Trump was vehemently against releasing Epstein files but switched as it was clear it would pass (passed 427-1), why did he do this, what was his plan?
the 5 options I put are largely mutually exclusive
1: resolution criteria for this will lean on Ro Khanna who said the victims lawyers and Biden official have seen the files, so will know if they’re not releasing the full files for political reasons
2: straight forward, if it doesn’t get to his desk
3: if he vetoes it
4: based on general consensus, it’ll be clear if this is the case
5: this is what the majority of Americans (specifically consider Khanna, Massie, and MTG in congress) likely want to happen/be the case, but will it actually happen?
1,000People are also trading
How should this resolve,
given they’ve
release some files
heavily redacted, nowhere near complete (apparently <1%)
The intention of the market was to understand Trumps motivation’s a month ago, so the way to think of the underlying epistemology of the market is that the true answer (ground truth) was already known with complete information a month ago, and everything in the last month is evidence that updates towards the ground truth rather than explicit criteria.
1: seems true,
I think I need to hear more comments from Trump
2/3: N/A (already resolved NO
4: they’ve released something, but I need to understand the public consensus on whether they’ve released “nothing (substantially) new”
5: this only resolves YES, if 1 and 4 are false
so I think I’m leaning on 1, but the evidence against it is that they continued the redaction and clearly haven’t finished redacting since they’re yet to release full files, so I need to know whether the reason Trump flipped was because he finally bought enough time to “complete the redaction to his pleasing” which might just be any files pertaining to him or perhaps anything that’s politically damaging to his allies and will affect the 2026 midterms, 2028 general, etc.
If 1 isn’t true, then 2 seems to make sense (again, pending a fair review of what the “consensus” is) but the case against it is that this release is clearly different than the earlier “fake” release so should resolve NO since they did release something regardless of how small that is, it’s likely 1000s x more new files than the one in Spring
So I’m still not sure how to resolve, the 3 options add to 1.73, so I’m not sure how it would resolve to multiple options given I stated “largely mutually exclusive”, I guess all 3 are at least partially true in that
the files they released were redacted and this likely fed into Trumps decision to flip out of the blue
They didn’t release much (will need to check if this sentiment is polling >50% among Americans)
It still seems a big part of the reason he flipped was that it was going to pass even if he continued to oppose it, so the appearance of bipartisanship with a 427-1 vote, was definitely a choice motivated for political/approval reasons since if he continued to oppose and it passed like 315-113, it’d look really bad