Why the Epstein Mystery Won't Die, Cuomo's Doom Ride, and Fur Flies in my Own House

Dan Bongino’s refusal to come to work on Friday after a showdown with AG Pam Bondi over the non-release of the Epstein files is yet more evidence that the FBI’s deputy director is a tattooed snowflake. We already saw him whining on Fox & Friends about how “I’m in there at 7:30 in the morning,” and “I stare at these four walls all day in DC,” an activity others might call having a job, like the ones occupied by all those fired government workers who, as Michael Lewis, author of the bestseller Who Is Government? put it, they were not “deep state bureaucrats,” but rather “mission-driven smart people who could make a lot more money in the private sector,” until they were bounced by DOGE. One feels Bongino is now dying to be fired himself to get back his me-time and will soon be granted his wish. Like most capos, Trump—who is clearly furious with Bongino for refusing to toe the nothing-to-see-here line about Epstein—knows how to weave a deadly vagueness into his fulsome expression of confidence in the deputy FBI director. During a press gaggle at Joint Base Andrews on Sunday evening, when he was asked if Bongino was still on the job, and whether they had spoken recently, Trump replied, “Oh, I think so…Dan Bongino, very good guy. I’ve known him a long time. I’ve done his show many many times [in the old days, when he was a loyal podcaster]. He sounded terrific, actually. No, I think he’s in good shape.”

Rave On

You have to feel for Bongino. Bloviating about conspiracies from your basement is so much more lucrative and ego-gratifying than wrestling with knotty executive decisions about protecting the U.S. from terrorism and foreign espionage, based on a worldview grounded in facts and meticulously gathered and corroborated intelligence. Bongino said wonderingly on Fox News in June, “I’m not paid for my opinions anymore…I’m paid on evidence,” which is especially awkward when your prior career was promiscuously trafficking in lies and online waste products and rumors, undermining the, yes, evidence-based work of the FBI.

One of the more compelling parades of sound bites I have heard recently was on Kaitlan Collins’s CNN show Monday night, which featured MAGA podcasters and rebels frothing and fulminating about Bondi’s and Trump’s betrayal. There was also a 2023 Epstein conspiracy flashback featuring a wild-eyed Kash Patel, now FBI director (who authored four books, three of them written for children, trashing the DOJ). Viewed one after another, Patel, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Candace Owens gave an unsettling picture of America unhinged. Truth arsonist Alex Jones, with his buzz-saw voice and crazed expression, ranted last week, “As populist nationalists, commonsense conservatives, whatever you want to call us, Christians, we are not falling to Jedi mind tricks and gaslighting [on Epstein].” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warned that the case was a “red line” for MAGA, which could blow “pretty big” blowback if the Trump White House does not share the mythological haul of Epstein dirt.

But it was anti-vaxxer and antisemite Candace Owens who voiced a central, deadly expression of MAGA doubt that may carry a kernel of good news for the silent majority, aka sane people. Addressing Trump with wounded sincerity, Owens said, “What is happening now is it seems like you think your base is stupid. That's how I feel. I feel like Trump thinks his base is stupid.” You do?

Could this be the moment when MAGA splits asunder, not because they believe Trump has betrayed them about Epstein, but because they are finally catching up to the fact that Trump has always thought his base is stupid? It’s been his superpower for a decade, knowing they will believe anything he tells them (“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”) and never hold him accountable. An old-school cable guy, he’s never watched a MAGA podcast that wasn’t shown to him on the phone of Natalie Harp, the devoted groupie aide who has been known to run behind his golf cart at Mar-a-Lago with inflammatory clips and ego-boosting news print-outs. But even if he doesn’t watch these podcasts, he’s smart enough to appear on them.

Now, he’s taking the faithful for granted, minimizing one of their core conspiracies, the existence of an Epstein pedophilia ring of billionaires and U.S. government officials along with a thousand hours of child sexual abuse videos, and sweeping it under the Reagan-era rug Trump had reinstalled in the Oval Office. Trump is dropping bunker-buster bombs on Iran, pledging “billions of dollars” worth of arms to Ukraine, and making menacing noises at MAGA good guy Putin about tariffs. Fox favorite, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, whom Trump nominated for ambassador to Germany during his first term, called that idea a “new peak of disappointment.” (Students of Trump’s MO will know the carefully chosen 50-day ultimatum to Putin to come to the peace table actually means “never” or “we’ll think of something later,” something Putin well understands).

