Tariffs, Trolls, and Texas Showdowns: The Week That Shook U.S. Politics

Trump just detonated the global economy. His new tariffs hit over 90 countries and could cost your household $2,400 a year. Meanwhile, the New York Times is laughing all the way to the bank. Subscriptions and ad revenue are way up thanks to names, games, gossip and generative AI lawsuits. And here's the real national emergency. Americans, especially kids, are getting over half their calories, that's right, over half from ultra processed garbage food in Texas. It's not just political theater anymore. Democrats are on the run and are facing bomb threats, FBI calls and potential expulsion, all for protesting Trump's gerrymandering map. And finally, Epstein memes are now a democratic weapon. From Muppet videos to meme bots, the left is finally trolling like the right and Trump's base is not laughing. All that and more today. All right, lots of fun coming up today. A lot of big stories. Appreciate you joining me. I'm TJ Walker. This is the Communiverse where we look at the top business stories, technology stories and culture stories of the day and analyze it through the filter of of communication skills, all with the goal of building your personal success. That is what we're all about right here. So I appreciate you joining me today. We have lots and lots of fun for you. Let's delve right into the first story. Trump's tariff tsunami hits 90 plus countries. Economists warn of $2,400 cost to U.S. households on average. This is according to the New York Times. President Trump's sweeping new tariffs took effect just after midnight, hitting more than 90 countries and pushing the average U.S. tariff rate to more than 18%, the highest level since 1934. Trump says it's about fairness, jobs and American manufacturing. But economists say Americans are about to feel the pain in their wallets and at the checkout line. Nations like Brazil and India are now facing tariffs as high as 50%, while Taiwan and dozens of others face 15 to 20% import taxes. Some countries cut last minute deals, including the eu, Japan and Vietnam. But the details are murky at best. Trump also floated a 100% tariff on on foreign semiconductors unless companies like Apple invest more in U.S. chip production. So there were some exemptions there. Meanwhile, economists are sounding the alarm. Yale researchers estimate the average US household will pay an extra, yeah, 2,400 bucks a year. And Moody says the country may be entering a stagflation esque slowdown, sluggish growth and rising prices. Trump insists costs are way down and unprecedented growth is coming. But hiring slowed sharply in July and businesses are already burning through Stockpiled goods. The New York Times. That's it for right now on this story. So what's the real message here? The message is Trump is saying to the world, hey, we're the richest country in the whole world. We're doing better than everyone else, and that's not good enough for us. So we want to stick it to you countries that are not doing as well, and we really don't want your business because we think we can go it alone. Well, that's a message that may play to one person and the followers, the cult members of that one person, but it's not flying around the world. True. We're not in a depression right now. The economy hasn't fallen into a crater, but growth is slowing. And make no mistake about it, you are going to feel it in your pocketbook and in your wallet. So let's dig deeper. Trump has been consistently sending a message that he's the big guy in charge. He's the big dear leader. He's like the North Korean leader, only for the whole world. And if he says black is white or white is black, you better step to it or there's going to be trouble for you. Now, make no mistake about it, if you're a mobster in New York city in the 70s, you can get away with that. You just whack people who don't do what you want. It works at a local level. If you're in charge of 10 blocks of Brooklyn, you can get away with thuggish behavior. But a lot of Americans have to realize it's a big world out there. And not everyone is going to get down on their knees and say, oh, please, Mr. America will do anything. You're so great, we'll do anything you want. Just tell us what to do. The world has some people like that, but not the countries that really count, not the major trading partners, the G7 nations, the economies that are most thriving, that they don't have to take our abuse. And make no mistake about it, that is what's going on. It's one thing to abuse a poor Democratic congressman or a Republican congressman who won't vote your way and sort of take him out. That happens all the time. And in the United States, Trump can get away with it because he has almost unlimited domestic political power, but it's not translating around the rest of the world. Yes. So people are giving into him. They're making these agreements that, oh, we're going to invest $600 billion in your country and have our private sector companies do it. Wink Wink, nudge, nudge. Yeah, there's some of that. But make no mistake about it, it's not really happening at any major significant level. And the United States is isolating itself. It's not just about saying, we don't want to buy your products. We don't want you to sell your products to us. It's about saying, we don't want your people to come visit our country because we might throw them in jail or send them to alligator Alcatraz while they're here. It's about saying, we don't want you to send your best and brightest students to study at our universities to get PhDs in artificial