"A Man Named Burn Bag."

     It's called a Freudian slip. Others call it "an unforced error."

     Today at a bill-signing ceremony at the Oval Office (hereafter referred to as the scene of many, many crimes), Donald Trump was fielding questions from the press. One reporter asked him about Kash Patel claiming to have found burn bags containing files on the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. Trump responded by asking,

     "He said what?" The reporter restated his question.

     "Oh, burn bag. I thought you said appointed a man named Burn Bag." The bearded goon standing behind him laughed because dementia is so funny, after all. Then it really went off the rails.

    "Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it's fair and reasonable, I think it will be shown and it should be shown. And I think he feels that way, and I think [Attorney General Pam Bondi] feels that way. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it's great. I think it's really great. The whole thing is a scam. It's a scam set up by the Democrats, and they love talking about it. 

     "You know, if they had anything, they would have done it the week before the election, because they were losing by a lot. If they had anything, they would have done it. They control the file. The Democrats controlled at Comey and all the sleaze bags, every one of them, that you read about all the time. But they control that file. So I would think that if they would have had something in the file, they would have released it about a week before the election. It’s got to be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved." 

     It didn't take very long before those in attendance realized that he was in reality talking about the Epstein files 

     It's becoming more and more obvious that Trump is unraveling as this Epstein scandal is engulfing Washington DC like a dust storm in the 1930s Midwest. And every time the walls start closing in and when it looks as if comeuppance is at hand, Trump acts out the same exact way every time.

     We saw it when Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate that very same topic, Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. When Trump learned that Mueller was put on his trail, he reportedly said, "I'm fucked! I'm fucked!" We saw the same exact behavior when he learned of his two impeachments. We saw it several more times during his four indictments and trials last year, his four arrests, his New York civil trial on fraud charges, during the E. Jean Carroll rape trials. We saw the same thing when Jack Smith was tasked with prosecuting him on two fronts for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol and for stealing classified documents.

     His predictability is wearisome at this point. Like a broken record, he does and says the same things. He resorts to name-calling and insults, lies, makes counter claims without basis, he rages against those just for doing their jobs. One can smell the flop sweat against a high wind.

    Today was another example of that. Lies. Name-calling. And the subject was Russia's role in the 2016 election. Yet Epstein was never far from his mind. One wonders if Trump is visited by Epstein's ghost and the other dead principles when he's trying to sleep at night like something out of A Christmas Carol.

     This is how guilty men think. Trump knows what he's done over the course of his life. He knows he savagely raped Katie Johnson in Epstein's Manhattan townhouse in 1994. He knows he raped other underage females. But it's not guilt that keeps it in the front of his diseased mind because Donald Trump is a sociopath who's incapable of feeling guilt because he honestly feels he can do whatever he wants. The closest he can come to guilt is a vague awareness that others are coming to get him.

     And rich, privileged assholes like Trump are absolutely outraged when public servants tasked with enforcing the law try to take him to task for his countless crimes. Accountability is for other people, especially his perceived enemies.

     But he knows he's on that client list. Blanche and Bondi told him as much last May. He knows he's all over those 300,000 pages of the Epstein files. And if his name is on those files, there are pictures, there are videos. Jeffrey Epstein wasn't just a prolific pedophile- He was also the most successful and sophisticated blackmailer in US history. And a man doesn't amass a half a billion dollar fortune predicated on blackmail without the documentation to use as leverage.

      While writing my novel, The Final Bullet, earlier this year, I wrote a prologue detailing the real-life murder of Joseph Elwell in June, 1920. Elwell was a notorious womanizer and, in the final seconds of his life, Elwell's killer confronts him about raping his underage sister. And Elwell arrogantly says,

     “I remember her now. Yes, she resisted but not for long. And she put herself in that position. No one told her to get into my car, no one ordered her to come here. Women, and girls, often get themselves into… compromising positions and they only realize it when it’s too late. You’ll learn that yourself once you’re a little older.”

     Yes, I was thinking of Donald Trump and Katie Johnson the day I wrote that. Trump was my template for Elwell. In real life, JB Elwell was a cold-blooded sociopath who used and discarded women after he was done with them. One of his own friends even described him as cold-blooded" in his dealings with women. 

     And Trump looked at Katie Johnson and so many others as animals trapped for a canned hunt for rich white men like he and Epstein to do with as they pleased. But behind Katie Johnson's brutal and violent 1994 rape at the hands of Donald Trump, behind the obsession with taking her virginity was the darker, unspoken truth that the 13 year-old Johnson resembled his then 12-13 year-old daughter, Ivanka, who was born in 1981.

     One of the things that gives Trump plausible deniability aside from his rage-filled denunciations is our unwillingness to accept the fact that Donald Trump is one of the most evil monsters in human history. He's an animal, plain and simple. By her account, he raped Johnson and struck her across the face when she cried and worried about getting pregnant and screamed obscenities at her, threatening the lives of her family. When he raped E. Jean Carroll in that department store dressing room about a year or two later, he was in such an animalistic frenzy that he prematurely ejaculated all over her black dress.

     The son of a bitch knows what he did. He knows he broke laws but laws are for little people and Democrats, don't you know? But the awareness of his crimes is never far from his thoughts as is the fear of comeuppance.

     And Trump's unforced error today in the Oval Office is a vivid delineation of that.