New York

On the evening of December 17, 2025, the resident White House criminal* attempted to claim moral and governmental competence in a prime time television address that convinced virtually no one of its merit or import.

Indeed, the speech failed to garner a single mention in the next morning’s print edition of the New York Times—a dearth of coverage that affirmed the journal’s front-page slogan from 1897 onward: “All the news that’s fit to print.”

The roundly mocked and reviled speech was, at best, a thud of exhaustively familiar rhetoric from the forty-seventh president of the United States. At worst, it was one more spear tip chunked into the slowly deflating mylar balloon that is the reign of Donald J. Trump—one more sign of “Donald’s Downfall,” the inevitability predicted four years ago by British journalist Raymond Snoddy.

The speech amplified three concurrent forces leading inexorably to Mr. Trump’s demise, hoped to occur or commence in this new year of 2026:

I.   Public revulsion over Mr. Trump’s commentary following the murders of beloved movie director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner;

II.  Public revulsion over racist cruelty imposed on so-called “illegal aliens” by the most fascistic of Mr. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE;

III.  Public revulsion over Mr. Trump’s rôle as longtime best buddy of the late New York financier Jeffrey Epstein, who supposedly hanged himself in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting federal trial as ringleader of an alleged international sex trafficking operation.

*In May of 2024, Donald Trump was officially declared a criminal when a state court in New York found him guilty on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records to camouflage hush money payments totaling $130,000 (€110,500) to pornographic film diva Stormy Daniels, with whom he snagged a hotel engagement—ahem!—at Lake Tahoe, Nevada while his wife was at home in New York with their newborn son Barron Trump.

One year earlier, a New York federal court ordered Mr. Trump to pay a civil fine of $5 million for sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s by accosting her in the dressing room of a chic Manhattan department store and shoving his fingers into her vagina.

Later, in January 2024, a second New York state jury found Mr. Trump liable for defaming Ms. Carroll by claiming that she had brought sexual abuse action against him in order to gin up publicity in the cause of marketing her book “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.” In that case, the jury award was $83.3 million (€70.75 million).  

Ms. Carroll has not collected on either award, pending appeals filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

Following is a tale of two sex creeps—Messrs. Trump and Epstein. One down, one to go.

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Touted in advance by Donald Trump’s flacks as a “powerful year-end presidential address to the nation,” the big TV event of December 17 was doubtless meant to distract attention from the December 19 deadline for release of a voluminous set of documents related to U.S. Justice Department investigations into the affairs of the late Mr. Epstein and accomplices.

…This in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, adopted with lopsided bipartisan majorities in both bodies of Congress—a vote of 427-1 in the House of Representatives, and by unanimous consent of the hundred-member Senate.    

Mr. Trump’s address was hardly “powerful,” let alone relevant.

 Instead, it was twenty minutes of watching and listening as a sour 79-year-old man regurgitated his many grievances and fantasies by yelling at a stationary TV camera set far enough back from a flag-festooned podium to shield viewers from close-ups of his flapping neck wattles.

Genuine newsworthy events in the days immediately preceding the meaningless monologue were these:

• A shooting on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (two dead, nine hospitalized); the nation’s three-hundred and ninety-third massacre of 2025, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Gun Violence Archive;

• A deadly sniper attack on Hanukkah celebrants in Sydney, Australia (fifteen killed, forty wounded);

• The cold-blooded murder of Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the doorstep of his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline;

• The fatal throat slashings of beloved, Oscar-nominated motion picture director Rob Reiner and his wife at their home in the upscale Brentwood district of Los Angeles, California and the arrest of their son Nick as the alleged killer.

I.  Trump commentary on the Reiner murders

Regarding the first three matters of the foregoing news events, Donald Trump offered pro forma “thoughts and prayers,” allowing also that anti-Semitism seemed not a good thing so far as he is concerned.

He noted, too, that the alleged killer at both Providence and Brookline—Claudio Neves Valente, who soon after died of a self-inflicted gunshot—was a Portuguese immigrant, as was Professor Loureiro. (The connection between the men, if any, remains unclear at this writing.) Had they hailed from anywhere beyond Europe, the sour old man might well have reprised his standard gripe about maniacal, dark-skinned immigrant “murderers” and “rapists” and “garbage people” from “shithole countries” flooding the United States to become burdens on society.

Mr. Trump had plenty to sneer about in the Reiner case, however.

