An estimated 8 million Americans marched in cities across the country (and around the world) to protest—well, take your pick: War? Affordability? Constant attacks on reproductive rights? Trump’s crazy goddamn ballroom?
Well, that was quick. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly contradicted Donald Trump’s claims about negotiations with Iran. Less than an hour after Trump declared Monday that the U.S. was in talks with a “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME,” Rubio presented an entirely different picture of Iran’s leadership.“We have to see if these people end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they are the ones that have the power to deliver,” Rubio said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’re gonna test it. We are hopeful that that’s the case. There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past.“We always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail. That we are dealing with a 47-year-old regime that still has a lot of people involved in it who aren’t necessarily big fans of diplomacy or peace,” Rubio said. So which is it, a 47-year-old regime or a brand-new one? Iran’s regime hasn’t actually changed all that much—and it certainly hasn’t been replaced. After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed earlier this month, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-line cleric, was tapped to replace him. At the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has only further consolidated power. Still, Trump claimed last week that regime change had already been achieved in Iran, and the White House doubled down in a similarly nonsensical fashion. Former national security adviser John Bolton also disagreed with Trump’s assessment last week. “The faces may change, but the ideology remains the same,” Bolton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The regime will change when the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard are gone, and we’re not at that point yet, quite obviously. But it’s another way for him to say that we have won the objective and therefore are victorious and can leave.”That’s one possible explanation for Trump’s outrageous regime change claims. Another might be that the president just wanted to make a splash before the markets opened. Either that, or Trump truly has no idea who he’s dealing with.
A woman who alleged that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was just 13 years old has had new details about her story verified, following work from the South Carolina–based newspaper The Post and Courier and Substack journalist Ellie Leonard.The anonymous victim was interviewed four times by the FBI in 2019. She claimed to have been sex-trafficked by the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein and sexually abused by a variety of Epstein’s associates during the mid-’80s.These associates allegedly included the president. The woman claimed Trump assaulted her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1984, back when Trump was a New York real estate mogul. She said she bit Trump’s penis after he unzipped his pants and forced himself on her, leading Trump to smack her in the face. This allegation was initially withheld from the Department of Justice’s Epstein files release before being quietly released on March 3 after a storm of controversy.The woman also alleged abuse by a man named “Jim Atkins” during the same time period. Leonard identified “Jim Atkins” as Jimmy L. Atkins of Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, earlier this month. He passed away in 2003 at the age of 69.On Sunday, The Post and Courier uncovered records that confirmed details of the woman’s testimony on Atkins. This included Atkins’s relationship with an Ohio college, his age, his hair color, his general appearance, and details about his employment in Hilton Head, South Carolina.Of course, the validated details about Atkins do not implicate Trump in any way. The White House, and the president himself, have furiously denied the woman’s claims since her testimony was publicly released, falsely claiming that the president has been “exonerated.” But every other detail of the woman’s testimony that turns out to be true gives more credibility to the rest of her story.The Trump administration’s mishandling and smothering of the Epstein files do not exactly give one confidence in their truthfulness. As The Post and Courier reported, 30 pages of files relating to the accuser remain missing from the public view.