Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog): Epstein

Showing posts with label Epstein. Show all posts

November 17, 2025

Two Substacks about Marjoie Taylor Greene, Trump, and the Epstein files. By Hal M. Brown

Most recent:

and earlier in the day:

November 14, 2025

Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into, Jeffrey. The author, a psychotherapist for 40 years, looks at how Trump deals with frustration.

With the House expected to vote to release the files today, and this being given extensive coverage in the media, Trump can’t be thrilled to have the public reminded of their friendship. If he was a “Laurel and Hardy” fan he might be saying “well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into, Jeffrey.”

Read about Trump psychology here

Donald Trump is not your usual human being. Yes, he is human, though he fancies himself to be superhuman.

Nobody is superhuman. The notion that anyone is superhuman comes from comic books and Marvel movies.

We know Trump wants people to think he’s a real life embodiment of a comic book or movie superhuman. Why else did he sell electonic cards - aside form the grift - depicting himself the way he did? I’ll spare you posting any of the images.

What Trump is may not be superhuman, but he is extraordinary in another way. He does not experience healthy human emotions like sadness, fear and anxiety. Of course you see where I am going with this.

Under certain situations a psychologically healthy person will experience the feelings associated with frustration. I don’t need to elaborate on what the experience of being frustrated feels like.

With someone like Trump, who on the self-awareness spectrum (there is such a thing - here’s an article) has about as close to no self-awareness as possible

Consider this excerpt from the article:

Self-awareness can be seen as an understanding of oneself on a nuanced continuum with distinct stages: Unconscious Awareness, Conscious Awareness, Reflective Awareness, Transformative Awareness, and Transcendent Awareness. You can read about these here.

Of course Trump experiences emotions. He often feels anger, sometime at the level which could reasonably be called rage. He may feel this when he’s frustrated but instead of reacting by looking inward he looks utward and blames others.

Trump feels joy when he triumphs in an endeavor and when he inflicts pain on his enemies.

This is not what a psychologically and an emotionally well-balanced person feels.

When we see a someone write or say that Trump is increasingly frustrated over the content of some Epstein emails being made public I can accept that in a limited way the use of the term is appropriate. But far more than frustration, I think it just pissses him off that he wasn’t able to control Congress and keep people clamoring unsuccessfully for their release. Trump really feels unhealthy frustration. His forte, as he sees it, is making other people feel frustrated. I doubt that Trump is panicking as the article “‘Don’t waste your time with Trump!’ President drops panicked plea as Epstein fallout grows” says he is.

Updates to this are here.

November 13, 2025

Much ado about dirty document dumping, By Hal M.Brown

Below is the title of the RawStory article:

“Explosive” dumping? This (image below) is explosive dumping, indeed, the dumping of explosive bombshells.

R ead My Previous Substacks

So far the worst thing that we have heard is that Trump may have known that Esptein’s “liking them young” crossed the line into pedophilia and sex trafficking.

We know Trump is a lascivious leerer, so it’s no news that he walked into a glass door while gawking at young women or girls in or around a swimmng pool (see story).

In reports about Epstein there are no suggestions Trump did anything illegal.

What Trump knew and when he knew it is an irrelevant question as far as Epstein goes. It that phrase sounds familiar and you can’t quite place it, this is the subtitle of John Dean’s book “The Nixon Defense.”

Even if it was revealed that he knew the worst of the worst for years before he cut off his relationship with Epstein, his base wouldn’t care. Trump is no Richard Nixon. In fact, Trump’s presidency has made many Democrats remember Nixon fondly.

Certainly lots of people care about Trump’s friendship with Epstein, but what difference would it matter if we discovered that Trump knew about what he was doing with underage girls?

The is the guy who was found guilty in the E. Jean Carroll case. This got him a great mugshot which ended up on t-shirts.

The is the guy who has been accused of sexually assaulting at least 28 women. Millions of MAGA men envy him for getting away with this.

The Access Hollywood bus incident as a scandal bombed like a Broadway show with high expectations that did well in Philly, but closed after the first night on The Great White Way to horrible reviews.

This is the guy who told Howard Stern that if Ivanka wasn't his daughter he might date her, and we know what he means by “date.”

Trump doesn’t think there’s anything that can hurt his political aspirations. He even even came away unscathed when he got Covid when it was killing thousands of people.