intelligence. We don't want you anymore because we're so good. Although our own native gene pool is so good. That is the message coming out of Washington these days and it shows a complete misunderstanding of everything that made America great. What made America great is we were the place that took the brightest minds from anywhere in the world and said, yes, come to our universities, come to our colleges, start businesses here. You don't speak English, that's okay, come. And we trust that you'll learn, you will add to the economy, you will make our economy bigger and better. And you know, it has worked. If you just look since the Great Recession 2008, look at what's happened to the United States economy versus the European Union. Our economy has grown 40% larger than theirs same time period. Part of it is we are more open to people, open to flows of information, ideas, cultures, languages than a lot of countries in Europe where you could be there 200 years. If you don't look exactly like the people who were there a thousand years ago, you are seen as not a true citizen. United States wasn't like that. And it's a shame and a travesty that we are headed in that direction. So I am not at all excited about these so called tariff deals. It is true, many prognosticators thought that by now with Trump being in office for seven plus months, we would be in a full scale recession. I never predicted that. It hasn't happened yet. But we are seeing signs of economic slowdowns, we are seeing signs of unemployment dropping up, of rising and I think that's only the beginning of it. Now, can the United States free market system survive Trump this year, next year, maybe even three years? Sure. But the question I regularly pose to you here is what if he doesn't leave in three and a half years? I know the Constitution says you can't serve more than two terms, but the One thing we can all agree on with Trump is if he sees something written down that doesn't give him what he wants, then he's happy to ignore it. He's happy to find judges that will tell him what he wants to hear. He's happy to just call that fake news. And he's happy to rewrite history, rewrite policy, rewrite the Constitution if it gives him more power. And I don't see any through line. I don't see any scenario where him leaving office in three and a half years benefits him. I mean, he's never gotten richer than this first six, six and a half months of his tenure. So it's not like he's going to make more money out in the private sector. He's merged the private sector, his own private sector with the public sector in arguably the most corrupt political regime not in the history of the United States, I would argue in the history of the world. At this point, when you look at the massive scale of his corruption, make someone like Putin blush, absolutely blush. We're going to be following these issues not because this is a political talk show, but because we focus on major economic stories, business stories, technology stories, and when you put a tariff on every country in the world, there's really no other way of talking about those issues other than the underlying force, which is in fact these tariffs. So we're going to be following this in the weeks and months to come. Issue 2 this is a little more positive and upbeat. Arguably the New York Times revenue surges nearly 10% in digital growth and ads fuel the climb. According to the New York Times, the company's revenues jumped 9.7% in the second quarter, driven by a sharp rise in digital subscriptions and ad sales. The Times added 230,000 digital only subscribers, pushing its total base to 11.88 million. Prince subscribers dropped again, no surprise, to 580,000. But digital advertising soared up to 18.7% with big growth in gaming, sports and the athletic, which finally turned to profit. There were some legal costs to $3.5 million tied to its lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI. But it also quietly signed a licensing deal with Amazon to provide AI content. The Times is forecasting even stronger digital subscription growth next quarter. And after years of media contraction, it's one of the rare legacy outlets riding the AI wave straight to the bank. So what's the real message here? If you are a media organization and you create high quality content that people all over the world like and respect and need, you can thrive. The New York Times is a case study for that. Unfortunately, that doesn't do anyone any good. If they want to know, is their local school board ripping them off? Is their local county commission robbing them blind? That's the problem with this new media world we live in. The rich are getting richer and the New York Times is rich. But the poor aren't getting poorer, they're being driven to bankruptcy. Let's dive a little deeper here. If you are trying to run a media company, you could certainly learn a lot from the New York Times. I mean I study them every day, I subscribe to them and I'm one of their paying digital subscribers. And it's one of the few media organizations I do feel like, okay, I really have to pay them. It's essential to get their information every day. Are they perfect? No. But they're doing a lot of things really well in constantly launching new products. In my own household, my 12 year old daughter loves the the Strands game. It's one of these word games you play. We play wordle every day. That's given them tremendous growth. And then when it comes to giving as fair as you're going to find any place else, news coverage of major stories of the day, again, they're not perfect. I defy you to