Trump has started to fancy himself a president MAGA doesn’t recognize any more. This dawning realization is more traumatic to them than Trump realizes. It could induce a mass nervous breakdown, similar to disorientated citizens of East Berlin, when suddenly awakened to what was really happening on the other side of the wall. The MAGA movement is built around the self-affirming belief that Trump is the president who sees its raw, real, superior value in a world where the elite who run it never did. Their anger, as the truth sinks in, will be ugly to behold.

Time Warped

When I saw Andrew Cuomo across the dance floor of an A-list Hamptons party the other weekend, I couldn't face undulating over to make nice to him. The former governor was supposed to be the man of the hour, fresh from a triumph in the NYC mayoral election the week before. Instead he represented a graveyard of hopes to all of the many Democratic donors in the room, smiting their brows over cocktails about the victory of socialist social media genius Zohran Mamdani. “I don’t understand. I gave him so much money,” one prominent Cuomo backer mourned, as if the mayoralty of New York were his to buy, like a Birkin bag for his wife. (Former Mayor Bloomberg alone kicked in more than $8 million.)

Now, Cuomo's announcement that he’s running in the mayoral general election as an independent is one more reason to self-deport to Europe. However corrupt Eric Adams may be (and a Trump stooge to boot), at least he looks as if he’s having fun when he’s out and about, whereas Cuomo has the air of a man on his way to a colonoscopy. Whatever he says now about “hitting the streets…to hear the good and the bad,” Cuomo’s whole body language communicates that he thinks the mayor’s job is beneath him. He’s depending on the same old go-to ghouls of Democratic politics—bloodless endorsements by the hotel and gaming, local service employees, and FDNY unions, and the trumpeted backing of brand name billionaires like Bill Ackman, Daniel Loeb, and Ken Langone. When the Queens Democratic party endorsed Cuomo on March 30, everyone at the 150-person event was required to wear a wristband in case a protester got in to ask the former governor of ten years an awkward question. With 100% name recognition, he spent $16 million on TV advertising and mailings, while the audience he needed to convince was scrolling the practically free, irreverent, inventive social media of Mamdani. If 79-year-old Trump understands the power of connecting digitally IN HIS OWN VOICE, why can’t Cuomo?

For the bitter ex-governor, a swing through City Hall simply represents a cleanup of his disgraced reputation for his Times obit. When asked by someone I know why he was running for mayor, he replied, “it’s too easy.” Cuomo would surely be the perfect foil to 33-year-old political novice Mamdani, except, as it turned out, the high-energy, all-over-the-five-boroughs Mamdani was the perfect foil to a pallid candidate whose photo ops always seem to take place in front of a $10 million piece of art in an Upper East Side donor’s home. Those urging Cuomo to run again—his equally remaindered brother, his stale cadre of exiled operatives now back on the job, the old customers of his gubernatorial favor bank—are as much to blame as the Biden bootlickers for this retread of campaign disaster.

When will the Democratic establishment tear off the bubble wrap? Whatever you think of Mamdani, he just proved it can be done, at least in this round. Now we hear that billionaire big head Bill Ackman is shoveling his wealth into the mix again, pledging a quarter of a million to the Adams campaign. I have yet to be told why I should care what Bill Ackman thinks about anything. However I will concede that, with Cuomo back haunting the house, everything points to voters succumbing with a sigh to giving Adams four more years of red sauce dinners with his shady cadre of cronies at Midtown’s Osteria La Baia.

Fur Flies

It’s been some time in Fresh Hell since I updated the news on how the love of my life, my daughter’s upstanding, patriotic English bulldog, Gimli, is getting along with my two supposed-to-be beguiling black kittens, Hocus and Pocus, acquired via a Quogue listserve, in the hopes they would all bed down together in a comforting furry, familial heap when Gimli came to visit. Little did I know that Hocus and Pocus would turn out to be the devil’s spawn. They spend all their time plotting mayhem against anyone who crosses their path. Why did I pay no attention to the fact that their father’s name was Lucifer and their mother had one eye? They are not felines.They are hellions. One of their more disturbing tricks is to leap out of the laundry basket, making a terrifying spitfire noise that turns the stalwart Gimli into a rampaging minotaur.

This problem, I am glad to report, has been solved by unexpected events. A friend came to stay at the beach last week, bringing her two tearaway rescue dogs, who responded to the first hissing salvo by Hocus and Pocus with a full-scale bombing raid, racing round the living room, barking and biting as the cats raced for safety under my chest of drawers. When all was quiet, I went to see where Gimli had spent this traumatic twenty minutes. Content to be out of the fray, she was snoring happily in her crate with her tongue out. Crammed in behind her were Hocus and Pocus, whose small, snakelike heads slowly appeared like periscopes. Gimli might be an infidel, but she is their dog now.