Finally Friday Reads: Clusterfucks r US

“The bottom line of everything this administration does.” John Buss, @repeat1969

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Once again, there’s no news fit to report, but I’m going to take a stab at it. The headlines run the gamut. There are headlines that make you want to laugh, like “Melania Trump says she was not associated with Jeffrey Epstein.” Headlines that make you want to cry, like “Consumer prices rose 3.3% in March, as energy prices spiked due to Iran conflict.”  Headlines to make you angry, like “Pete Hegseth’s holy war: the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran.” There are also headlines that make you feel quite unsurprised, like “Calls to Impeach Trump Collide With Reluctant Democratic Leadership.” Once again, it’s a week that leaves us all worse off.

So, let’s start with Melania Dearest, who insists she had no ties to Jeffrey Epstein, even though she was not under oath to tell the truth, you have to wonder if a Congressional Committee will ask for a repeat performance.. William Kristol, writing at The Bulwark, suggests she threw hubby under the bus. “What Melania Didn’t Say.”

Standing behind a podium bearing the presidential seal, speaking at the White House Cross Hall where so many presidents have addressed weighty matters of state, and where her husband last week spoke to the nation about Iran, the first lady read a six-minute statement about her and Jeffrey Epstein.

Melania’s focus was on . . . Melania. She began, “The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” Her purpose, she said, was to defend “my reputation,” to clear “my good name.” (Emphasis mine.)

And so she asserted that “I have never been friends with Epstein” and that “I . . . was never on Epstein’s plane.” She also claimed that “My email reply to [Epstein’s imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine] Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence.1 My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a trivial note.”

Left unsaid, but not unimplied, was that none of these claims could be made about her husband. He was a pal of Epstein’s. He was on Epstein’s plane. His relationship with Epstein, as exemplified for example in his contribution to Epstein’s birthday book, was more than “casual” or “trivial.”

Melania also chose to express concern for Epstein’s victims, something her husband has conspicuously not done.

And she went on to say that

Now is the time for Congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course, this doesn’t amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to uncover the truth.

So the Epstein investigation is not, as her husband has asserted, a “hoax.” Nor is it yet time, as her husband has said, to move on. The truth hasn’t yet been uncovered, and we need to uncover it. And if doing so leads more “prominent male executives” to resign, so be it. One wonders: Could Melania have one prominent male chief executive in mind?

Melania chose not to include in her statement any assertion of her husband’s innocence of complicity in the Epstein affair.

Melania is perhaps not a deep thinker, but she’s no fool. Since immigrating to the United States three decades ago, Melania Knauss has done well for herself. She’s shown that she has a shrewd sense of how to operate in her adopted country. She’s risen to the top, while mostly avoiding being directly engulfed in all the scandals that have raged around her.

There is surely a lot of evidence suggesting she knew him well. But, with the Iran War being waged like a lethal version of mud wrestling, let’s see if the due diligence will be done by the press. This topic really skates on Slut Slamming, but it’s hard to cover earnestly. Emptywheel has an interesting story on the mostly out-of-view First Lady. “Melania’s Immigration Witness, Paolo Zampolli, Asked to Get His Baby Mama Deported.”  I wonder if she’s worthy of any Congressional questions.

The biggest denial may be this one:

I met my husband by chance at the [sic] New York City party in 1998. This initial encounter with my husband is documented in a detailed [sic] in my book, Melania.

The entire stunt seemed like a response to Michael Wolff. After all, when Melania listed the people who’ve had to retract claims — James Carville, The Daily Beast, and Harper Collins, in conjunction with a biography of the Andrew formerly known as Prince — she did not mention Wolff (or Hunter Biden), whom she has been threatening to sue for some time, with whom she has been stuck in litigation for months.

She has threatened Wolff in the past, who has made claims about how she met Trump, whether Epstein had fucked Melania before Donald did, and whether Donald and Melania first fucked on his plane. But thus far that litigation remains pending, and she didn’t mention him (or Hunter Biden, whom she also threatened to sue) in this appearance.