really make the case of anyone. That's different. Now if you have an extremist, extremist ideological perspective, can you find someone to tell you what you want to hear even more? Sure. But to honest, fair minded people, I think you're going to have a hard time finding an organization on a whole variety of issues. Give a fair take if they're US based. Are there other great media organizations in the world? The BBC, London Times? Yes. So what's the real message for people who are trying to follow media companies? You have to have a strong, strong voice in a lot of different ways and have a number of things going on. The New York Times, it no longer has what I consider the greatest bench of op ed columnist. They kind of treated Paul Krugman very shabbily last year. He left now has a fantastic substack column which I read every single day. But still, the New York Times does have a lot of interesting op ed columnists. I would argue the Maureen Dowd's of the world, the Thomas Friedman's of the world. Maybe they should get the Biden treatment of okay, past your prime time to retire. But still they do have a lot of interesting thinkers across the ideological spectrum putting forth opinions on a regular basis. Their straightforward news coverage, again not perfect, but is second to none. Their sports coverage through the athletic is outstanding and they continue to give solid journalism every single day. Their podcasts are exploding. I listen to Ezra Klein's podcast from time to time. He's one of the, he was one of the great innovators in the blogging World World 20 some years ago. He's continued to ride that way. And as top tier guests, they've got a lot of great podcasts, they put out a lot of video content. Their, their podcast are in a video format. So yes, you still think of the New York Times as a newspaper, but they are like everyone else these days. They are a multimedia, multimedia platform where they're creating content in text, digital, audio, video, every format. And what they're doing is of interest to the entire world. So that in a sense makes it much easier than a local newspaper in Cleveland that's trying to do the best coverage of what's going on in Cleveland. What we're seeing here in the media world is kind of a mirror of what's happening in the larger economy where you've got a winner take all mentality and a reality in professions like law. You've got a lot more people graduating from second tier, third tier law schools can't even get jobs. And if they do get jobs, it's not even enough to pay their, there's their debt service. Meanwhile, you've got superstar lawyers making five, sometimes $10 million a year. You see it in the journalism world of high priced authors who have a certain level of fame. You see the podcasting world where the Joe Rogans of the world are making sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And 97% of podcasters are making nothing or at least less than $3,000 a year. So we're seeing this in so many places around our economy. The media is one of them. And the New York Times is a beneficiary of it. In this particular place, they're a good media outlet, as good as it's going to get in the United States. I hope we live in a world that will continue to have a New York Times. If you want to start your own media company, it's not that you have to be like the New York Times. It's very difficult doing original reporting and investigative reporting. You, you can't do it without a gigantic financial base, advertising base, subscriber base. But as I just share with you the numbers, the millions and millions of subscribers, they've never had a larger, not just readership, but listenership and viewership. Whatever you do, you've either got to go big if you're doing something that's covering a lot of issues or you got to go narrow and big deep if you want to make it in the modern media world. I'm TJ Walker. 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CDC says over half of US calories now come from ultra processed foods. According to a new CDC report, Americans are getting 55% of their calories from ultra processed foods and that number jumps to nearly 62% for children. The worst offenders? Teens and young adults aged 12 to 22. Among adults, those aged 19 to 39 consume the most at 54.4%. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Has tied ultra processed food to rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. His Make America Healthy Again commission is calling for schools and parents to step up. There's a small silver lining. Since 2013, ultra processed calorie consumption is down slightly, but only by 2 to 3%. Nutrition experts are calling for less marketing of these products to kids, changes in school meals, and better parent education. But as long as processed snacks are cheaper, flashier, and everywhere, the numbers won't budge. Okay, I don't mean to sound like I'm saying Kennedy's doing a good job on this issue. He's okay. But that is more than offset by all the horrible things he's doing with vaccines. So what's the real message here? Once again, top scientists, researchers in the world are telling us, stop feeding yourself processed garbage all the time. You're killing yourself, you're killing your kids. We're actually seeing average life expectancy go down rather than up, which is a first that we're seeing in the last hundred years other than times of war. And at the moment, they're not even any huge pandemics. We're eating ourselves to death. And we can point fingers at Washington or here or there. You're going to have to take responsibility for yourself. I'm sorry. Because