Epstein slop has now apparently reached the outermost limits of absurdity with Monday's New Yorker entirely incapable finding anything actually incriminating about President Donald Trump in the latest release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents. So what to do? What to do? Well, New Yorker editor Jessica Winter seems to have drawn the short stick to "earn" this assignment and completely embarrassed herself with a theory about "negative space" in "The Darkest Thread in the Epstein E-mails."
The subtitle reflects the fact that Winter found absolutely no there there since the worst allegation tossed Trump's way is something called "negative space": Donald Trump occupies a kind of negative space in the available files, which run an enervating gamut from the inane to the depraved.
Spoiler alert: Nothing really negative about Trump was found so Winters dreamed up something called "negative space" to gloss over that sad fact. In fact, her "negative space" is reminiscent of "dark energy" which is defined as a mysterious force in the universe whose exact nature is unknown and whose very existence can only be inferred.
House Democrats singled out a 2011 e-mail in which Epstein called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked,” and another message, from 2019, in which Epstein invoked Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, and said that “of course he knew about the girls”—presumably referring to girls such as Epstein’s most prominent accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who was a teen-age locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was first spotted by Epstein’s main accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. But Giuffre, who died in April, always maintained that she had never witnessed inappropriate conduct by Trump.
And, if Giuffre had made such allegations, it’s not clear that the President’s advocates would mind all that much.
OUCH! The bizarre reasoning here leaves a "negative space" in one's head. According to Winter, Trump did nothing wrong according to Virginia Giuffre but if he had then in an alternate universe it wouldn't have bothered Trump supporters.
Winter then recites what she does NOT remember about Trump. I kid you not.
I likewise did not remember that, in 2004, Trump won a bidding war against Epstein for a Palm Beach mansion, an incident that may have precipitated a falling-out between the old pals; I did not recall that local police began investigating Epstein for sex crimes shortly after the sale, or that, just four years later, Trump sold the property for more than double what he paid for it, to the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. This is what is known, I believe, as the art of the deal.
By now, you might wish to have never remembered reading the above nonsensical paragraph.
The President occupies a kind of negative space in the (available) Epstein files; the volume of ineffectual sniping in his direction, often volleyed from positions of real power, can be perversely flattering to him. In a 2018 e-mail to the journalist Michael Wolff, Epstein mentions that he just spent three hours “with SB,” apparently meaning the right-wing political operative Steve Bannon, “who believes DJT won’t last to the mid terms.”
When Kathryn Ruemmler—the former White House counsel under President Barack Obama who is now general counsel at Goldman Sachs—complained in a 2017 message to Epstein that “Trump is so gross,” Epstein replied that the recently inaugurated President was “worse in real life and up close.” (That’s the best you can do?) During the 2016 campaign, Epstein sent a characteristically all-lowercase note to Peter Thiel which read, in full, “trump delegate? fun.” Later that year, the onetime Cabinet official and Harvard president Lawrence Summers asked Epstein, “How plausible is idea that trump is real cocaine user?” Just imagine: you somehow find yourself in an e-mail exchange with a person who has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting dozens of minors, and the question on your lips is if Donald Trump ever does a little toot. Summers, who is still a professor at Harvard, also sought dating advice from Epstein, who referred to himself in a 2018 e-mail as Summers’s “wing man.”
And that's it with Trump. The only allegation, if one can call it that, is that he somehow inhabits "negative space." The rest of the article has absolutely nothing to do with Trump. So where does this "negative space" concept even come from? It could be, that the New Yorker, once known for quality writing, has fallen so low that ingestion of magic mushrooms could be the answer. Or at least that answer could lay in some sort of "negative space" somewhere in the Phantom Zone.
Oh, and a nomination for the Epstein Slop story of the year.