Wolff has many recordings about what Epstein told Wolff, whether Epstein’s claims were true or not.

But I’m more interested in another detail.

Melania cites her own book for the definitive account of how she met Donald (she has done this in past lawsuits).

Why would she do that? She has a witness to some of this: Paolo Zampolli, the agent who imported her on the same Einstein visa scam as Epstein used for his victims.

Zampolli not only remains in the Trump circle, but he flew to Hungary to do errands for Russia with JD Vance this week.

…

Epstein survivors had plenty to say about the performance. This is from The Guardian. Shrai Popat has the story. “Survivors of Epstein’s abuse accuse Melania Trump of ‘shifting burden’ onto victims, Outrage from survivors follows first lady’s statement calling on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.”

More than a dozen survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have accused Melania Trump of “shifting the burden” onto them after she called on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.

“Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” said a group of 13 people and the brother and sister of the late Virginia Giuffre, who was one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, in a statement. “Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility not justice.”

Their response came after the first lady delivered a surprise statement in which she said denied that she ever had a relationship with Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. She also said that she was not a victim of Epstein, had no knowledge of his crimes, and said that the late convicted sex offender did not introduce her to her husband, Donald Trump.

“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” she said, adding that “numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been calculating [sic] on social media for years now”.

It remains unclear what specific accusations prompted her remarks. Her senior adviser, Marc Beckman, told Reuters that she “spoke out now because enough is enough. The lies must stop”.

During her statement, the first lady also urged Congress to hold public hearings and take sworn testimony from survivors of Epstein’s crimes.

In their statement on Thursday evening, the group of Epstein survivors said the first lady “is now shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions that protect those with power: the Department of Justice, law enforcement, prosecutors, and the Trump administration, which has still not fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act”.

“It also diverts attention from Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities,” they said. “Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers.”

“Survivors have done their part,” the statement concluded. “Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.”

It appears that the majority of the country is suffering under the impact of the Iran War. CNBC’s Jeff Cox has this headline. “Consumer sentiment hits record low, inflation fears rise amid Iran war.”

Consumer confidence plunged to a record low in April as fears mounted over rising energy prices and the broader impact of the Iran war, according to a University of Michigan survey Friday.

The university’s headline index of consumer sentiment tumbled to 47.6, down 10.7% from the March survey to its lowest on record. Current conditions and expectations indexes also saw double-digit monthly declines.

The drop in sentiment coincided with a sharp spike in inflation expectations, with respondents seeing prices up 4.8% in a year from now, a full percentage point rise from the March reading to its highest since August 2025. The one-year outlook in April 2025 was 6.5% following President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement.

Survey comments “show that many consumers blame the Iran conflict for unfavorable changes to the economy,” said the survey’s director, Joanne Hsu.

However, Hsu also noted that most of the interviews were completed before the April 7 ceasefire. The survey, then, primarily reflects conditions from March.

“Economic expectations will likely improve after consumers gain confidence that the supply disruptions stemming from the Iran conflict have ended and gas prices have moderated,” she said.

There’s no good news coming out of the Iran War. This is Heath Cox Richard’s take on her Substack today.

The ceasefire President Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday night fell apart almost immediately. Israel complained that it hadn’t been consulted, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Israel did not accept an end to its bombardment of southern Lebanon as a way to dislodge Iran-backed Hezbollah militants. Steven Scheer of Reuters noted today that Israel has been under a state of emergency that halted the work of the judicial system, but with the end of the war, Netanyahu’s trial for corruption is scheduled to begin again on Saturday.

Iran has been permitting certain ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but responded to Israel’s continued bombing by closing the strait again.

Vice President J.D. Vance said there was a “legitimate misunderstanding” about whether the ceasefire included Lebanon. “We never made that promise,” he said. But in fact, Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, who posted the terms of the ceasefire on Tuesday, noted that the agreement did include a ceasefire in Lebanon. He tagged Vance in the post.