politicians are not going to protect you. This the number one way to protect yourself. When you go to the grocery store, look at a label. If it's got a label, don't buy it. Buy real food in the produce section, in the seafood section. If it's got 10, 20, 30 ingredients. If it's got a lot of o S e at the name of the chemicals, don't buy it. And do this. Drink more water, not more sugar. Water and garbage. That's the real message here. Okay, let's dig a little deeper. I did a story like this just the other day. And yeah, you see stories like this from time to time. The problem is most of us see these stories out of the corner. The oh, yeah, yeah, junk food's bad. Meanwhile, chip corn chips and Doritos and hey, but it's a party. Or, hey, it's someone's birthday. Hey, it's the weekend. I'm on vacation. If you go looking for an excuse to eat processed food filled with lots and lots of sugar, processed sugar, artificial sugar, fat. Artificial fat, dyes, chemicals, processed carbide. If you're looking for an excuse, there's few guarantees in life. But here's a guarantee I will give you. You're gonna find an excuse to eat whatever the heck you want today and every day because it's a holiday somewhere. What's the old expression? It's five o' clock somewhere. I might as well start drinking. It's great that you might not have an alcohol problem. That's fine. But don't kid yourself if you say, well, I never drink before five. But you're eating junk food all day long and you're drinking cappuccino lattes with 10 ounces of sugar in it. What you're doing to your body is as bad or worse than if you drank booze all day long. It really is. So don't kid yourself. We see these stories. It's been twice this week that I brought it to you. The problem is, okay, you're hearing about it twice this week for a minute or two, but every single day, thousands of times, literally thousands of times a day, you are being bombarded with a Coke ad, with a billboard, a McDonald's golden arches as you drive down the highway. A. You might see an ad right here on this page that I can't control even though I try to keep fast food ads off of my content. It's on every webpage, it's in Gmail, it is on Google, it's on Facebook. You're going to see ads all day long. It's on billboards, it's on the blimps that go over you. Every single day, you are bombarded by about 10,000 marketing messages. In general, thousands of those are for junk food. If you doubt me, the next time you watch any kind of live sporting event, just count how many things are they selling you that are really about highly processed, highly processed food. I understand almost all food has some processing. If you roast or steam a piece of broccoli, that's processed food, but it's so lightly processed, it's not doing any damage to you, it's not harming nutritional value. But if you take that same piece of broccoli, dip it in breadcrumbs made of Oreos, deep fry it, and then pour chocolate sauce all over it. Yeah, at least to some people, that will be tastier. It's going to be tastier, but it's going to be so extraordinarily processed, it's going to be bad for your cholesterol, it's going to be bad for your heart, it's going to be bad for everything. And it's certainly going to be robbed of any nutrition that can help your body. And that's really the problem we face in the modern world. It's two positive messages reminding you don't eat junk food. And of the 10,000 messages you day, probably 6,000 of them are encouraging you to eat some form of highly processed garbage food. Again, I don't mean a simple piece of corn with a little salt and pepper on top of. That's processing of sort. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the highly, highly processed, the fried, the processed carbohydrates with that bliss point magic moment of it melts in your mouth. When it melts in your mouth, you can't stop eating. Which means you got to buy more. Which means the producers and the shareholders of lace Potato Chip Co. Get more money. Good for them, bad not only for your waistline, but for your heart and your longevity. So please, do what you can to just not buy junk food. Look at your grocery cart and ask yourself, do you truly want your body to be constituted from the junk you put in your shopping cart? Chances are, no. That is the perfect time, and I mean the absolute perfect time to get rid of it is don't put it in the cart in the first place. Once you've bought it, brought it home, and it's sitting on the counter, the battle's over. The fast food companies have won. The junk food companies have won. They're more than happy to have you practice all your mindfulness and all your willpower tips. If you buy their food first and just get it in the refrigerator, just get it in the counter, they're like, okay, do whatever you want. Fool yourself. Maybe you can go a day without eating this, but when it's there, someone in your family is going start munching more, getting more of an addiction and buying more. That makes them richer and you less healthy and more likely. Unfortunately, two literally die. Democrats face bomb threats and legal attacks as walkouts escalate. These are Democrats in Texas. According to the New York Times, the pressure on Texas Democrats who fled the state to block redistricting has exploded. It is just off the charts. After receiving a bomb threat at their Illinois hotel, many of these Democrats now face calls for FBI arrests, threats of removal from office, and even criminal investigations. Attorney General. The Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is targeting walkout leader