Germs and bullets can’t bring him down. Of course he thinks he’s invulnerable:

Pam Bondi and Mike Johnson know that there’s nothing in the Epstein documents that will cause Trump a moment of shpilkes. Why then have they tried to suppress their release?

The answer should be as plain as the brown noses on their faces. They want to please the president.

This leads to the next question. If Trump doesn’t worry about anything being revealed that he knows or suspects is in the documents, why didn’t he direct Bondi and Johnson to have them released expeditiously?

This is because he knows his enemies want them released, and damned if he’ll give them the satisfaction of getting their way. This is because he knows that when it all comes out it will embarrass them, not him. This will be because all the hype will turn out to be a big hoo-hum.

Trump can then gloat and make fun of them for promising a giant three ring circus of a scandal and ending up getting a side show flea circus.

Related from Thom Hartmann

On HUFFPOST

RawStory article.

My hope is that Trump does commute Maxwell’s sentence because of what is in the last sentence of this article:

“But if Trump did grant the commutation, it would also only add to the questions about whether Trump is trying to bury any evidence about his ties to Epstein after their falling out. The president, in short, has no good options.”

July 30, 2025

Today's Substack goes from humor to horror in a country gone crazy. By Hal M. Brown

In an alternate universe where Trump lost the election the ony publications bothering to waste cyber-ink on him would be those covering the entertainment industry like Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and WWE Online, the latter current paying homage to Trump’s darling:

Still we have to try to get some satisfaction from Trump suffering from the persistent pox of Epsteinitis the itchy rash that won’t go away.

South Park’s making the news with their micropenis Trump also provided a moment of welcome comic releif. They managed to hit him below the belt and despite their network, Comic Central, being owned by Paramount they not only got away with it but the show was renewed for 50 epidoses. Literally, the phase “stay tuned” is applicable here. Consider this article in Variety:

South Park airs on Comedy Central which is owned by Paramount. That network just merged with CBS. South Park makes so much money that, despite their skewering Trump with biting satire, there’s no way they will be censored or forced off the air.

It is telling that while Trump has been on a rampage attacking Stephen Colbert and other late night TV hosts so far he’s avoided going after South Park like they are The Plague. Trump doesn’t care a whit that when he attacks a late night comic he only piques the curiosity of the public and may actually lead to more people tuning in to their shows. Whether or not he will attack cartoon characters like Cartman and Kenny remains to be seen. He could go after SP creators Andy Samberg, Mike Judge, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. I’m familar with the first two but most people who aren’t fans don’t know who they are.

Meanwhile, on the subject of fantasy images, there’s this (see article):

This leads me to ask the question “which depictions of Trump are are more realistic, a cartoonish Trump or a lousy photoshop?”

Then in a nauseating but not unexpected development we have the Emil Bove’s appointment to the Third Circuit confirmed by the Senate.

This shows that the Republicans in the Senate would confirm a Magic Eight Ball to make decisions on any court as long as they always favored Trump.

I don’t know why I bother writing about such trivial matters, even the Bove vote, is trivial when we have stories like this:

Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.
Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.
Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place. Continued.

More proof that Trump has Epsteinitis came late last night when he reposted this post from a QAnon believer who describes herself as a “Proud American, born and raised, a Woman for Trump. I believe in Q, The Great Awakening and Holding the Line!❤️ WWG1WGA!.” The initials stand for “where we go one, we go all” which is a slogan of QAnon believers. (Read article in RawStory)

It’s possible, perhaps likely, that Trump doesn’t know that "the storm" refers to what conspiracy theorists believe will be a day of reckoning when the "Deep State" will be brought to justice and imprisoned and possibly executed at Guantanamo Bay. He may just have liked the AI image of himself and the text.

You have to scroll down the Fox News wesbite to find this story, middle right below, about Epstein: Schumer calls on FBI to conduct counterintelligence threat assessment on Epstein files.

If Trump watches MSNBC there is unrelenting coverage of the story.

They show how close he was with Ghislaine Maxwell.

I wrote about this here:

They also report on the so-far missing minute of video surveillance of Epstein, supposedly dead by suicide, was found. This led to the conspiracy theory that someone had him killed.

He does not look like a happy camper:

That’s it for today. It’s a mixed bag of Halloween candy which includes some tasty treats and apples with razor blades in them. Remember how that story broke?