Few things better illustrate why there has been a steep decline in the quality of writing at The New Yorker under the editorship of David Remnick than his absurd reaction to finding out that a letter supposedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to convicted serial sex offender Larry Nassar which implicated President Donald Trump in something bad has been determined to be fake.
On Tuesday, Remnick revealed just how sadly his obsession over his Orange Whale has overwhelmed him to the extent that he has laughably lost whatever sense of rationality he might have left as you can see in "Trump, Epstein, and the Women."
For the first several paragraphs the furious Remnick hurled charge after charge against Trump before he touched on the supposedly damning Epstein letter to Nassar:
On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”
The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”
It appears that even Remnick accepts that the Epstein letter is fake. So did that cause him to even reconsider his charges against Trump? Nope. And here is Remnick's twisted rationale: "The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence."
Remnick then digs himself even deeper into a hole by claiming that we don't really need no stinkin' documents since he somehow knows that Trump is guilty... of something:
...As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.
What has driven Remnick's latest descent into TDS darkness has been the fact that like the rest of the left, he had placed his fervent hopes on the released Epstein files implicating Trump in misdeeds. Unfortunately for poor Remnick the Epstein files revealed no such thing which appears to have caused his absurd embrace with sheer irrationality.
The upside to Remnick's irrationality is that it has inspired widespread mirth such as this:
The Nassar letter—genuine or not, it almost doesn't matter in the end!.... Remnick goes all Hitler Diaries on us. https://t.co/llFlyWYm28
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) December 24, 2025
