Last month after convicted felon President Trump ordered US Air Force bombers to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities it was pretty obvious what was going to happen to him politically, domestically after the dust clear and the limited scope of the attack became clear: His fanboys on the Israel-skeptic (using that generously, because a lot of them don’t deserve such generosity) and/or anti-“Neocon” cohorts would more or less get over it and move on to their next bullshit news cycle.

He always finds some way out when his cultists grumble, no small thanks to the MAGA propaganda-industrial complex which always finds a way to make him right and his cause just in the end. Tariffs aren’t a tax on Americans, they’re a means of combatting fentanyl, reshoring American jobs, punishing Brazil for being woke and using their justice system to bring accountability to Jair Bolsonaro, bringing fairness to international trade, rebalancing relationships with trading partners, protecting domestic penguin shit markets from foreign penguin shit producers, and getting Canada to self-annex as the 51st state, depending on what day of the week it is. We’re only deporting criminals, not family-oriented undocumented immigrants, but every undocumented immigrant is illegal so we need to deport them although the farm industry needs the labor but that would be amnesty so we’re just going to deport them until somebody changes his mind again. Elon Musk should be denaturalized, deported, and stripped of all his federal contracts but hey Grok is super cool so let’s sign a new one for $200 million so Defense Department personnel can learn interesting new insights about how Hitler kind of had a point when you really think about it.

It’s not so much that these outcomes were predictable so much as they weren’t terribly surprising.

Like this Politico Playbook fondle piece from Friday about the Orange God Emperor filing his freaking $10 billion lawsuit against Murdoch over the birthday letter article from Thursday:

Fuuuuuuuuuuu-uuuuck you can set a watch to these insufferable dipshits helping the “momentum shift” narrative take hold. But even Playbook slips it in there that they think this is “the shortest of short terms” and “however much more trickles out” about the fat fuck and his fellow “enigma.”

The reaction to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting is EXACTLY the answer to the goddamned stupid question of “Why didn’t Biden and Garland release the Epstein files if they implicated Trump?” Just a complete rejection of the story AND a lawsuit from the fat bastard. That much was unsurprising if not predictable (The threat of a lawsuit was predictable because that’s every goddamned day of the week. Actually filing a $10 billion “libel” lawsuit? Not so much. Will get to why in a bit).

Predictable was that these fucking worms would end up looking even dumber than they did on the day in February when they danced out of the White House carrying these stupid binders, though in what way precisely was unclear. It might’ve been reasonable to expect that whatever was in there was a nothingburger, though what was a bit shocking if unsurprising was that all the info contained within was almost entirely already public. Trump’s contempt for his most loyal minions as displayed in that episode is pretty consistent. “These people cash their paychecks and get their clicks all thanks to him,” an “outside advisor” tells the Atlantic, adding that Trump said the “disloyal” MAGA influencer dipshit class “have forgotten whose name is above the door.” The advisor says “The president has bigger fish to fry, and he’s said what he wants: Move on. People need to open their ears and listen to him,” emphasis theirs on the directive issued to the too-online chodes.

“He’s being tested and doesn’t like it,” a Trump Regime official is quoted in the unsurprising, borderline predictable bit of well-sourced insider reporting. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Only took Grok four tries to get the text right. Pretty good.

Yet for all the familiar beats like everything being fake and made up by Hillary, Obama, Biden, and the revenge firing of a high-ranking Justice Department official named Comey there’s really, really, really no predicting how this ends – if it ever does. Every day of the rest of Trump’s second failed presidency will in all likelihood have him lurching from some different self-inflicted crisis with the overall cloud of Epstein hanging over his head, just like much of the first one did with Putin.

They’re friends forever. It’s not a prediction, just a statement of fact.

COUNTEROFFENSIVE MISCELLANY

Lol at these assclowns writing their headlines from the same, unflipped script. Couldn’t fit them in above, despite the predictability of their narrative. First one first: “The difference between the Republican amendment and the one proposed by House Democrats is that it trashes documents that are unverified or knowingly false. If you wish, you can refer to this as the Steele Protocol – a guardrail against the dissemination of fake news, which would lead to further shambolic stories like the one published in The Wall Street Journal last night,” writes Townhall fanboy Matt Vespa.

