Trending
To the editor:
From Big Brother to Stalin to Kim Jong Un to Putin to Xi Jingping, the quality that defines authoritarians is their supposed infallibility; they can never be wrong about anything. Any story that casts the leader in a bad light is immediately labelled a "hoax" or "fake news."
Trump persists in claiming he won the 2020 election, has pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists and is even floating the idea of reparations for those who were prosecuted for invading the Capitol. Like Big Brother, Trump is trying to rewrite history to say Jan. 6 didn't happen the way we all saw it happen. He persists in backing the anti-vaccine Secretary of Health, RFK, Jr. because Kennedy pushes the narrative that it was the CDC, not Trump, that made mistakes during the pandemic.
Trump originally claimed the 50th birthday card he sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 was "non-existent" and sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for claiming otherwise. Now that the WSJ has produced the card, Trump and cronies claim the signature is not Trump's, though it certainly looks genuine and handwriting experts say it probably is. There's nothing particularly salacious about the content of the card, except perhaps that Epstein and Trump share a secret. But the content of the card certainly gives the lie to Trump's narrative that he scarcely knew Epstein. Is the secret they share something to do with sexual proclivities?
But here's the thing: The card is from 2003, before Trump even went into politics. If the card is a fake, someone went to a great deal of trouble to prank Trump and Epstein. And the thing about pranks is that the prankster always wants the victims to know it was a prank and who did it. But neither Trump nor Ghislaine Maxwell is claiming a prank by so-and-so.
The card reads as genuine; the signature looks genuine, but Trump will persist in disclaiming it because it casts him in a bad light and destroys a narrative he has pushed for years concerning his friendship with Epstein. The supreme leader is infallible; therefore, the card is a "hoax" put forward by his enemies to discredit him. But who, in 2003, wanted to do this?
Ray Clasen
North Fort Myers