Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning, it is 5.30 a.m. in the morning of Friday, February 27th. The last weekend of February, thank God. Too much snow, too much cold, too much tension in the air, frankly. Not gonna bother talking about the State of the Union because we know what the State of the Union is. The State of the Union is that we have a president who is prepared to go to war with Iran to prevent files leaking out that show that he’s a rapist of children.
That’s not even a lie. That’s the state of the union. That’s where we are right now. And I feel like what’s happening now is everything is ratcheting up. And it feels like a game of chicken between the forces of despotism, with Trump establishing a full-on dictatorship without question—that’s on one side—and on the other side, the Epstein Files threatening to undo him and end his presidency.
So we have these two sides coming together, hurtling towards each other. Which one is gonna win? Who’s gonna play chicken first? Because once he’s an absolute dictator, we’ll never see anything about the Epstein Files. And once the true nature of Trump’s crimes are revealed, he will be done. Even the people in Congress who are protecting him now will have no choice but to remove him.
So I want to talk a little bit about what that means.
On the despotism side, there’s been a number of really terrifying reports and coverage about how Trump is trying desperately to subvert the voting process. He knows he can’t win a fair election. He’s already doing everything he can with voter suppression. They’re bending over backwards to try to pass this quote unquote “SAFE Act,” which is anything but, which will screw up the ability for a lot of people to vote, make it harder for people to vote—probably the people that will vote that it be the hardest for are Democrats or people who will vote against him, which he knows. So he’s all in on that. The Supreme Court is all in on that. All of those things are well-documented.
David Daley wrote a great book about John Roberts and his entire career of basically clawing away at the Voting Rights Act, and that’s where we are now. We have a Supreme Court—a rogue, reactionary, fascist Supreme Court—that’s enabled all of this. So we have that.
And then we have reports coming out that Trump—this is from the Washington Post— that Trump wants to basically federalize the election processes. Right now, the states are responsible for determining how people vote in each state and administering the voting. Trump wants to take that away. Because he can’t cheat unless he has control over it.
And it goes without saying that once he has control of it, he’s going to win by some margin and declare victory and that’s gonna be it. He’s not even gonna need Elon Musk this time. But the crazy thing is, ABC News reports that Mike Flynn, Pat Byrne (the guy who was Maria Butina’s lover and in on this the first time), and Mike Lindell of My Pillow of Fame—these are people that were trying to come up with ways to subvert the vote back in 2020, you may recall. Giuliani was also in on that plan back in 2020, December of 2020, that basically the whole J6 thing spilled out of that, right? To try to use any means necessary to keep Trump in power.
Well, fast-forward to now. The same thing is happening. know, Gal Suburban was on my podcast on June 3rd, 2022—almost four full fucking years ago—talking about this, about Executive Order 13848, which was issued by Trump.
And it’s an order to protect the voting from foreign interference. And the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to present a report to Trump after the elections where the Intelligence Community has done an assessment about whether or not there was foreign interference in the previous election.
So, you know, the Director of National Intelligence is Tulsi Gabbard. I don’t know who she’s working for, if it’s the cult leader guy from Hawaii or if it’s Putin or what, but she ain’t working for the American people. We know that. So she presumably would submit some sort of report that Trump would read and use as a pretext to impose his own will on the election process to “protect” it.
And in the original plan, as Gal explains and Jim Stewartson explained, again, back in 2022, was to use the National Guard to seize the voting machines. Now it would be ICE, I think, that would seize the voting machines, because now he has his own secret state police; he doesn’t have to worry about the National Guard. So he wants to do that.
And then in this original plan, he was going to task USAID with counting the votes. Of course, Elon Musk has gutted USAID. And the person nominally in charge of that now is, I believe, Marco Rubio. So those are two—in Rubio and Gabbard—hideous traitors, some of the worst traitors that have ever betrayed the country, those two people.
So this is coming. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is what’s happening. This is being reported in the Washington Post and ABC News. This is what they’re doing. This is what they’re trying to do unless we stop them.
That’s the first thing.
The second thing is the war with Iran. Most of the air capability in the United States is in the Persian Gulf right now. I’ve looked at some of these military sites and it’s terrifying how much muscle we have, military muscle, within striking distance of Iran. And some of these military writers are saying that we never move this much into place like that unless we’re gonna do an attack.
