Digested week: Tutting Trump and Maga fans send each other to Coventry

The Guardian

4 hours ago

Rightwing American conspiracy theories often circle the drain of lurid abuse stories. So it was quite a twist this week to see the chickens of this particular rancid online conspiracy culture come home to roost in the form of Maga faithfuls turning on Donald Trump for what the US president now refers to as the 'Jeffrey Epstein hoax'.
Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, killed himself in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, and Trump's conspiracy-hungry supporters are now accusing the president of a cover-up. Specifically enraging to Trump fans is his decision to tread water on releasing the 'Epstein files', FBI files supposedly containing the names of the banker's 'client list', which, last month, Elon Musk suggested Trump himself may appear on.
Until very recently, the Trump administration had been happy to throw meat to the lions by suggesting it would release the files. But in recent weeks the president has dropped that promise and instead recommended that everyone 'move on'. Meanwhile, the FBI issued a memo last week saying it did not have evidence that would justify interrogating further suspects.
Well. Can you imagine? Across the US, the deep-state-is-lying-to-us klaxons went off like tornado warnings and before you knew it, the Maga megaphone Laura Loomer was calling for the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to resign, the Trump ally Steve Bannon demanded the dissolution of federal law enforcement, and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, called the FBI memo a 'cover-up'. Which brings us to the domino run of events this week: Trump coming out fighting against his followers, who he described on Truth Social as 'weaklings' and 'my PAST supporters', who 'have bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker'. And a partial, 11th-hour climbdown when he ordered Bondi to release testimony from the Epstein grand jury. As Trump himself might say: beautiful.
What do tarantulas smell like? Not chocolates, apparently; a useful piece of information to have had at Cologne Bonn airport recently, where news was released this week of a smuggling attempt thwarted by customs officials tipped off by a 'noticeable smell'.
Or rather, the notable absence of a smell: officials inspecting a large haul of cake boxes noted they didn't smell chocolatey, and on further inspection turned out to contain, not confectionery from Vietnam, as the customs paperwork promised, but – what are the chances? – 1,500 baby tarantulas in individual plastic vials.
Many of the tarantulas hadn't survived the journey from Vietnam, which feels like the opener to a dark Pixar movie or the trigger for an odd conflation of responses: revulsion, fear and sympathy.
The 2025 Emmy nominations are in and with them, more importantly, the snubs. At the top of the list is Keira Knightley, overlooked for her role in the very patchy Netflix show Black Doves (notable detail: Sarah Lancashire's bored face in the pilot), followed by Tina Fey's also really quite bad Netflix show, The Four Seasons, overlooked in every category bar a single nomination for Colman Domingo.
Meanwhile, the parlousness of John Hamm's suburban comedy drama, Your Friends & Neighbours, was recognised by Emmy voters with a nod for the theme music and nothing else. But while some media outlets pointed to Renée Zellweger being overlooked for her role in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – which found itself in the TV movie category since it went straight to streaming in the US – this wasn't quite right. For a movie, show or performer to count as having been snubbed, voters must have approached it with reasonably high expectations in the first place.
Crucial to Trump's 'Epstein hoax' about-face seems to be the existence of what, in a story broken by the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper described as a 'bawdy' letter and cartoon, allegedly written by Trump to Epstein on the occasion of his 50th birthday and included in a special album compiled for Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell – names that fall like a fantasy dinner party list but where the object is to assemble the worst people in the world.
It is the Journal's attempt to describe Trump's alleged cartoon-drawing skills that particularly arrests in this new twist: the president's alleged sketch featured the naked silhouette of a woman in which, wrote the Journal, 'a pair of small arcs denotes the woman's breasts,' (the choice of 'denotes', here, really raising the tone), and Trump's 'signature is a squiggly 'Donald' below her waist, mimicking pubic hair'.
The message, meanwhile, allegedly read: 'Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.' And while Trump jumped on Truth Social to call the note a fake and threaten the Journal with legal action, the rest of us could only sit back and marvel at the way life mimics pulp fiction – or rather, Alice in Wonderland, in which the president's difficulties aren't authored by a bold defender of Truth, but by the man who arguably bears more responsibility for his rise than any other: Journal proprietor and sudden hero of the hour, Rupert Murdoch.
In a week of awkward missives, Pat Brennan has resigned from his post as a parish priest in Coventry and marked the occasion with what the Metro described as a 'sassy poem'. In his blog, Humble Piety, the priest posted a verse entry entitled Not I Lord Surely!, in which he blasted parishioners for being, among other things, 'unfriendly', 'disdainful', 'bored', 'gossiping' and 'tutting for a living', and nailed a rhyme scheme in which he paired 'holier too' with 'you know who', and 'Lord's own seal' with 'it can feel'. We can only hope this style of critique catches on.