Representative Jean Wu for removal. Governor Greg Abbott wants the Texas Supreme Court to vacate wu's seat. And Beto o' Rourke's group, Powered by People, is under investigation for allegedly funding the walkout. Democrats are holding strong for now, hoping to outlast the special session. But if even a few of the 54 Democrats return to the Texas Capitol, the GOP gets the quorum they need. Meanwhile, Republicans are ramping up the pressure, not just legally, but politically. Cornyden and Paxton are locked into a Senate primary and trying to out tough each other. National Democrats are using the moment to push back on redistricting nationwide. But this standoff could shift quickly from political drama to courtroom showdown. So that's what's going on in Texas. What's the real message here that the Texas Republicans are sending Democrats and America? The message is this. We don't care about democracy. We have power. We have a lot of power. We now want all the power, and if it's not nailed down, we're going to steal it. Now, the whole issue of gerrymandering is, let's say you've got a state that is 60% one party, 40% another. What you can do is put all of the people in that one party in a few districts where it's a hundred percent, and then give, say, 45% of that party of all the other districts. So you get, you have a situation where one party may only have 55, 60% of the voters, but they're going to get 95% of the members of the House of Representatives. It's obscene, it's absurd, it's not democracy, but it is how the totalitarian mind thinks. So that's the bottom line of what the real message here. Let's go a little bit deeper. This is being pushed by Trump. It's being pushed from the White House very similar to what he did in the 2020 elections where he called up the Georgia election supervisors. Get me another 11,000 votes. He's now telling Republican leaders around the country, get me more members of the House of Representatives. Because there's only a handful more Republicans than Democrats in the United States Congress by every traditional metric, no matter how successful a presidency you have, no matter how popular you are, and this is not a popular president, he's actually the least popular president at this term in his office than any modern recorded president in terms of public polling. So it would be normal for someone in this political situation to lose a dozen or two House members. For someone this unpopular, it's more likely to lose 30 or 40 seats. So Trump in this regard is no dummy. He's like, I could really lose. Once I lose control of the House, my legislative agenda is gone. Plus they might start doing their duty and actually impeaching me. Now he's not worried about being convicted by the Senate, really, no matter what happens. But I don't think he really wants to watch the United States House of Representatives hold hearings, especially about, you know, who, Jeffrey Epstein, and impeach him on that. And they certainly could in early 2027 if the Democrats regain control of the United States House of Representatives. So that's what's what's going on here. It's a way to bypass democracy. It's a way to bypass accountability. It's a way to bypass the will of the American people. And Trump is very upfront about it. He's like, whatever the norm of decency held by all political parties and certainly by Republicans, Democrats in the last hundred years, let's take that norm, ball it up and throw it in the garbage can. That is, is his mentality. And he's telling his henchmen in various state capitals around the country, you do the same. And if you can steal 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 members of the House for me to become members of my cult, please, please do so. In fact, I order you to, or I'm going to condemn you otherwise. That's the message coming from Washington now. And to be clear, nobody's a 100% purist on this issue of how you draw lines for who gets what congressional districts. There's, there's always going to be someone who feels like they were left out or they were discriminated against. And yes, it's true, Democrats have sometimes drawn lines that were more favorable for them, but nothing, absolutely nothing that could compare to the current proposal in Texas, where they would essentially eliminate not one, not two, but five, five Democratic House seats. That would be extraordinary to see that kind of change happening. Now, Governor Newsom of California saying, well, I'll fight back. And you're seeing the governor of, of Illinois do the same. In fact, he is currently sort of housing and protecting the Texas Democrats who fled to Illinois. But now we're seeing something that is really new. This, this whole issue of members of one party leaving a state to prevent another party that dominates the state Capitol from having quorum. That's been done before. There's nothing new about that. And it's an extreme tactic, but often an extreme tactic in reaction to an extreme measure. But what's new here is the Republicans say we're just going to simply remove you from office. That is new, that is dangerous, that is anti Democratic, it's authoritarian, and it's the, the stuff of which 1930s fascism was made of. And we're going to be looking at this more and more closely. In the coming days. But it's. It's getting ugly, my friends. It really is. I'm TJ Walker in this show. What I try to do is analyze the top business stories, technology stories, media stories, and culture stories. Analyze it through a filter of communication skills in order to help you become a better communicator to be more successful in every aspect of your professional life as well as personal life. That's what we're about. More in a moment after these commercial words.

