'Festering, open wound': Dems told they have the 'sword' with which to finish Trump

President Donald Trump has handed the Democrats a weapon that they can use to destroy the Republicans — but they need to learn how it must be wielded, a Guardian columnist wrote Saturday.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga hasn’t just plunged MAGA into chaos and given Trump a potentially devastating crisis. It's also given Democrats a message that they must now refer to in every single criticism they fire at Trump between now and election day, wrote Peter Rothpletz.

“Say it in every stump speech, vent about it in vertical videos and keep it alive as a dominant narrative in the zeitgeist,” he wrote. “Do not back away.”

The key, Rothpletz argued, is to use Trump’s Epstein scramble to tell voters where Republicans’ true allegiances lie.

“It goes like this: Trump protects elites,” Rothpletz wrote.

And if they want to win, Democrats have to hammer that message home.

“As the conservative pundit Bill Kristol noted: “[Richard Nixon] said of Watergate, ‘I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish,’ he wrote.

“Trump may have given us a sword. We should use it.

“Kristol is right, to a point. Liberals, progressives and never-Trump Republicans must not let voters forget Trump’s festering, open wound without neglecting the kitchen table, cost-of-living matters that hurt them last fall.”

The messaging, he said, comes from Trump’s desperate efforts to keep documents his base believes associate many powerful people with the sex trafficker Epstein under wraps. Now it’s suspected the president is considering pardoning Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, to help fulfil this cover-up.

“This is the challenge for Democrats: how do they maintain a spotlight on a scandal that reveals Trump for who he is in a way that finally resonates with his base without appearing to exploit a tragedy?” he asks.

“ …It goes like this: Trump protects elites.

He went on, “Trump has always tried to straddle those rings, painting himself as the renegade billionaire. The Epstein affair shatters that mythos. It casts him not as a brash, bull-in-a-china-shop outsider but as the ultimate insider, rubbing shoulders with the very aristocracy his campaign rhetoric promised to upend.

“Democrats must lead with Epstein. Then they need to connect it to the president’s myriad failures. Why did Trump cut taxes for the richest Americans while cutting Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act? For the same reason he is protecting Epstein and his buddies. Why is Trump risking union jobs in auto manufacturing so he can have a trade spat with Mexico and Canada? For the same reason he is protecting Epstein and his buddies. Why is Donald Trump talking about firing the head of the Fed? For the same reason he is protecting Epstein and his buddies.”