New York

He is taller than most men, his girth even greater. Thus do all who follow in his trail struggle in the darkness he creates, and perpetuates.

He is wealthier than most, or seems to be. Yet his vulgar mien and the cheapness of his crimes would embarrass a decent gonif.

He has been revealed in cultures high and low throughout the world, and across the borders of time and nation. From the ancient Irish proverb, “Is buaine an cine ná an duine,” to the orotund narratives of Orson Welles for hard-boiled American radio serials of the 1930s: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…”

All sins cast long shadows, as the Irish first told us in the original Gaeilge; sins that range from regrettable to depraved. “Murderers are always punished, unless they kill so many and to the tune of trumpets; then they are rewarded,” as the Russian novelist and philosopher Leo Tolstoy told us in his 1886 essay “Church and State.”  

Now comes Donald Trump—congenital liar, convicted criminal, adjudicated fraudster and sexual assailant, accused child rapist, and president of the United States. See him lurking in shadows that shroud millions of true-believing American “patriots,” as he identifies his devotees by prostituting a once noble word.

Following Mr. Trump’s televised State of the Union address in the final week of February, a ceremonial government custom regardless of who occupies the White House, U.S. Senator Rafael Warnock appeared on air to express reaction to what he’d heard of the president’s near two-hour speech. Donald Trump, said the senator, is a “plague on the American conscience.”

Mr. Warnock—also the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he succeeded the social justice icon Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)—characterized the Trump address as “half lies, half grievances” and the man himself as a “desperate and divisive demagogue.”

George Will, the usually grandiloquent columnist for the Washington Post, issued his terse reaction: Donald Trump, he said, is “a sickening moral slum.”  

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All the more sickening in the wake of what might soon bring devastating light to the Trumpian shadows are these: credible allegations of evil gradually being brought to public attention by the independent journalist Roger Sollenberger.

Late last month, Mr. Sollenberger began his initial phase of sifting through multiple millions of documents contained in the Trump regime’s eponymous Epstein Files—a database of official probes into collusion among the late Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein and his cultivated network of rich and politically powerful men allied with Donald Trump for the purpose of “grooming” female minors for personal and commercial sexual exploitation.

Mr. Sollenberger identified approximately fifty-three pages of F.B.I. investigative summaries and notes that were cataloged by the Department of Justice but omitted from its public database—pages that made mention of Donald Trump’s involvement, in contravention of the congressional Epstein Files Transparency Act that requires public release of a “list of all government officials and politically exposed persons” named. Reluctantly, Donald Trump signed the act into law on November 19 of 2025.

Following is a small sample of Mr. Trump’s many mentions in a tranche of interview forms not withheld, as first reported by the intrepid Mr. Sollenberger:

“…unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in [New Jersey, at Mr. Trump’s golf resort, where his first wife was buried after her death in 2022]. The friend told that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump. …Office to conduct interview…”

At the time of the foregoing alleged incident, Donald Trump was a Manhattan real estate developer, age 44, and a close friend of the late Jeffrey Epstein, who supposedly committed suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting a federal trial in New York on charges of sex trafficking—and while his close friend was two years into his first term as president.

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During his State of the Union address at the Capitol building in Washington, Mr. Trump made no mention of alleged oral sex he allegedly forced a teenage girl to perform—nor how he was sorely penalized for that, allegedly. Nor did he deign to mention or to even look up to see in the guest gallery a delegation of grown women who were child victims of his close friend Jeffrey Epstein.    

Nor did Donald Trump see fit to mention other evils associated with his name and command—

• On February 24, a 56-year-old refugee from Burma, living legally in the U.S., was found dead in a darkened street in Buffalo, New York. Nural Amin Shah Alam had been falsely arrested by a squad of Donald Trump’s thuggish immigration bullies who released him at a coffee shop upon realizing their error. Blind in one eye and nearly sightless in the other, Mr. Alam attempted to find his way home from the coffee shop on foot—a distance of five miles (8.05 km). A curtain rod he regularly used as a walking stick had been confiscated by the federal thugs. 

•  On February 13, two far-right judges reinterpreted federal law that may sweep millions more immigrants into mandatory detention, potentially expanding the mass deportation machinery established by the Trump regime. Their decision for the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would transform the entire United States into a permanent border zone where unauthorized immigrants can be jailed indefinitely without bond—even years after their arrival.

• Meanwhile, the regime is buying up warehouses from coast to coast in a push to build an archipelago of immigrant concentration camps—each lock-up larger than any existing jail or prison in the country. The warehouses, certainly not designed for human habitation, will hold up to ten thousand immigrants each, with little oversight and little recourse for detainees whose rights under domestic and international law are violated. Legal observers at camps already in operation report issues of malnutrition, rampant disease, and sexual abuse by armed guards.

• Thugs employed by Mr. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the paramilitary unit responsible for shooting to death two ordinary citizens of Minneapolis opposed to their brutal conduct, seem to be on a detention rampage. In Minneapolis alone, one hundred-fifty legal observers have been thrown into jails for hours before being released from bogus charges of interfering with law enforcement.

• In Washington, Attorney General Pam Bondi—one of the most earnest and adoring of Mr. Trump’s “patriots”— recently told Congress that her Justice Department has begun compiling a national database of U.S. citizens based on their political beliefs. The purpose? For investigation as potential terrorists.

• Last July, Mr. Trump’s director at the Department of Homeland Security, the heavily botoxed Kristi Noem, claimed to have deported a cannibal. In an interview with Fox TV News host Jesse Watters, she explained that the unnamed cannibal was chewing on his arms while seated during a flight back home to his country of origin. The ever grinning and sneering Mr. Watters asked, “Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” Ms. Noem answered, “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. marshal just said it, like, it was normal (sic). He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”  

Needless to say, the identity of that immigrant cannibal has never surfaced. Ditto the whopper about hungry Haitians peddled by Donald Trump as he campaigned in 2024 for a second presidential term. At that time, he insisted before an all-white Ohio audience that black refugees from the war-torn Caribbean nation of Haiti, invited to work and shelter in the small city of Springfield, are “eating the dogs…The people that (sic) came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that (sic) live there.”

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We laugh at Ms. Noem and Mr. Watters, stars of the American amusement industry that is American television and, all too often, our government leadership. We laugh, though they are not a joke. There is something peculiar about them; I imagine them finding comfort in shadows, where they cannot hear us laughing.

In a previous era, sophisticated Germans laughed at a strutting little man they called Herr Schicklgruber. Neither was he a joke. Something in his eyes flagged evil.

Nowadays when not simultaneously appalled and exhausted by him, we laugh at Donald Trump. But…something in his eyes, and his increasingly puffy face. Eyes as soulless and dead as a dead fish. The face of a floundering man, a fascist who has lost his steel.

Will Mr. Trump get away with his crimes known to date? With his alleged depravities awaiting confirmation? Possibly, quite, for he has made multitudes of us patient to the point of passive. And always, there are the gullible. Still, I respect that we may find comfort in the coming month of June.

Herr Schicklgruber was only 56 when he died in a bunker with his bride, both as hale and snappy as schnitzel. In June, Herr Trump will reach his 80^th year; already, he appears deflated. A small plot of land for a large man awaits him, aside the golf course grave of Ivana Trump, née Ivana Marie Zelnícková of Gottwaldov, Czechoslovak Republic.