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It's not just smart, it's personal. Okay, welcome back. Democrats go full meme mode on Epstein and it's making Donald Trump squirm. According to the New York Times Magazine, Democrats are now using memes Parody and just down and out mockery of Donald Trump in a way that is, is unique for Democrats. The Republicans have been really, really good at that for quite a while and now they're getting a taste of their own medicine. More on this in just a moment. Okay. The Democrats are now using memes, parody videos and trolling tactics usually associated with MAGA to pressure Trump over his associations with Epstein. They're, they're being very upfront about it. They are being attacking and I got to tell you, I'm enjoying it. Best of all has been the boys at south park and some of the, some of the, some would say cruel things they are doing to Donald Trump. Let me give you a few more facts of what is going on here. This is according to New York Times Magazine, Democrats are now using all of these tactics. Representative Hank Johnson posted a surreal guitar parody accusing Trump of covering up Epstein file. So not just some Hollywood creator, this is a member of Congress, Hank Johnson. The Lincoln Project released a viral Muppet style video showing Trump on Epstein's jet. It's bizarre, it's crass, and it's racking up millions of views. The bot account at Trump Epstein bot taunts Trump daily with the same post. No, a reference to his failure to release the Epstein files he once promised. Even mainstream Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders have joined the call for transparency. And while some voters may cringe at the tone, others are thrilled to see the left finally fighting back, using the same playbook. For a party that's often accused of being too serious and too slow, this marks a striking shift. And for Trump, it may be the rare meme war he didn't start and cannot control. So let's, let's talk about this a moment, friends. Donald, you could say, well, this isn't fair, this isn't nice. Let's not forget Donald Trump's entire rise to power came by spreading conspiracy theories. He was the guy who spread the theory that Barack Obama wasn't a real American, wasn't a legitimate president, was not born in America, did not have an American birth certificate and was born in Kenya. That's how Trump really rose on the national political scene. It was a lie. It was proven to be a lie. He was told it was a lie and he said, I don't care. It's getting me applause everywhere I go. So I'm going to keep doing it and keep doing it because I just love attention. And he didn't stop there. There have been very few major conspiracies in the last Decade, he hasn't trumped up and pushed further out into social media, especially if it somehow could make a Democrat or a liberal or progressive or a centrist look bad. The odd thing is he continued doing that even with Epstein, given the fact that nobody has a closer association, known association with the pedophile Epstein than Donald Trump himself. And what I find fascinating is Trump is the master at changing the narrative. He's the master at changing people's focus, getting them to give attention to what he wants. Normally says, oh, you think this is bad? I'm going to do something ten times worse here. He hasn't been able to do that this time. Causing massive tariffs. Yeah, maybe change the topic the headlines for a few hours. Threatening to take away Rosie ODonnell's citizenship. Okay, that changed the topic for about five minutes. Telling major league football teams and baseball teams they have to go back to using offensive mascots. You probably forgot that I almost did that. Changed the subject for about five minutes. It just keeps coming back. And it's the rare, rare issue where the people who love Trump more than anything, the true, true cult members, also love conspiracy theories more than anything. So they just love this idea that Epstein was the center of this world where all these elite people got around to do things like destroy the water system with fluoride and create vaccines that kill people. And then they spent all their free time having sex with children and molesting children. To so many of Trump's base, that is almost a religious principle. And Trump promised him, oh, we're going to release the files, we're going to show you everything. He didn't do it and he's lied. It's not just that he's lied about it, because that's kind of baked into everyone's assessment of Trump. So the one thing anyone can agree on, any fair minded person, left, right, center, Trump lies about everything. The problem for Trump has been the lies change every single day about Epstein. I mean, at one point it was almost like I never even heard of the guy. And then it was like, oh, I didn't think highly of him. Not a classy guy. And then it was like, well, when he got these charges, I backed away from him. And then it was, well, we had a falling out over a real estate deal. And then it was, no, that wasn't it. I didn't like him because he was poaching my employees. And then it was like, well, he was inappropriate towards one of the members of my club. And then it turns out it was really okay. I had a, a hot 16 year old working for me at Mar A Lago and Jeffrey Epstein took her and turned him into, turned her into one of his sex slaves for years and she eventually killed herself. Virginia Giuffre, I'm talking