THE SQUALOR(S): Squalor Red and Squalor Blue!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2025

Our nation's dueling squalors: Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, right there in New York City. He was found dead in his prison cell on Saturday, August 10, 2019.

Given the squalor of the time, what happened next was inevitable. In fact, it happened before the day was through. Inevitably, this is what came next:

The sitting president, Donald J. Trump, "used his Twitter account to spread a baseless conspiracy theory" about Epstein's death. Or at least, so said the Washington Post in an August 11 news report.

Instantly, the sitting president had chosen to spread a baseless "conspiracy theory!" According to that poisonous "theory," former president Clinton had somehow caused, or had somehow been involved in, Jeffrey Epstein's death.

Inevitably, that's what the sitting president had decided to suggest. That was the squalid behavior he instantly chose to engage in.

As usual, President Trump was drenched in moral and intellectual squalor as he performed this familiar task. As usual, one of his aides slithered out, working to justify his morally squalid behavior, even as she worked to spread another claim about former president Clinton, a claim which was plainly false.

In the passage we've posted above, we've quoted from that August 11 news report in the Washington Post. Headline included, here's the start of that report:

Trump retweets conspiracy theory tying the Clintons to Epstein’s death

President Trump used his Twitter account Saturday to spread a baseless conspiracy theory about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy and politically connected financier who had been facing multiple charges of sex trafficking involving underage girls.

Trump’s Justice Department announced that Epstein, who was being held in a federal corrections facility, died by “apparent suicide.”

But Trump appeared to disregard his administration’s statement, instead retweeting a message from conservative actor and comedian Terrence K. Williams, who suggested that Epstein’s death might be tied to former president Bill Clinton...

The claim is completely unsubstantiated, and federal officials say Epstein was not on suicide watch at the time of his death.

So began the Post's report about the sitting president's conduct. Later, the report described what Kellyanne Fitzpatrick had said about the president's conduct in an appearance on the Fox News Channel.

For the record, the headline in the Post report refers to "the Clintons" (plural), a reference which went unexplained in the body of the report. Perhaps for sound journalistic reasons, the Post's report never quoted the baseless claim the president chose to retweet. 

In its own new report, the New York Times was perhaps a bit less circumspect. Headline included, the August 11 report in the Times started off like this:

Trump Shares Unfounded Fringe Theory About Epstein and Clintons

President Trump used Twitter on Saturday to promote unfounded conspiracy theories about how Jeffrey Epstein, the financier accused of sex trafficking, died in a federal jail, even as the administration faced questions about why Mr. Epstein had not been more closely monitored.

For years Mr. Trump has brashly—and baselessly—promoted suspicion as fact and peddled secret plots by powerful interests as a way to broadcast his own version of reality. Those include the lie that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and that millions of votes were illegally cast for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Hours after Mr. Epstein was found to have hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell, Mr. Trump retweeted a post from the comedian Terrence Williams linking the Clintons to the death. Mr. Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead,” wrote Mr. Williams, a Trump supporter. In an accompanying two-minute video, Mr. Williams noted that “for some odd reason, people that have information on the Clintons end up dead.”

There is no evidence to substantiate the claim, which derives from groundless speculation on the far right, dating to Mr. Clinton’s early days as president, that multiple deaths can be traced to the Clintons and explained by their supposed efforts to cover up wrongdoing.

So began the New York Times' report. In short: a flyweight comedian / blogger had offered a baseless (and poisonous) speculation about Epstein's death. The sitting president, Donald J. Trump, had rushed to move the morally / intellectually squalid messaging along.

Now for a bit of perspective:

As the New York Times' report correctly noted, President Trump had been engaged in this sort of conduct "for years" as of August 2019. His repeated baseless claims about President Obama's birth had begun in 2011. Through repeated appearances on the Fox News Channel over the course of four or five years, those absurdly disingenuous claims had been peddled to Red America over that period.

Now it was 2019,  and the president was peddling this claim. Soon thereafter, he was asked to explain or justify what he had done. On August 13, Politico reported what he said:

Trump defends sharing Clinton-Epstein conspiracy theory

President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his decision to share a tweet suggesting Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in financier Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide, and stoked speculation about the former president’s relationship with the deceased convicted sex offender.

“The retweet—which is what it was, just a retweet—was from somebody that’s a very respected conservative pundit, so I think that was fine,” Trump told reporters, referring to a conspiratorial message by comedian and commentator Terrence K. Williams, which he re-posted Saturday.

Trump, who has been criticized for promulgating the unfounded theory that the Clintons had a hand in Epstein’s death, said on Tuesday that he had “no idea” whether they played a role in the high-profile prisoner’s demise, and accused former President Bill Clinton of lying about the extent of his air travel on Epstein’s planes.

It was just a retweet, the president said. What could be wrong with that?

He said that he had "no idea" if the insinuation in question was accurate! He had simply decided to retweet the flyweight comedian's poisonous tweet:

So what was the big freaking deal?

As noted, this squalid behavior by this president occurred in August 2019. The final part of the excerpt from the Times report explains why we're discussing it today.

Even then, the Times reported, the sitting president had been "accusing former President Bill Clinton of lying about the extent of his air travel on Epstein’s planes." In the endless hurly-burly which passes for the American discourse, this squalid behavior by President Trump re-emerged with a vengeance this past summer, but then again in the past few weeks.

The moral squalor of this president's conduct would seem to speak for itself. For the purposes of this week's reports, we'll refer to that as Squalor Red.

Unfortunately, Squalor Red has been enabled by Squalor Blue over a period of at least fifteen years. Sadly, the New York Times is deeply committed to that second type of squalid behavior.

A nation is sinking beneath the seas of these dueling acts of squalor. President Trump in deeply sunk in Squalor Red—but what the heck is Squalor Blue, and will it ever end?

Tomorrow: The ubiquity of the whale

Important fuller disclosure: Neither one of these Squalors is ever going to change. This week's reports are being offered for informational purposes only.