The Final Nail?
Why Nothing Sticks to Trump (Not Even Epstein)
By Heywood Reynolds
It’s not that there’s just one thing wrong with Donald Trump, it’s that so much is wrong with him. And strangely, that might be the source of his resilience.
I’m reminded of an episode of *The Simpsons* where Mr. Burns visits his doctor expecting a clean bill of health, only to be diagnosed with “Three Stooges Syndrome,” a condition where he has so many diseases at once that they bottleneck at the door, preventing any single one from killing him. In the scene, the diseases all try to squeeze through the doorway at the same time and clunk their heads together—much like the Stooges. He literally has every problem imaginable. Misunderstanding the diagnosis, Mr. Burns assumes he’s indestructible.
We are living through the political version of this phenomenon. The Trump era is defined by such overwhelming corruption, dishonesty, and incompetence, happening all at once, that no single scandal ever seems to land.
The January 6th riots, the Access Hollywood Tape, hush money to a porn star, hoarding classified documents, the Zelensky phone call—any one of these would have ended a normal political career. Under Trump, they blur together into background noise. He’s “Teflon Don,” nothing sticks to him. Meanwhile, his political strategy thrives on singular, repetitive attacks against his opponents. With Hillary Clinton, it was “her emails.” With Joe Biden, it’s “his age.” With Kamala Harris, it’s “her low IQ.” Baseless as these smears may be, their simplicity and repetition make them stick. (And maybe Biden’s age was a valid critique.)
The bottom line is: in modern politics, if a criticism can’t fit on a bumper sticker and be repeated endlessly, it rarely breaks through. For a brief moment it seemed as though Trump’s association with Epstein might be that one scandal that finally broke the camel’s back. As commentators and voters briefly ignored the rest of his misconduct and focused on a single, coherent line of criticism, it seemed possible that Epstein would be the issue that stuck.
The remedy to this problem? Overwhelm the system with even more chaos and criticism.
The irony is that if Trump were less corrupt or less chaotic, he might actually be more vulnerable to criticism. But chaos is his brand. We’ve become so numb to his absurdity that when he casually suggests buying Greenland or deploying the National Guard to half a dozen cities, we just shrug. “That’s just Trump being Trump.”
No wonder Americans are tuning out the news. Many cite exhaustion, overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all. But disengagement is dangerous. The more fatigued we become, the more we enable Trump to act with impunity. And while some of his antics are mere distractions, his policies have real and often damaging consequences. In fact, many of his policies will likely produce the exact opposite of their intended effects.
He wants to fix government dysfunction—by hiring people with no management experience. He wants to lower prices—through tariffs and mass deportations that will drive costs up. We are plagued by floods and wildfires—so he talks about gutting FEMA. We’ve just endured a pandemic—yet he wants the U.S. to leave the World Health Organization while appointing a vaccine skeptic to lead Health and Human Services. He wants to make the federal workforce more efficient—by paying them not to work. We’ve had the hottest year on record—so he pulls us out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
It’s governance by gut instinct—and every instinct he has is wrong.
Which brings me to one final pop‑culture reference: *Seinfeld*. There’s an episode where George Costanza, the lovable loser, realizes that every decision he’s ever made has been disastrous. So, he decides to do the opposite and suddenly, his life turns around.
Trump could learn something from George. If every instinct he has is wrong, the opposite must be right.
And if we, as a country, don’t course-correct soon, this won’t end like a sitcom. It will end like a warning we failed to heed.