Rob and Michele Reiner were allegedly knifed to death by their 32-year-old son Nick, a diagnosed schizophrenic prone to violence and drug addiction who had been living in a guest house behind the couple’s home. Their corpses were discovered in bloody crumples of severed limbs and shredded flesh by daughter Romy Reiner, 28, who resides across the way from her mother and father’s Brentwood compound along South Chadbourne Avenue.  

Less than twenty-four hours after the murders, Donald Trump acted on a ghoulish impulse to attack the late Mr. Reiner, an Oscar winner who directed twenty classics of popular American cinema—including the comedies “When Harry Met Sally” and “This is Spinal Tap,” and the dramas “Misery” and “A Few Good Men.”

Via a posting on his internet site Truth Social, Mr. Trump dismissed the auteur as “tortured and struggling, but [a] once very talented movie director,” adding, “I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person.”

Further, Mr. Trump suggested that the couple’s politically liberal activism in causes antithetical to his own far-right agenda marked for them a fate foretold: The “anger [Rob Reiner] causes others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME (sic)” has deadly repercussions.

Objection to the president’s swipes and snarks came quickly and plentifully, with some of the sharpest dissent emanating from several of Donald Trump’s very own Republican Party confrères.

Said conservative Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, “I’d expect to hear something like this from a drunk guy at a bar, not the president of the United States. Can the president be presidential? [His post] was gross.“

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky chimed in with, ““[T]his is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about  man who was just brutally murdered. …I challenge anyone to defend it.”

The New York Times’ conservative opinion writer Bret Stephens cleaned up: “Though I think it a waste of space to devote a column to Trump’s personality—what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man?—sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”

NOTE: While awaiting trial for murder, Nick Reiner is in solitary confinement at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, where he is under suicide watch.

II.  The cruelty of Stephen Miller & ‘ICE Barbie’

It is apparently not enough that masked brutes employed by the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency—men (and a few hirsute women) who swagger about à la gladiators of America’s professional wrestling circuit—now roam the streets of our cities ever ready to spring into action at the sight of brown skin or the sound of Spanish language.

Actions such as the indiscriminate arrests of non-English speaking workers in steamy restaurant kitchens and the blood-slicked floors of meat processing plants, beat-downs of Latino day laborers gathered for hiring show-ups outside construction supply stores, and terrorizing children as their parents are chained to the steel benches of prisoner transport buses and spirited away to detention camps or off-shore torture facilities.

…Even the federal immigration courts are targeted by gung-ho ICE crews. All too often, asylum seekers lined up to appear before judges in the process of gaining legal resident status are slammed to walls, handcuffed, and hauled away.

No, all this is not enough cruelty and humiliation to satisfy Donald Trump. Or his two highest ranked brutes in the matter of immigration policy—

• Stephen Miller. The president’s deputy chief of staff, father of immigrant family separation practice and a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. through airports. He is an ardent promoter of “The Camp of the Saints,” a French novel published in 1973 that depicts “the end of the world [caused by] a brown invasion of refugees.” In a 2023 media interview, he spoke of an “immigrant invasion” that will “decimate” America, adding, „We are being conquered…This is a complete resettlement of America in real time… a generation from now people will not know the country that they are living in.“   

• Kristi Noem. Due to her habit of accompanying ICE thugs on their detainment rounds in glamorous full face cosmetic makeup and gleaming hair extensions that cascade from beneath her twill cap, the toothsome Ms. Noem is known in social media as “Ice Barbie.” Before arriving in Washington from her home state of South Dakota, where she served a term as governor, Ms. Noem famously shot to death her “untrainable” puppy dog, named Cricket, and her “disgusting, rancid, and nasty” goat. In her autobiography “Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland,” Ms. Noem wrote that her willingness and ability to perform such „difficult, messy, and ugly“ work as an animal killer qualified her for top-level government leadership—such as her current position as the Trump-appointed boss at the Department of Homeland Security, where ICE is a division of enforcement.

With Christmas ’25 came the latest in official ICE public relations: an AI-generated video depicting Santa Claus as an enforcer togged out in the requisite bullet-proof vest, Glock 9-milimeter sidearm, and shackles at the ready as he prepares for a day’s work of rounding up desperate Latinos and Africans for disappearance. According to the cheerful video voiceover, those fleeing dangerous countries of origin for the dubious safety of Donald Trump’s America are advised to self-deport in order to “Avoid ICE Air and Santa’s naughty list!”