I think Trump is just itching to hit Iran. I think Pete Hegseth is just itching to hit Iran. And right now the only thing preventing it is probably the generals who don’t want to because it’s crazy and unnecessary. As much as it would be great to topple the Ayatollah and liberate the Iranian people from this horrible person—it would be ironic in some way if we liberated the Iranians and they actually did greet us as liberators, because I think they actually would, unlike in Iraq—that’s neither here nor there. Trump doesn’t give a shit about that. He doesn’t care about the Ayatollah cracking down. Of course, the Ayatollah has threatened to release the Epstein files if he attacks. And I’ve also read, and I don’t know if this is true, that Bibi has threatened to release them if he doesn’t attack. So he’s between a rock and a hard place with Iran.
But the point is, this guy might go to war. And once he’s at war, if there’s a real war, then all the rules change. All the rules change. Then Trump is a war-time president. He’ll argue that we shouldn’t even have elections because we’re at war and bring up Zelenskyy and whatever thing he’ll try to claim—even though we had the election of 1864. We had every election during World War II. We have elections during war in this country, but he’ll try to claim otherwise. So that’s a big deal.
This tariff thing, I mean, it’s kind of a joke because the Supreme Court shot it down. They said Trump’s tariffs are unlawful, illegal, he’s not allowed to do them. But then Trump responded with, “We’re gonna put on more tariffs!” Like, no, man, the court said you can’t unilaterally impose tariffs. And Trump’s response is to unilaterally impose tariffs.
Now, I don’t know how the mechanism of this stuff works, but if he’s just ignoring the Supreme Court and his minions in the customs office, which I think is under the purview of Noem, that basically means that we have no more rule of law in the country, right? So that’s bad.
And then he’s just stealing stuff. He’s just looting the treasury. He’s looting it in these unbelievable ways. Just pouring money out of, stealing money from us, lots of money. For him and his disgusting children and God knows who else, who else he owes money to or whatever—these horrible oligarchs who are helping him. Really, it’s gonna take a lot to cleanse the country of these people when all is said and done. There’s not enough sage in the Midwest to do what needs to be done.
So that’s the one train coming down the track, right? That’s the train of despotism coming down the track.
On the other side, we have the Epstein Files, which are not going away. Epstein Files are not going away.
We know he’s in the files. We know there’s stuff in the files about him that’s bad. That’s “duh,” okay? He wouldn’t be moving heaven and earth to redact his name and prevent them from coming out. He wouldn’t have put Pam Bondi in the Department of Justice—and that other guy, Blanche, was his defense attorney—otherwise. These people are there to protect Trump. Kash Patel is there to protect Trump…and I guess get drunk with hockey players. What a pathetic spectacle that was, but we don’t even need to talk about that.
We know there’s stuff in there. The only question is: what it is, how bad it is, what’s he hiding? There’s been a lot now of things trickling out. The FBI was investigating an allegation about Trump from the 80s. The girl was 13 when she was allegedly raped by him. Epstein was involved. Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth had the scoop on that:
There’s still the Katie Johnson stuff. There’s other things in there that we don’t know.
And I’m sure there’s a lot of things in there about money and other things. It’s not just the sex trafficking horrors. It’s also money, and Epstein’s ties to foreign governments, and probably stuff around the election of 2016, because there’s a lot of chatter in there between Epstein and Bannon and Peter Thiel and these other people about that election. Talking to the Russians…it’s just that there’s a lot of weird stuff in there that we haven’t even scratched the surface of.
And then there’s also, as I wrote about this in my Epstein piece about what it could possibly be, the fact that there’s the files—and I didn’t even put this in my piece this week about Lutnick because I wasn’t sure of it, but Dave Troy posted it, so therefore it’s accurate. The Epstein Files between 1999 and 2001 are being suppressed.
Those are the emails and the files that you can’t find. Now, gee, I wonder what happened in those years? Well, the 2000 election happened, which was a catastrophe, and obviously 9/11 happened. And the people who were characters in 9/11 have resurfaced during the Trump years. Coincidence, maybe, but it seems to me that people have stuff to hide around that and we need that to come out.
And then there’s two other things where we know Trump gave depositions.
UpstateNY, my friend on Blue Sky, sent this to me. There was supposed to be a deposition by Trump in August of 2009 by Brad Edwards in that Ghislaine Maxwell / Epstein case. And apparently he never went to the deposition, but he had a chat with Edwards about it—and then totally redacted about what they talked about.
So what did they talk about? I don’t know. We may never know. But the point is Trump was in the crosshairs for that. We know he was being investigated with these other sex crimes, because of the information coming forward.
And then Senator Wyden today released this thing that the DEA was apparently investigating Epstein about some drug case years ago that Trump maybe was also involved with. So there’s all kinds of stuff that Trump is actively being investigated for that we don’t know about.
That’s the stuff with the Epstein Files.