As more information about the achievement of the ceasefire became known, it reflected poorly on Trump. Humza Jilani, Abigail Hauslohner, and Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times reported yesterday that while Trump claimed Iran was begging for a deal to end hostilities, it was actually the Trump administration that was pushing Pakistan to broker a deal with Iran. Tyler Pager and Katie Rogers of the New York Times reported that the White House was helping to craft Sharif’s social media statements, suggesting Trump “was actively looking for a way out of the crisis” as his own imposed deadline drew closer on Tuesday evening.

Although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims the U.S. has had a “historic and overwhelming victory” that achieved “every single objective,” David S. Cloud of the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that Iran saw the ceasefire as a “triumph” because it had survived a 38-day barrage from the United States and Israel and because it had gained control over the Strait of Hormuz, inflicting deep damage on the U.S. economy. Iran claimed the U.S. had suffered “an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.” Iran’s new leadership is even more anti-Western than the previous leadership, killed in the early days of the U.S.-Israeli strikes.

Yesterday the president posted his own interpretation of the terms of the agreement, but they were aspirational and asked for Iran to agree to terms that were less advantageous for the U.S. than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 and Trump tore up in 2018.

The actual terms of the ceasefire agreement were murky. On Wednesday, Iran released its version of the points of the agreement; the White House said those points weren’t the basis for the ceasefire.

Also yesterday, Trump suggested the U.S. was considering joining the Iranians in demanding tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it,” he told journalist Jonathan Karl. But today Trump posted: “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait—They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!” Hours later, he added: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!”

I’d like to think I have the vocabulary to describe how I feel about all these idiotic, powerplay antics, but I really don’t. We are clearly dealing with people who don’t have a clue and don’t care to understand our democratic republic. This article from The Guardian blew me away. “Pete Hegseth’s holy war: the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran.”  This article deserves a full read from us.  We should never forget Hegseth’s weird diatribe.

Nine months and six days before a Tomahawk missile tore through the gaily decorated classrooms of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, ripping apart the bodies of schoolchildren, teachers, and parents, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal pastor delivered a sermon at the Pentagon.

“There’s a temptation to think that you’re actually in control and responsible for final outcomes, especially for those who issue the commands and do the aiming and the shooting,” preached Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, at the first of what have become monthly Christian worship services at the Department of Defense. “But you are not ultimately in charge of the world.”

Citing a verse from Matthew 10, Potteiger told the gathered leaders of the US military: “If our Lord is sovereign even over the sparrow’s fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles …

“Jesus has the final say over all of it.”

The available evidence and a preliminary investigation by the US military all suggest that the US was responsible for the 28 February school bombing that killed more than 175 people, most of them children, but neither Donald Trump nor Hegseth has taken any responsibility, nor have they expressed any remorse.

Instead, Hegseth has persisted in framing the war in Iran, which reached a temporary ceasefire on Tuesday after six weeks of fighting, as divinely sanctioned, repeatedly invoking “God’s almighty providence” and expressing surety that God is on the side of the US military. Amid boasts about the US’s superior firepower and theatrical disdain for “stupid rules of engagement”, the defense secretary has promised to give “no quarter” to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime and called on the American people to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ”.

Hegseth’s distinct combination of piety and bloodlust was most prominently on display at the 25 March worship service at the Pentagon, the first since the war in Iran began, when he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The prayer was so shocking that it appears to have provoked a direct rebuke from Pope Leo, who preached on Palm Sunday that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.

Hegseth will hardly mind harsh words from the head of the Catholic church, however. The 45-year-old US army veteran and former Fox News host is a member of an obscure, deeply Calvinist wing of evangelical Christianity – John Calvin broke from the Catholic church during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation – that rejects the pope’s authority and is rooted in a belief in predestination.

“They believe that nothing happens that isn’t in God’s will,” said Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, who researches this branch of Reformed Christianity. “They believe that God directs everything that happens.”

Even a bomb falling on an elementary school full of children?

I really just want to cry.

Have a good and peaceful weekend.  Try not to give up hope.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?