Shorn of a Title
A dead man’s leverage, a living man’s anger, a martyred man’s trust. This is who we have become now in 2026, these three. What shall we title ourselves?
*
Jeffrey Epstein. A file that will neither open nor close.
Which contains 3.5 million pages, 2,000 videos, and no indictments. Which took an Act of Congress to unseal and is still not fully released.
Which names the men who flew to the island, visited the townhouse, and stayed the night. Which someone keeps pulling pages from when no one is looking. Which the Justice Department redacted to shield the powerful and strip the victims bare.
Which a sitting president released under coercion and now cannot stop from naming him. Which includes an FBI list of allegations against that president compiled while he was in office. Above which the vultures of history are gathering.
He died of mysterious hands, for mysterious reasons. The cameras went dark. The guards were sleeping.
**
Donald Trump. A 79-year-old man who holds the most powerful office on Earth for the second time and has never once been seen to enjoy it.
Who has never conceded anything. Who has never apologized for anything. Who has never been loved for free.
Who partied with a child trafficker and has never explained why. Who ignores laws of appraisal and assault and accumulates power because nothing else fills whatever is missing.
Who retaliates against anyone who defies him because he cannot let it pass. Who outlasts every wife, every investigation, every prosecutor, and calls it winning. Who won, lost, and won again and is still a victim.
Who is now bombing Iran, defying court judgments, and dismantling the federal government while threatening to cancel midterm elections.
Who is not finished and wants everyone to know it. Who will never be finished. Who does not know what finished would feel like.
He lives in his own preferred hell on earth. The gold is the fire and the brimstone. The emptiness is structural.
***
Abraham Lincoln.
Who lost more elections than most politicians enter. Who married a woman many could not stand and never said so publicly.
Who told jokes at cabinet meetings while the republic was bleeding. Who wrote furious letters to his generals and put them in a drawer. Who sat alone with the math of it, how many dead, and for what, and whether it was enough.
Who freed four million people with a war measure he knew the courts might overturn the moment the war ended. Who sent six hundred thousand men to kill one another to hold an idea together.
Who went to Ford’s Theatre on a Friday night because his wife wanted a comedy.
Who died diagonally on a borrowed bed too short for his legs in a room full of Senators, Generals, Cabinet Secretaries, and Corporals, men whose futures he had saved.
Who trusted in us, during our generation’s time, to finish it.
He died of repulsive hands, for the most evil of purposes. He lived for the most noble.
****
The file is still open. The elections have not been canceled. The work remains. Lincoln faced worse odds than these. He held the idea together with his hands until his hands were gone.
We still have our hands.
What shall we title ourselves?
True. Sad. Poetic. And inspiring – thank you. I will do what I can.