Saying that this guy knows full well that description is almost literally fucking EXACTLY how this whole shitshow got started but wrote the words anyway is probably giving him way too much credit.

Definitely giving him way too much credit would be saying that any such legislation would be a useless show vote with no practical implications – much like the ones Democrats are doing now. This isn’t to say applying pressure to get Republicans on the record opposing Epstein disclosure again and again and again doesn’t have its political advantages, but they know, as does everyone who games this out, that in the very unlikely event that such a bill passes both chambers – and the one with thosee bullshit “unverified or knowingly false” asterisks will certainly not get 60 votes in the Senate – there almost certainly won’t be a veto-proof majority. Which would hand Trump any excuse he wants to kill it. “Nope, this is Obama Biden Hillary fake news Deep State coup attempt.”

You know what Congress could do though? Their fucking job and start subpoenaing people and documents. A non-surprising outcome would be that this doesn’t start happening until 2027 if and when Jamie Raskin is the chair of House Judiciary. Jim Jordan will be fun to watch then.

The other Matt with the other unflipped script at Townhall’s sister site PJ Media took the lawsuit angle, going real deep into the six degrees of Russia, Russia, Russia game with “One of the co-authors of the WSJ report, Joe Palazzolo, previously wrote for a publication called Main Justice, which was founded by Mary Jacoby, who happens to be the wife of Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS founder behind the debunked Steele Dossier and the Russia hoax. Both Simpson and Jacoby previously worked at the Wall Street Journal themselves, which tells you everything you need to know about the political rot festering in that newsroom” in a piece that was otherwise light on really anything you haven’t read elsewhere about this lawsuit. Matt Margolis is a particularly emotionally fragile fellow so good to see him being productive after his Zoloft kicked in.

As for the lawsuit, just default to Murdoch ends up settling for a $50 million donation to the Trump library so it can be laundered to buy his shitcoin. You think the regime had Paramount by the balls on the merger with Skydance? A Fox News without access to its beloved orange muse and all of his minions in the regime and his party would be like a higher budget version of OAN.

That’s the likeliest outcome. Murdoch will sacrifice what’s basically the one remaining bulwark of actual decent journalism in his empire to keep the propaganda going. Sure, the Journal will take a big hit from the segment of their readership who come for the political reporting after all their talent fucks off in disgust, but that’s a pittance compared to the Fox News cable viewership. Plus it’s not like the investor class readers are going to give a shit. More space for Titleist ads.

However just gaming it out based on cynicism and past analogues to arrive at this as the likeliest conclusion does not remove any room for speculation on how it could go otherwise: The Murdochs may want to have this fight with Trump. Maybe they sense weakness and want to reassert themselves after a decade of being the junior partners in this fascistic symbiosis. Maybe the entire Journal threatens to walk on them. CBS’s capitulation was a strongarm job while they were vulnerable to Orbanist strongarming. ABC’s was a muddy technical issue about George Stephanopoulos’s words where Trump’s claim just might’ve had legs to get it in front of a jury.

However what the Journal reported this week was NOT a close call. They viewed the letter Trump wrote to Epstein and printed what they saw accordingly. There’s no retracting or apologizing – which you better believe Trump is going to demand as part of a settlement – for real reporting.

Again, the likeliest outcome is that Trump does get the Murdochs to settle, but that’s the only way he wins. He rolled the dice here though. If they don’t forfeit then this is going to get very ugly. Trump simply filing the lawsuit in the first place was a tactical mistake as it helps keep the Epstein shitshow alive in its own eddy, swirling amid the larger current of this very bad news cycle for the fat fuck. If the Journal is given its own autonomy to fight back there’s going to be a discovery and a deposition at some point in the next year or two, at which it’s hard to see Donald not dropping the case and finding some way to declare victory before having to sit and try to avoid perjuring himself.

“We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit,” WSJ parent company Dow Jones said in a statement on Friday night after Trump sued. So they’re not rolling yet. And if they eventually do does then what about the Times? You better believe they’re going to fight as, unlike the other guys, they’re one business and one business alone. There’s no Skydance or Fox News or fucking Disney Cruises tethering them down.

Their reporters are hungry and probably smarting from letting the Journal scoop the birthday letter to Epstein. Maybe hungry enough to break that multiple credible witnesses told the FBI that Trump effed an underage sex trafficking victim after that awesome birthday party.