about. So the story has changed every single day. That's not how you get a scandal to go away. And that has been Trump's strategy and it hasn't worked. And it leads not just me, but other fair minded people to ask what's different about this? Because here is a guy who you convict him of 33 felonies and he's like, bring it on, give me more. I got nothing to hide here. I love it when you guys do this. Makes me look good. He's not bothered by traditional law enforcement and having the name of felon on his record, something that would make most people ashamed and slink off the public stage forever. He wasn't bothered by that. He's not been bothered by accusations of all the fraud he's committed in his own career. He wasn't bothered by the fact that he caused an insurrection, was basically guilty of sedition. A police officer was dead because of the January, the January 6th riots that he fomented back in 2020. So blood on his hands, killing indirectly a police officer. You got no problem with that, seem to be proud of that, abusing women. You know, some 20, some women have accused him of abuse, harassment, sexual abuse over the years. They're all liars. And I like being able to go into, to the dressing room of the young girls at the Miss Universe in this Team USA contest, no problem. That didn't bother him. But suddenly something about Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, I don't want to be associated with it. Hardly ever knew him, not my kind of guy. It makes you wonder what did he do that was worse than all these others? And back to Eugene Carroll. Let's not forget a judge basically said, okay, we're not officially convicting him of rape. But in so many words, by most people's common definition, that's what occurred. He sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. That didn't seem to bother him at all. He said, oh, bring it on. She's just trying to sell books. I'm going to keep trashing her no matter what. That didn't seem to bother him. So it makes you wonder if committing felonies doesn't bother him. And now he's so bothered by this Epstein association, the Epstein files and what's in it. If he's so bothered that, then logic would lead you to deduce it's got to be worse than garden variety 34 felonies. It's got to be worse than stealing government documents. It's got to be worse than fomenting a civil war against your own country, which he did January 2nd. It's got to be worse than physically assaulting and by some people's definition, tantamount to rape. It's got to be worse than that. So what are the things that are worse than all that? I mean, I don't think he murdered somebody with his own bare hands. I don't think that. I don't think he is guilty of necrophilia or bestiality. I mean, those to some people would be worse. I don't quite, I wouldn't rule it out, but I, I don't see him as guilty of those things. So what's something like that? Is it possibly pedophilia? I mean, that is the number one thing Jeffrey Epstein is known for. And let's be clear, let's define things. There is pedophilia of having sex with someone who is a child and has not developed sexual organs. That is the standard, most classic definition. And then there's sexually abusing someone who society deems it does not have the mental capacity to make independent judgments, even if they are physically advanced and of a mature, mature physicality. So presumably someone 17, 16 might not look like a child. But our society has determined that when it comes to adults having sex with their children and they're off limits. That's the rule. And if you do that, you're guilty of, of sexual crimes and assault and acts of pedophilia. Now, is it implausible to me that Trump would kill someone or murder someone or be involved with necrophilia or bestiality? I gotta tell you, that doesn't seem very plausible. Is it plausible that on Epstein island or Mar a Lago or a jet somewhere or a party somewhere, the guy known for loving young ladies and lovely ladies on the young side, Jeffrey Epstein, a few 17 year olds kind of slipped in for the big, big, big party nights and Trump was there. I don't have any dip. I have no proof of that, but I have absolutely no problem imagining that and finding that to be a highly, highly plausible scenario. Why? L. You may say, T.J. that's crazy. Then tell me why else is he acting so embarrassed by this? Why is this issue different from every other crime he's ever been accused of? I would love to know, so please let me know. Post your comments, post your thoughts. And I do want to thank you for joining me today. My name is TJ Walker. This is the communiverse. We will be changing names soon. It's most likely going to be filtered with TJ Walker. The concept is we are filtering the news through the lens. Communication skills and personal development skills to make you a better person. And the main lesson behind this last story is you have to live your life with integrity. And you cannot simply tell people, hey, this stuff I've been talking about, every conspiracy I always jumped on to get attention. Now I can't do that. There's at some point you cannot defy all logic and fair play. It will come back to bite you at some point. I'm not saying I believe karma always rules. Always. But at some point you can run out of luck if your entire business model, financial model, political model is how can I smear people anytime I want, take advantage of anyone and just hope people give me sympathy when the wagons have circled around me. That's the real lesson here. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me. I will see you tomorrow.