These policies produced an additional Paris!