You know, every week we learn something else that’s a little bit closer to Trump, but not close enough. And again, these two trains are coming together. Which one is going to veer off the tracks first depends…you know, no pressure, but the future of our country and our democracy depends on what happens now.
The one takeaway that I have is that there’s a lot of people in the country now that actually do know stuff and aren’t legally allowed to tell. You’ve got people at the DEA, which I just mentioned. You have people in the DOJ. You have people in the FBI. You have people in the CIA. You have foreign intelligence people. You maybe have some journalists. You definitely have some lawyers. All of these people know things that would put Trump away. They know, all of them know, things. And they’re not allowed to say. Even the FBI that were doing the redactions, right? People know stuff and they’re just not allowed to say, because it’s illegal, it’s unlawful, it’ll screw up a future court case, whatever it is.
Guys, there’s no more rule of law! The rule of law is dead. It’s dead. The Department of Justice is being run by a lackey of a mobster. We have a mobbed-up criminal Kremlin asset in charge of the country who has installed his muscle men in all of these positions of power. He’s ignoring the Supreme Court, which he owns anyway.
I mean, where is the rule of law? They’re building concentration camps right now! They’re building concentration camps! You know, they’re occupying cities with the secret state police. What do you think is gonna happen?
You come out and say what you know or we’re doomed. It’s that simple. So if you’re sitting on something and you’re one of these people, we need to know what it is. And you don’t have to come to me. There’s still journalists out there that’ll publish this. There’s still good journalism happening. There’s plenty of outlets that will publish this. Even the New York Times would if it was the right kind of thing. Go, find people, find journalists that you trust. Even go to the BBC or whatever, The Guardian. It doesn’t have to be in this country. We need this stuff to come out. People need to come out and tell us what’s happening.
The idea that we’re protecting the norms, this Merrick Garland read of things, has failed. It failed during the Biden administration and it continues to fail. There are exceptions that we have to make to this stuff. And now is the time of the exception.
LB has been calling for the release of the Confidential Informant files, the FBI files on Trump, for 10 years now. Release those files, leak them, or talk about them or something. There has to be something. There has to be something.
Because if we don’t have something, what’s going to happen is he’s going to steal the election and that’s gonna be it—if we even have an election. So the situation could not be more dire.
You know, not to ruin your weekend or anything, but this is where we’re at. This is what the state of the union is. And unless we act—and by we, I mean people in the know…
You have citizen journalists—I don’t know if I like that term—investigators, researchers who are independently, and without getting paid in most cases, combing through these files, trying to find stuff. Meanwhile, the people who know things are just sitting around like, “I can’t say anything because of the norms.” Come on, man, give us a hand, for fuck’s sake, you know?
Your job is to protect us. It’s not to protect yourself. That’s how it is. If you didn’t want to take risks like that, you shouldn’t have been in the job in the first place.
So that’s my soapbox for today.
Now, I’m pleased to announce that I have a podcast today featuring Aaron Tracy and his excellent podcast, which is called The Secret World of Roald Dahl, the children’s book author, who led such a fascinating life. And it’s a really interesting, fun conversation that we have. And it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of stuff.
So if you want to listen to people talk about the podcast, you can do that. No Trump discussion. And then if you want to listen to his podcast, it’s quite good. I recommend it. It’s available everywhere.
So I’ve got that for you. And then tonight on The Five 8, we’re just going to talk about Epstein stuff. We’ve got Jen Taub coming on. I know we don’t like to announce the guest, but I think it’s OK to announce the guest. Jen Taub’s coming on again to talk about Epstein stuff, and that’s basically what we’re going to talk about. So check us later at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on YouTube.
I don’t know. The weather’s getting warmer. Spring is coming. You know, what did Shelley say? “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I hope so. Fate of the nation depends on it. But I think we shall prevail.
Golden Ticket: The Hidden Life of Roald Dahl
You’re familiar with his books: Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, James & the Giant Peach, The BFG, Matilda. But how much do you know about their author?
Greg Olear speaks with Aaron Tracy about his excellent new narrative podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl. They explore Dahl’s fascinating life, his impact on children’s literature, and the complexities of his character, including his anti-Semitism. The discussion also delves into the evolution of storytelling through podcasts, the crisis of masculinity, and the ongoing debate of separating art from the artist.
Aaron Tracy is the founder of Parallax, the award-winning audio company. His debut audio drama, The Coldest Case, a thriller starring Aaron Paul, is the most successful Audible Original of all time. He teaches creative writing at Yale University. The Secret World of Roald Dahl, on iHeart Media, is his first narrative nonfiction podcast.
Listen to Aaron’s podcast:
