<....Yesterday, Trump said that his personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, had a productive meeting with Putin in Moscow, leading the U.S. president to return to his original plan to end the war: a summit. A third White House official told me that Trump has informed European leaders that he wants to meet with Putin as soon as next week in a new effort to get a cease-fire. A Kremlin spokesperson accepted the White House offer but said its details needed to be finalized. Trump also told European leaders that he would potentially have a subsequent meeting with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the Kremlin did not immediately agree to that.

One of the officials told me that Trump is still considering how and whether to directly punish Putin if Moscow doesn’t hit tomorrow’s deadline. The U.S. does little trade with Russia, so direct levies would be useless, and the West Wing is divided as to the merits of slapping secondary sanctions on nations that do business with Moscow. Trump signed off on sanctioning India this week because, the official told me, he was already annoyed at the lack of progress on a trade deal with Delhi. But he is far more leery of sanctioning China—another major economic partner of Russia’s—for fear of upending ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing.

Witkoff’s visit to Moscow came just days after he had been in Gaza to urge Netanyahu to ease a blockade and allow more aid and food to reach Palestinians. Although Israel agreed this week to allow some more food in, the humanitarian crisis has not abated. Trump, who badly wants the conflict to end, believes that Netanyahu is prolonging the war and has told advisers that he is wary of Israel’s new push to capture Gaza. Even so, officials told me, Trump is unlikely to break with Netanyahu in any meaningful way.

Any president, of course, can be vexed by events outside his nation’s borders. Trump’s superpower at home has long been to command intense loyalty from fellow Republicans. Yet that power might be hitting its limit. He was able to pressure the GOP to pass his One Big Beautiful Bill last month, but some Republicans, seeing its shaky poll numbers, have already tried to distance themselves from it; Senator Josh Hawley, for instance, has said he wants to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts that the bill, which he voted for, included. And lawmakers who are trying to defend the bill are facing voter anger. Representative Mike Flood was loudly heckled by a hostile crowd at a town hall in his Nebraska district on Monday. One of the White House officials told me that the West Wing has told House leadership to advise Republican members against holding too many in-person town halls.

Then there is Epstein. Trump has desperately wished the story away. He feels deeply betrayed by his MAGA supporters who believed him when he intimated during the campaign that something was nefarious about the government’s handling of the case, and who now have a hard time believing him when he says their suspicions are actually bogus. The president has snapped at reporters asking about Epstein, told House Speaker Mike Johnson to send Congress home early to avoid a vote on whether to release the Epstein files, and sued his on-again, off-again friend Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had sent Epstein a lewd birthday card in 2003. Murdoch hasn’t backed down. Neither have a number of MAGA luminaries and Republican lawmakers who keep demanding to see the files.

Trump’s own efforts to manage the story have only fed it. His account of why he and Epstein had a falling-out two decades ago has shifted multiple times. One of the White House officials and the outside ally told me that advisers have told Trump repeatedly to stop saying he has the right to pardon Epstein’s former partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking and related offenses, to avoid drawing more attention to his previous friendship with Epstein. Despite hopes that the story would dissipate over the August recess, the White House is preparing for Trump to take more heat from Republicans in the weeks ahead.

Some Trump allies still believe that the president, even as a lame duck, will keep Republicans in line. “Having survived Russiagate, Hillary Clinton, two impeachments, four trials designed to put him in jail, and two assassination attempts,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told me, “it’s unlikely the current situation will be much of a problem.”....>

<....The White House also pushed back against the idea that Trump is in a perilous moment. “Only the media industrial complex and panicans would mischaracterize this as a challenging time. They simply haven’t learned anything after covering President Trump for the last 10 years,” the spokesperson Steven Cheung told me in a statement. “The successes of the first 200 days have been unprecedented and exactly what Americans voted for, which is why this country has never been hotter.”

But others in the party sense signs of trouble. “He’s spending the political capital he’s accumulated for a decade,” Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and on then-Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, told me. “Below the surface of the Republican Party, there’s an intense battle brewing over what a post-Trump GOP looks like. And that surfaces on issues like Israel, the debt, and Epstein. How Trump navigates that fight over the remainder of his presidency will be a big test.”

There was a time, years ago, when August could be counted as a slow news month in Washington. That’s now a distant memory, in no small part because the current president has an insatiable need to be in the news cycle. In August 2017, while Trump was vacationing at his golf club in New Jersey, I asked one of his senior aides why Trump had declared that he would deliver “fire and fury” on North Korea. The aide told me that Trump was looking to intimidate Pyongyang—but that he was also annoyed that he hadn’t been the central storyline on cable news. The bellicose rhetoric worked: Suddenly, Trump had changed the news cycle.

In this particular summer of his discontent, Trump is again trying to regain control of the political narrative. But his efforts have been more haphazard and less effective: a threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship, a revival of the “Russia hoax,” an announcement of a new White House ballroom, even a walk on the West Wing roof. None of those things changed the news cycle; instead, they only reinforced that, at least to some extent, he is at the mercy of events outside his control.

Trump has long believed that he can create his own truth, often by telling the same falsehood over and over again. He seems to be trying that tactic again too, especially with the economy. Trump’s response to the disastrous July jobs report was to assert, with no evidence, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had incorrectly reported the statistics to hurt him politically—and then fire the commissioner. That sent a chill through the markets and the business world, which need reliable statistics to function, and sparked fears that Trump will try to bend other government data to his whims.

When it comes to his own political standing, Trump is also trying to create his own reality, seeming to will away the challenges he faces. In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, he insisted that he has “the best poll numbers I’ve ever had,” claiming that his approval was north of 70 percent. But that number represented his approval among Republicans, the interviewer told him. In fact, his overall approval rating is hovering at just about 40 percent. When corrected, all Trump could do was call the whole thing “fake.”>

This featured two men, one of whom was bald, with man number one rubbing the head of the other and proclaiming:

<That bald head feels as smooth as my wife's ass.>

<A new psychological study has found that people who report favorable views of Donald Trump also tend to score higher on measures of callousness, manipulation, and other malevolent traits—and lower on empathy and compassion. The findings, based on two large surveys of U.S. adults, shed light on how personality traits relate to political beliefs, including support for Trump and conservative ideology. The research was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Malevolent personality traits—sometimes called “dark” traits—include tendencies such as manipulativeness, callousness, narcissism, and a lack of empathy. These traits are often captured by concepts like psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, which together reflect a general disposition toward exploiting or disregarding others for personal gain.

People with stronger malevolent traits may be more comfortable with aggression, dominance, or cruelty and less likely to value fairness or kindness. These tendencies are associated with lower levels of affective empathy (concern for others’ suffering) and, in some cases, higher levels of dissonant empathy (enjoyment of others’ pain). In contrast, benevolent traits reflect the opposite—a disposition marked by compassion, humanism, and a belief in treating others with dignity and respect.

The researchers conducted the study to better understand the psychological traits that underlie political ideology, particularly support for Donald Trump and conservative beliefs. Prior work had already linked conservative ideology with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, but the researchers hypothesized that malevolent personality traits might also play a role—especially given Trump’s rhetoric and behavior, which often display dominance, callousness, and disregard for social norms.

They were especially interested in whether support for Trump was associated with higher malevolent traits and lower empathy, and whether benevolent traits might predict a more liberal or non-authoritarian outlook. The study aimed to clarify how these personality dispositions relate to political beliefs and what this might reveal about the deeper psychological dimensions of ideology.

“This paper was several years in the making, starting as a result of the 2016 election, and was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” explained study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas.

“Also, there is a large literature on personality and ideology (e.g., low honesty-humility associated with conservative ideology), but only recently have there been studies on malevolent personality (e.g., callousness, narcissism, Machiavellianism) and ideology. More critically, few studies have examined the associations between benevolent (affiliative) personality and political ideology. Finally, many studies in this area tend to statistically control demographic factors, but we sought to examine how the associations between personality and ideology might be moderated by gender or minority status.”

To investigate these links, the researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of over 9,000 participants from the United States. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website.

Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy. Political ideology was assessed through questions about general political orientation, preferences for military versus social spending, support for gun control, and evaluations of Trump’s first term as president. The researchers used structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows for the testing of relationships between multiple variables at once, while accounting for measurement errors.

In Sample 1, the researchers measured social dominance orientation (the belief that some groups should dominate others), right-wing authoritarianism (support for conformity, obedience, and traditional norms), and psychopathic traits. In Sample 2, they added measures of broader malevolent traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) and benevolent traits (humanism, faith in humanity, Kantian respect for others). Empathy was also assessed in the first sample, distinguishing between its emotional, cognitive, and dissonant forms.

The findings consistently showed that people who identified as politically conservative—and especially those who rated Trump’s presidency highly—were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits....>

<....In the first sample of men, all three predictors — social dominance, authoritarianism, and psychopathic tendencies — predicted conservative ideology and favorable views of Trump, but only for white participants. Among men of minority status, psychopathic traits were not significantly related to political ideology. This suggests that the psychological pathways to conservatism may differ based on racial or ethnic identity, possibly due to different experiences with social power and marginalization.

Support for Trump was also associated with distinct patterns in empathy. Compared to those who did not support Trump, Trump supporters reported lower affective empathy (less emotional concern for others) and higher dissonant empathy (greater enjoyment of others’ suffering). These differences held even after controlling for age, education, and racial background.

In the second, larger sample that included both men and women, the researchers focused on how broad personality dispositions—benevolent versus malevolent—related to political beliefs. They found that people who reported stronger benevolent traits, such as valuing the dignity and worth of others, were more likely to hold liberal views and reject Trump. In contrast, people who reported more malevolent traits—such as manipulation, selfishness, and emotional coldness—were more likely to support Trump and identify as conservative.

While both men and women showed this pattern, the associations were stronger for men. In other words, malevolent traits were more predictive of conservative ideology among men than among women. Women in the sample tended to score higher on benevolent traits overall and lower on malevolent ones.

Those who viewed Trump favorably reported higher levels of malevolent traits and lower levels of benevolent ones. In other words, Trump supporters scored higher on traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—which reflect manipulativeness, entitlement, emotional callousness, impulsivity, and antisocial behavior—and lower on traits such as humanism, faith in humanity, and Kantianism, which reflect compassion, belief in others’ basic goodness, and a commitment to treating people as ends rather than means.

These differences were not explained by other factors such as age, income, education level, or minority status. The authors concluded that personality traits linked to callousness and self-centeredness may shape how people engage with politics—and in particular, how they relate to the Trumpist strain of conservatism.

One of the study’s most striking findings was the consistent link between empathy and political orientation. While people across the political spectrum are capable of empathy, the results suggest that those on the political right—especially those aligned with Trump—may experience and express empathy differently.

Supporters of Trump were less likely to feel concern for others’ suffering (lower affective empathy) and more likely to enjoy or be indifferent to others’ distress (higher dissonant empathy). Importantly, these differences were not found in cognitive empathy. Trump supporters were just as able as others to recognize emotions in others—they simply appeared to care less, on average.

The new findings align with earlier research showing that Donald Trump’s political appeal has been especially strong among individuals who endorse authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump supporters stood out from supporters of other Republican candidates not because they were more submissive to authority or resistant to social change, but because they were more likely to endorse the use of aggressive tactics and hierarchical worldviews that place some groups above others....>

<....The current study builds on this by suggesting that these ideological patterns are not just political opinions—they are rooted in deeper psychological dispositions, including lower empathy and stronger malevolent traits like callousness, narcissism, and enjoyment of others’ suffering.

“Consistent with emerging research, our findings suggest a link between malevolent (aversive) personality and conservative political ideology, which in our study included positive view of Trump, and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably,” Neumann told PsyPost. “Further, people who view malevolent political figures favorably also report less empathy for others and enjoy the suffering of others.”

“We also found that benevolent (affiliative) dispositions were associated with a liberal political ideology. All of these findings are bolstered by the use of a strong measurement invariance approach, indicating that measurement error or bias cannot account for the results. Finally, we found the same pattern of results across two samples which were from two different historical time periods when views of Trump may have changed (pre- and during COVID-19).”

But the study, like all research, has limitations. Although the study is based on large and diverse samples, the research was cross-sectional, meaning that it cannot determine cause and effect. It is also focused specifically on Trump’s first term in office, and attitudes may have shifted since then. Additionally, the study relied on self-report measures, which can be influenced by social desirability or personal biases, though the authors used statistical methods to reduce such effects.

It is also important to note that research compares average personality trait scores between two groups of people (those who viewed Trump favorably and those who did not). While the researchers found statistically significant differences—such as higher average scores on traits like psychopathy and lower scores on empathy among Trump supporters—these are group-level trends, not absolute labels. The findings do not mean that all Trump supporters are manipulative or lack compassion, nor that all non-supporters are empathetic or benevolent. Individuals within each group vary widely, and the results reflect differences in average tendencies, not universal characteristics.

“Next papers in the pipeline employ mega-samples from across the globe to further study of the connections between malevolent/benevolent personality and ideology, as well as modeling the core domains involved in Professor John Jost’s theory of motivated social cognition (epistemic, existential, relational) and their connection to ideology in different cultures,” Neumann said.

“Political ideology (left vs. right leaning; liberal vs. conservative) is not necessarily a good or bad thing, if it involves ideas about how to productively arrange our world. However, if a given ideology is fundamentally about one group’s malevolent domination of other individuals, then we should ask ourselves if this is the type of (uncivil) society we want to live in. For instance, does taking Medicaid away from vulnerable people while also giving money to the wealthy involve political malevolence or benevolence?”>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.06.30"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Browne, Walter"]
[Black "Manion, Josh"]
[ECO "A57"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<The Trump administration appears to have hit another dead end in its desperate efforts to provide some semblance of closure in the years-long saga of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York denied the Justice Department's order to unseal grand jury records related to the prosecution of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges. Not only that, Engelmayer blasted the very premise of the motion, suggesting in blunt terms that Trump and his allies in government wanted the files published not in the interest of actual disclosure but as a stunt meant to silence any further questions about the case.

Calling the government's arguments for moving to unseal the records "disingenuous," Engelmayer concluded: "A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the government's motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency' but at diversion - aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such." He would therefore not permit the "extraordinary step" of allowing the grand jury records, which are supposed to be kept secret to protect the integrity of the process, and may only be released under rare, highly specific circumstances.

"Granting the Government's motion would bloat the ‘special circumstances' doctrine, which to date has warranted disclosure in only a tiny number of cases, all involving unique testimony by firsthand witnesses to events of obvious public or historical moment," Engelmayer noted in his 31-page decision, also remarking that the materials are "redundant of the evidence at Maxwell's trial." In one notable instance of grand jury files being unsealed, the proceedings in which jurors decided that there wasn't sufficient evidence to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, were made public to address accusations of racial bias.

The Trump administration has been looking for ways to placate a conspiracist MAGA base that believed the White House was working toward the publication of an Epstein "client list" of powerful elites whom he potentially blackmailed with information about their sexual activities with underage girls he trafficked to them. (This view has persisted despite the existence of the "list" being a matter of wild and unfounded speculation.) The same voters have also long expected bombshell revelations about Epstein's death in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019, which was ruled a suicide.

But last month, the Justice Department and FBI stunned right-wing Epstein truthers with a short memo declaring that there was no evidence of a client list, nor that Epstein was murdered as part of a massive cover-up. These claims were all the more shocking after Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed to have an Epstein client list on her desk in February and then distributed binders of documents labeled "The Epstein Files: Phase 1" to Trumpworld social media influencers. Conspiracy theorists were furious when these turned out to be documents that were already in the public domain, including Epstein's address book.

The dismissive July memo and Trump's own subsequent attempts to brush aside inquiries about Epstein in press conferences caused an even bigger uproar on the right, with many MAGA loyalists calling for Bondi's head and even criticizing the president for reneging on a campaign promise. Trump's spin on the Esptein scandal as a Democrat-manufactured "hoax" (as he lashed out at his own followers for continuing to give it oxygen) gained little traction. The story only drew more attention to Trump's long, well-documented relationship with Epstein; The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles with new details about their close association. It meanwhile came out that Bondi had informed Trump in May - contrary to his denials - that he is named in FBI files related to Epstein. (Inclusion in these documents is not itself an indication of wrongdoing.)....>

<....The president continued to make matters worse for himself with bizarre, self-incriminating answers to reporters, as when he stated that he broke off contact with Epstein because the latter was poaching women who worked at the Mar-a-Lago spa, and said that one of the employees he "stole" was Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April.

Since then, the administration seems to have taken interest in Maxwell as a potential solution to the ongoing scrutiny of Trump's links to Epstein and the failure to bring more prosecutions in the case. In late July, the government abruptly transferred Maxwell to a minimum-security, women-only federal prison camp in Texas where most inmates are serving time for nonviolent and white-collar crimes. During hours of interviews Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche the same month, she reportedly said she had never witnessed any concerning behavior from Trump. Maxwell has appealed her conviction to the Supreme Court and offered to testify before Congress under certain conditions, including formal immunity. Trump has not ruled out a pardon for her.

Even as the administration seeks a viable endgame strategy through this notorious trafficker, right-wingers did what they could to accuse Democrats of obstructing justice. Chaya Raichik, who runs the anti-LGBTQ account "Libs of TikTok" on X, posted there that "Obama appointed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer has DENIED the Trump admin request to unseal the grand jury documents against Ghislaine Maxwell." (As one of the influencers embarrassed in the "Epstein Files: Phase 1" incident, (Raichik) has largely avoided commenting on Epstein developments since.) An anonymous MAGA conspiracy theorist also pointed out on X that Engelmayer is an Obama appointee, writing, "What does that tell you?"

Most debate over Engelmayer's decision, however, was overshadowed by the news that Trump would deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., supposedly to deal with rampant crime - even though violent crime in the city has fallen to its lowest rate since before the pandemic. The president's critics on social media called this extreme measure yet another "distraction" from a president who has been trying to shift focus away from Epstein for more than a month.>