The Lincoln Logue The Epstein Files Earthquake & Trump's Stochastic Terrorism
CJ Penneys (Charles Penneys)
The country spent the week watching federal power move through cities like a storm system—aimless on the map, precise in its damage. Charlotte woke to unmarked cars and men in tactical gear, a theater of fear staged hundreds of miles from any border but close enough to an election to feel intentional. Federal agents smashed windows, tackled residents, and left naturalized citizens clutching passports just to buy pastries, while Washington insisted it was all routine. DHS picked a blue city, branded it “Charlotte’s Web,” and spun the narrative that danger lives wherever immigrants do, even when every statistic in the city says otherwise. Businesses shuttered not because of crime, but because the government created the conditions of panic it claims to be fighting. And when the people of Charlotte asked why they had been chosen, the answer came disguised as policy but sounded unmistakably like punishment.
Elsewhere, the political temperature rose with the precision of a controlled burn. Trump’s approval plunged to a new low as voters rebelled against grocery bills that refuse to come down and a White House that keeps shifting its story on Epstein like it’s adjusting a spotlight. A federal court in Texas struck down a racially engineered map drawn to manufacture Republican victories, a rare moment where the law acknowledged the distortion instead of rubber-stamping it. Then the president accused Democratic lawmakers of sedition for reminding service members that they must refuse illegal orders, escalating rhetoric into something far closer to menace. And all of it unfolded while Congress forced his hand on releasing the Epstein files, exposing a panic inside the administration that no amount of spin can fully conceal.
By week’s end, the country felt suspended between the government we have and the one it keeps threatening to become. Federal agents roam cities like political props, the president talks about execution on social media, courts block maps drawn with precision bigotry, and public trust sinks faster than prices rise. Even the promise of transparency comes wrapped in threats of selective secrecy and weaponized investigations. Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Let’s get into the week that was.
▌If the administration can’t find disorder, it manufactures it.
Charlotte learned it was the next target in the administration’s immigration sweep the same way the public did: through panic, not planning. DHS called the surge a crackdown on “criminal aliens” even as the city’s crime rate has fallen and local officials were kept completely in the dark. Agents in camouflage poured out of unmarked SUVs, tackling residents like they were reenacting a scene no one asked for. A naturalized citizen had his car window shattered despite holding a REAL ID, a moment that said more about the operation than any official statement. And businesses closed their doors because the greatest threat wasn’t crime — it was the government itself.
https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/the-lincoln-logue-the-epstein-files