"Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers."

Reporter: Are you considering a pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Trump: I’m allowed to give her a pardon

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) July 28, 2025 at 6:52 AM

🚨Trump admitted that Jeffrey Epstein “stole” young women working at the Mar-a-Lago spa, including Virginia Giuffre.

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— Republicans Against Trumpism (@rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social) July 29, 2025 at 12:31 PM

I've come to the conclusion that rational people are overly likely to project rationality onto others, particularly in the fields of politics and business. To be clear, assuming that someone's actions are sensible and well thought out is not a bad starting point, but you shouldn't let it blind you to the possibility that the person in front of you is acting out of anger, catharsis, panic, or simple stupidity — particularly when there's a history of one or more of those things.

Rather than look for a secret game plan that explains why the White House has made a string of decisions that only served to deepen the crisis, it probably makes more sense to assume that this is a profoundly dysfunctional group of people acting mostly out of panic.

The past week has given us at least two perfect examples. First, the idea that pardoning the most notorious sex offender currently imprisoned in exchange for testimony that would exonerate Trump to the extent that people would stop asking to see the files is absurd — but fanning the speculation with “I could if I wanted to” sound bites actually makes things worse. At the risk of starting an argument over Occam's razor, rather than looking for a cunning strategy, it's probably best to go with the most obvious explanation here.

Trump says Epstein poached young women from Mar-a-Lago. That raises new questions about what he knew. 

It is also important to consider the fact that Trump is an increasingly confused elderly man with an ever-diminishing attention span with a bizarre compulsion to boast at the most inappropriate times. Some commentators are treating yesterday's comments about Epstein “stealing Trump’s people” as a blockbuster confession. It certainly sounds bad and it could very well indicate that Trump knew what Epstein was doing — but it could also be another bizarre non-memory that the president has been prone to as of late.

Possibly related to the tendency to project rationality onto irrational people is the reluctance of the press to look too closely at extreme craziness. This latter concept was recently addressed by both Josh Marshall and Lawyers, Guns & Money’s excellent Cheryl Rofer.

Here's Marshall [emphasis added]:

A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.

Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.

I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.

And Rofer:

Josh Marshall does something today that’s like what I did a few days ago on QAnon. He takes the crazy seriously. It’s been easy to dismiss Hulk Hogan and his lawsuit or the idea that pedophiles are drinking the adrenochrome of our children. These things are far outside the wildest imaginings of most of us. But the Hogan lawsuit was the product of outside-the-box strategy, and significant numbers of people believe the QAnon dogma or something like it and act on those beliefs. The Hogan lawsuit has distorted journalistic practice, and Donald Trump’s QAnon supporters vote and influence others.

We need to consider how they are thinking. We need to get ahead of Peter Thiel, who was instrumental in the Hogan lawsuit and is now playing multiple roles in politics. He is a mentor to the Vice President and involved in multiple grabs for significant governmental roles via companies he controls. QAnon believers are a significant chunk of Trump’s support.

The reason we need to understand their thinking is to get ahead of them and to develop strategies of our own to thwart and defeat them.

Marshall details why he did not see the Hogan lawsuit as newsworthy. Most of us have ignored the QAnon fictions because they are ugly and bizarre. It’s easy to point and laugh at the people who believe them. But those people now occupy large parts of our reality. The Epstein furor, which is weakening Trump, is a product of QAnon beliefs. The degree to which it is throwing Trump off his game is hard to understand in any other way.