It's Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025 from Peachfish Productions.

It's The Gist. I'm Mike Peska. And what is reality? Oh, no, you're starting there.

Yes, of course. Because what is the reality of Jeffrey Epstein? We don't know. We think we know that a bunch of people who love Donald Trump think they know

what happened with Jeffrey Epstein. And so a decent enough analysis is there's some cognitive

dissonance among the Trump base because they're blaming him for not exposing what they think

is the reality of Epstein, though they can't know the reality because we don't

know the reality. And then with the learned people who make sense of reality, who maybe we turn to,

people who will say, well, this is the first time that the Trump base is more upset with him than not.

But they didn't do a good job of that. Or maybe they did a great job. But Trump was so adept at

throwing out the MLK

tapes or John Brennan accusations that he distracted them in a way that we couldn't have even

understood. But it doesn't seem such a well-run plan. It seems like garden-level distraction,

and it worked. But the reality sense makers who look at this instance where we don't

even know the reality and tried to say the reality is this will hurt Trump, they were wrong.

Then again, I'm not saying I know the reality or I could have predicted what would happen

with the Republican base turning against Trump. I'm saying it is such a vortex of unreality at the center of it. It's

very hard to correctly predict the real implications of this unreality. Let me give you an

analogy. Schizophrenia. Okay. We have phrases about some of the aspects of schizophrenia, phrases like echolalia or florid

delusions, but we don't really and can never really know what goes on in the brain of the

schizophrenic.

Even the schizophrenic, who's on their medications and can tell you how they feel, they don't

know what is

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