Messrs. Miller and Trump, along with Ms. Noem, may not yet understand that their zeal to detain, deport, and disappear immigrants is not morally acceptable. According to a survey by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute, sixty-seven percent of American adults find the president’s immigration policy repugnant. Ridiculing immigrants’ misery with Santa Claus jibes seems not to be effective public relations.

Yet the beat goes on. According to figures from Ms. Noem’s department, formal deportments of undocumented immigrants numbered 605,000 last year, with another 1.9 million persons who self-deported; hundreds of thousands of both groups had spent decades living and working in the U.S., paying taxes, and striving for citizenship.

Of the combined 2.5 million immigrants who have been forced out of the country, a mere handful were found to have committed crimes, or civil offenses greater than traffic violations—never mind Mr. Trump’s assurances that his thugs had pursued and expelled only “the worst of the worst.”

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III.  Finally…Jeffrey Epstein

Come the Deadline Day of December 19, few if any Americans were surprised that Mr. Trump’s sycophants at the U.S. Department of Justice failed to deliver on what they had long promised to produce—and then, after a protracted political struggle what they were mandated to produce, in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Public Law No: 119-38.

The act, passed by Congress in November 2024, requires full release of the government’s investigative documents that expose sex crimes committed from the 1990s into the early 2000s by Donald Trump’s longtime bosom buddy, the late Jeffrey Epstein.

… Crimes quite possibly countenanced by a future president who, despite lies to the contrary, enjoyed Mr. Epstein’s frequent hospitality at his mansion on Manhattan’s exclusive east side, where bevies of very young women and girls as young as thirteen years of age were regularly on hand for the lurid enjoyments of rich and powerful men.

The “available” women and girls—nudge nudge, wink wink—were groomed for their jobs by Jeffrey Epstein’s lady friend and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite currently serving a twenty-year prison term for her participation in Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise. During Ms. Maxwell’s trial in a Florida federal court, it was revealed how she won the confidence of vulnerable women and girls by mentoring them toward her elegant ways and ever so gradually into sexual servitude—and how she partnered with Mr. Epstein in sexual congress with them.

Per transparency required of the act, the names of Mr. Epstein’s guests and clientele are to be made available in a searchable data base for anyone with a computer. Redactions are limited to the names of Ms. Epstein’s female victims and survivors. There are to be no redactions of client names.

None of these requirements were fully met on deadline day.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ultimately responsible for full disclosure of the photographs, documents, and interview transcripts contained in the Epstein Files. In dribs and drabs, she has released some sixty-thousand pages from the files thus far—pages that are heavily redacted in contradiction of the clear standard set under the transparency act, and largely containing much of what has already been reported in media. In several cases, names of Epstein survivors and victims remain unredacted, likewise contradicting the standard.

As many as a million more pages discovered only weeks ago—Oops!—remain to be evaluated by Ms. Bondi’s staff.  

Meanwhile, the two members of Congress who sponsored the transparency act threaten to seek either prosecution or impeachment against Ms. Bondi for willfully disobeying Public Law No: 119-38. If convicted by a jury on a charge of obstructing justice, Ms. Bondi could face up to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of $100,000 (€85,000).

Donald Trump is also subject to impeachment and removal from office for, among several other things, his part in defying the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Articles of impeachment have already been drawn up and are set to be introduced either this year or in January 2027, when the House of Representatives, in the view of prominent political experts, will flip from majority Republican control to leadership under the opposition Democratic Party.

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During the holiday weeks of late December, we heard tidings of good will everywhere, in a whole new manner reflecting two shades of optimism: cheerful regards for friends and family, and a happy confidence that “Donald’s Downfall” was near at hand.

The exact expression, heard day after day on the New York street: “Merry Christmas, and may he be gone by this time next year.”

Perhaps the sentiment was heard in Washington as well; perhaps by the attorney general herself, whose face, like the president’s own, grows more haggard by the day. And despite his bluster, surely the listening president realizes our profound disgust with him, at long last.

As for us, we hear fury and sadness and crazed angst in his Christmas Day internet posting:

“Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country (sic)…and the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT (sic)…”  

Despite his crudeness and his volume, perhaps the president senses quiet finality as in “The Hollow Men,” the 1925 poem by the American-born poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). Perhaps he sees by the poem’s ending line what is soon to come for him:

“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

                                                                                                                              Thomas Adcock, U.S. correspondent

New York
tadcocknyc(at)gmail.com
www.thomasadcock.com

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