Saw this.. by Robert Hawks

"You’ll forgive the candor, but I’ve seen this particular opera before. The overture is dissonant, the soprano’s drunk, and someone has barricaded the emergency exits.

What we’re witnessing is not an explosion.
Not yet.
It’s pressure.
The kind of pressure that builds slowly in a steel drum over a blue flame, hissing, rumbling, waiting for the weakest weld to split like a politician’s alibi.

The MAGA faithful may have been promised a cleansing fire, but what’s rising isn’t righteous fury.

It’s something far more dangerous: expectation laced with betrayal.

My theory, if you’ll indulge it, is rather simple.
Ghislaine Maxwell, yes, her...was sold a dream.
A vile, cynical, and deliciously transactional dream.
That if she kept her mouth shut through her trial, through prison, through the ritual shaming on the cover of tabloids she once hired photographers for, Donald J. Trump would return to power and, at precisely the right moment, make it all go away.

A pardon.
A clean slate.
A golden parachute sewn together with denial and a wink.
And for a while… it worked.

She stayed quiet.
Trump won.
Or claimed he won.
Pam Bondi, Christopher Wray, Dan Bongino, yes, that’s how you pronounce it, like a failed pasta dish, began priming the base.
Whispering sweet nothings into MAGA’s ear about how there never really was an Epstein list, how the whole affair was a fabrication of the Clintons and the liberal elite.

A psy-op.
Smoke. Mirrors.
Because the goal, always, was to prep the battlefield.
To soften the edges of outrage.

So that when the pardon came, wrapped in red, white, and a flaming Twitter post, it would be seen not as complicity but as justice.

But now?
Now the whole thing’s blown a goddamn gasket.
The narrative snapped.

The list exists.
The documentation exists.
The tapes may very well exist.
And Ghislaine, poor doomed Ghislaine, is sitting in her cell doing mental arithmetic with one equation: “If he won’t save me, why should I keep his secrets?”

Trump CAN’T pardon her.
Not now.
Not without confirming every fear, every accusation, every whisper in every basement bar and comment thread in America.

To do so would be to stand on the gallows and wave a flag that says: Yes, I was in on it.

But if he doesn’t?
If he tries to pivot, distract, throw Rosie O’Donnell under a bus or start a war in Patagonia to change the subject, at some juncture soon Maxwell will sing.

Not just warble.
Not just suggest.
She’ll scream.
She’ll torch every bridge and dance in the embers, and the whole rotted scaffolding will come down.

Which brings us to Pam Bondi and the gang.
Up till now, their job was simple: look the other way.
Pretend not to notice the smell from the basement.

But now, to save him, they’d have to start committing active, prosecutable felonies.
Destroying evidence.
Lying under oath.
Obstructing investigations they no longer control.

And here’s the kicker: the Supreme Court may have given Trump temporary sanctuary, but they aren’t protected.
Not even a little.
And they’re beginning to realize, with the exquisite clarity of someone holding a grenade with the pin already pulled, that Donald Trump will let them drown before he risks getting his cuffs wet.

He’s in a LIFEBOAT, yes, but it’s built for eight and he’s armed with an oar, cracking skulls to keep it balanced.

He promised safety, and now they’re treading water, watching him drift away.

And what happens when the frog in the pot realizes the water’s boiling?

Either she gets fried and served with a side of plausible deniability…
Or she jumps.
And if she jumps, she burns the whole goddamn kitchen down…"

*from Robert Hawks, writing for "Democrats, Republicans and Independents Against Trump and Trumpism"

Julie Bolejack, MBA