Fifteen years ago, as my aunt was “recovering” in a nursing home from the disastrous hip revision surgery that exacerbated her dementia and would precipitate her death, I ran into a woman I knew whose husband was a partner in a prominent local food business. He had treated her badly, cheating on her. Now he was in the same nursing home, having had a stroke.
The woman made no bones about her grudging visit to him. Indeed, there was a certain gleeful disdain, a kind of schadenfreude, in that visitation.
“In my end is my beginning”: The motto of Mary, Queen of Scots – rather prophetic as it turns out -- can be interpreted in two ways. Death is not the end but the beginning of a new life. And yet, we might also think of it “As I began so shall I end,” not in the simplistic “ye reap what ye sow” kind of way but instead in the more complex manner of karma, that what you set in motion, good or bad, remains in motion until it returns to you, and nothing you can do will change that.
President Donald J. Trump is learning all about karmic comeuppance with regard to the Jeffrey Epstein files. Few people have been greater masters of spin than Trump, few have understood better that he who controls the narrative, controls perception, and that is real power. In his promise to release the files on Epstein – a financier and convicted sex offender whom he knew and who apparently hanged himself in 2019 while in jail in New York awaiting trial – Trump had a narrative that dovetailed with his MAGA base’s obsession with the deep state and pedophilia. By his own account in the White House in 2019, Trump had broken off his acquaintance with Epstein around 2004, before Epstein was ever convicted, so again why not just release the files?
Was he afraid of what they might reveal, even if it were only guilt by association? Or had the spinmeister who had woven a web of tales that had enmeshed others come up against a yarn that had spun beyond his control? Trump called the MAGA who had broken with him on this “stupid,” which The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said reminded her of the Andy Griffith character in “The Face in the Crowd,” a Trumpian populist who inadvertently brings himself down by underestimating his followers. If only. (See, too, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” also a film, and Joyce Carol Oates’ “Son of the Morning.”)
As tensions mount, Trump has spun other golden oldies – about the Democrats and in particular former President Barack Obama out to hurt him in 2016. (And yet at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral in January, he couldn’t get enough of Obama, talking his ear off.) Then there was the urgent plea to restore the name of the Washington Commanders to the Washington Redskins in the name of “our great Indian people.”
Lost in all this are the real stories – the girls Epstein abused, the food that’s being destroyed because we’ve gutted foreign aid programs, the bombing of Ukraine, the starvation of Gaza, the people who are being kept like animals until they’re deported without due process, oh, and the prices of groceries.
In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal’s publication of a supposedly salacious birthday letter from Trump to Epstein has brought MAGA back to the same page as Trump, who’s suing The Journal for $10 billion and has kicked the publication out of the White House press corps.
It remains to be seen if Murdoch’s narrative can trump Trump.