FRIDAY: We humans aren't built for this line of work!

FRIDAY, JULY 25, 2025

Trump, Christopher do it again: Everybody makes mistakes. Tommy Christopher just made one.

Also, score a win for Donald J. Trump—a very slimy win.

Below, you see part of a transcript published by Christopher as part of this new report for Mediaite. The transcript includes a flaming misstatement made today by the highly erratic Trump.

It's a flaming misstatement by Trump. Christopher let it go:

REPORTER (7/25/25): Would you offer a pardon or clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

TRUMP: Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney.

But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers. You ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys. They’re all over the place.

You ought be speaking about Bill Clinton, who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

"I never went to the island," the fellow said.  As far as we know, that statement's correct. As far as we know, no one has ever shown anything different.

On his way to that denial, the sitting president had tossed in a different sort of statement. He said that President Clinton "went to the island 28 times."

He made that claim about Bill Clinton. Christopher let it go.

Our discourse has been hounded by this sort of conduct for at least the 33 years. People are dead all over the world because various people, not excluding mainstream journalists, made bushel baskets of such statements over those many long years, and because other journalists happily repeated the statements or chose to let them go.

What does the record actually show? Within the past week, Clinton has said, for the ten millionth time, that he never went to the island in question. 

As far as we know, no one has prevented any evidence showing anything different. For the record, Clinton managed to present this (repeated) denial without adding a bogus claim about the disordered fellow named Trump.

Trump seems to be borrowing his number—"28 times"—from an actual public record, but it's a public record of something totally different. We take you now to a report by FactCheck.org—a report which was published in August 2019, shortly after Epstein's death:

The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories

In the absence of information about how sex offender Jeffrey Epstein managed to die in prison by an apparent suicide on Aug. 10, outlandish conspiracy theories have cropped up across the political spectrum.

Among the more prominent theories are claims that the Clintons or President Donald Trump is somehow involved. Trump himself shared a comedian’s tweet peddling the baseless suggestion that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were responsible.

When a reporter asked Trump about that on Aug. 13, the president said he had “no idea” if the Clintons were involved and referenced trips that Bill Clinton had taken on Epstein’s plane.

It’s true that Clinton had ties to Epstein, a wealthy financier who stood accused of sexually abusing dozens of young girls, and that the former president had traveled on Epstein’s plane. But Epstein had ties to Trump, too, and to other politicians who have been named in recently released court documents.

That's the way the report began, with Trump already peddling bogus accusations. Later on, the report detailed the published information about Bill Clinton's rides on that jet:

The Clinton Connection

[...]

By 2002, after Clinton had left office, the former president began to be listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private plane, a fact confirmed by Clinton’s spokesman on Twitter in July. Between Feb. 9, 2002, and Nov. 4, 2003, we counted a total of six trips; two of them were just one-way flights, though. In all, there were a total of 26 flights taken during the six trips, since several trips included multiple stops.

The flight logs for Epstein’s plane were recently unsealed in a lawsuit brought by one of his accusers. Here’s what we found:

Feb. 9, 2002—Clinton hopped a flight from Miami to Westchester, New York, where he lives.

March 19, 2002—Clinton was listed as flying from New York to London and then returning two days later.

May 22, 2002—Clinton flew from Japan to Hong Kong. The next day he flew to Singapore (by way of Shenzhen, China), where he gave a speech. On May 25, he left for Brunei, by way of Bangkok.

July 13, 2002—He attended a wedding in Morocco and then hopped a flight to New York, stopping in the Azores.

Sept. 21, 2002—Clinton left for a nine-day trip to Africa with actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, visiting Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa. While there, he worked on HIV and AIDS prevention projects, democratization, and economic development. He finished the trip in England, where he addressed the Labour Party during its annual conference. In a 2002 profile of Epstein, Clinton is quoted as saying through a spokesman, “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science. I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” According to the flight records, this was the longest trip Clinton took on Epstein’s plane, and it accounted for 11 of the 26 total flights.

Nov. 4, 2003—About a year after the Africa trip, Clinton took what appears to be his last trip on Epstein’s plane. He flew from Brussels to Oslo, where he had a two-day visit with officials to work on his project to prevent HIV and AIDS in developing countries. He then flew to Hong Kong, by way of Siberia, and finished the trip in Beijing.

Shortly after Epstein’s death, Trump sowed confusion about Clinton’s use of the plane...

And so on from there.

For the record, all these trips were taken before Epstein's criminal conduct became publicly known. In 2019, Trump quickly got busy "sowing confusion," as he's done once again today. 

Now for a look at the record:

As you can see, Clinton was known to have taken 26 "flights," but those 26 flights were part of just 11 "trips." 

Several of the "trips" involved multiple flights around the world in support of the Clinton Foundation's work on AIDS prevention, democratization and economic development. In September 2002, the former president took an extended trip through several continents in support of the foundation's missions. 

That one trip accounted for eleven (11) of the 26 "flights." The trip in November 2003—the trip from Brussels to Oslo to Siberia, then on to Hong Kong and Beijing—also accounted for a substantial number of Clinton's 26 "flights."

He was working on AIDS prevention. Today, as only someone like Trump would do, those journeys were converted into 28 trips to the island—and hapless news orgs around the world are letting his statement go. 

Everybody makes mistakes. Thanks to Christopher's bungle, Mediaite joins the ranks of those orgs.

We've been trying to tell you us something for the past quite a few years. We base our assessment on roughly forty years observing this kind of behavior:

We human being simply aren't built for this line of work! 

We aren't smart enough to do this work, and we aren't sufficiently honest. We prove this again and again and again. Then we prove it some more.

We had actually planned to write about Tulsi Gabbard's latest amazing statement. Before we could accomplish that task, this tired old groaner popped up. 

This sort of thing simply never stops. At present, given the speed of the discourse, there's no possible way to keep up. 

We'll score it as Donald J. Trump's latest win as we move down the road to perdition.