Trump's effort to distance from Epstein complicated by his deep ties to Epstein

Wriggling out of this jam is failing so far.

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President Donald Trump has spent a second week trying to end, once and for all, his supporters’ obsession with Jeffery Epstein — and distance himself from the disgraced financier and child sex offender that Trump knew for four decades. It isn’t going well.

The attempted in-public coverup took a turn for the worse for Trump on Thursday, with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal blowing the story wide open by publishing the contents of a letter Trump wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.

The letter, which the Journal did not publish, reportedly contains a drawing of a naked woman with Trump’s signature as her pubic hair. It also included an imagined conversation, written by Trump, that alludes to a deep relationship between the two men, seemingly based on their sexual proclivities and appetites.

“May every day be another wonderful secret,” Trump wrote, according to the Journal.

Trump responded to the Journal’s program with an epic crash out, threatening lawsuits and claiming (implausibly) that the letter is “FAKE.”

But even before the Journal’s bombshell, Trump was scrambling. On Wednesday, he declared conspiracies around Epstein’s life and death a “hoax,” insisting that powerful Democrats were somehow responsible for the Justice Department “files” that Trump’s biggest supporters have been fixated on for years following Epstein’s suicide in prison in 2019.

“Their new scam is what will forever be known as the Jeffery Epstein Hoax,” Trump wrote of Democrats on Truth Social, “and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit’ hook, line and sinker.”

Hours later, Trump doubled down, saying that any Republicans or Trump supporters who continue to press for the release of files from the Justice Department’s investigation of Epstein are “stupid” and “foolish.”

In the wake of the Justice Department’s announcement last week that its investigation of Epstein produced no “client list” or credible information on the supposed secret circle of powerful perverts that Trump’s MAGA movement has fixated on, the president has become increasingly adamant that his supporters need to move on, thus setting into motion a golden rule of modern American politics: if Donald Trump is trying to make something go away, it’s probably because he has something to hide.

But Republicans’ lock-step support of Trump’s constant claims of victimhood is showing some cracks in the case of Epstein, who has been a focus MAGA conspiracy theories for years.

“Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things,” Steve Bannon said at the Turning Point USA conference last Saturday. Bannon is among a growing chorus of influential MAGA voices who have called for more information from the DOJ’s investigation of Epstein, despite Trump’s insistence that the case is a dead-end. (AG Pam Bondi vowed to release grand jury documents in the wake of the Journal’s bombshell report, but that appears to be nothing more than yet another effort to protect Trump.)

Trump betrays his conspiracy-addled base

Still, MAGA’s obsession persists. Top Trump deputies like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel built audiences by stoking Epstein conspiracies to right-wing audiences for nearly a decade, goading the Republican base into believing the Justice Department’s files would expose a vast network of liberal sex predators and international criminals.

In 2016, Trump himself noted Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein.

“Nice guy,” Trump said of Clinton, “got a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island, with Jeffery Epstein.”

Now, those problems are his.

A long and sordid friendship

Trump and Epstein have known each other since at least the 1980s. Trump’s former president of his Atlantic City casino remembers the future president and Epstein bringing “underaged” women into the casino.

Around that time, Epstein was also a member of Trump’s club at Mar-a-Lago, where in 1992 the pair were filmed ogling women on a dance floor.

Trump, sometimes with his then-wife Marla Maples and daughter Tiffany, flew on Epstein’s private jet at least seven times between 1993 and 1997, according to flight logs released by the Justice Department in February.

In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that he had known Epstein for 15 years, calling him a “terrific guy” and noting their shared taste in women.

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said at the time. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

In 2004, Trump and Epstein faced off in a bidding war over a Palm Beach property — a dispute that caused a falling out between the two men, according to the Washington Post. In 2008, two years after Epstein was charged with paying for sex with a 14-year-old, Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago after Epstein allegedly hit on a club member’s daughter.

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Trump also appears in two separate volumes of Epstein’s “little black book.” The first, which dates to 2004, was published by Gawker in 2015 and contained Trump’s name and contact information among more than 1,700 people, many of them powerful figures in politics, finance, and entertainment. In 2021, Business Insider obtained another “little black book,” of Epstein’s that had been discovered on a sidewalk in Manhattan and sold on eBay. The book, which dates to the mid-1990s, contained Trump’s name, as well as the name of Melania Trump’s best friend. The book is now up for auction.

In February 2000, Trump and Melania were photographed arm-in-arm next to Epstein, who in the photo had his hand around the waist of his longtime friend and alleged “madame,” Ghislane Maxwell, who allegedly procured sex victims for the disgraced financier. It’s one of several photographs of Trump and Epstein together — no surprise, considering Epstein himself called Trump his “closest friend for 10 years.”

By the time Maxwell was arrested in 2020 and faced trial for her alleged crimes, Trump said he “hadn’t really been following” Maxwell’s case “too much.”

“I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump said during a White House press briefing. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach and, I guess, they lived in Palm Beach … but I wish her well.”

MAGA — along with the rest of the country — has had plenty of opportunity to judge Trump’s relationship with Epstein for themselves. The revelation about tapes of Epstein calling Trump his best friend came just days before last November’s election. In them, Epstein also detailed attempts the future president made to sleep with the wives of his friends, among many other sordid details.

But the Epstein tapes didn’t amount to much more than a blip in the news cycle, and days later Trump was re-elected as president.

MAGA struggles to explain the obvious

Trump’s latest ill-fated attempt to make interest in Epstein go away began immediately after his Justice Department released statement on July 7 explaining that Epstein had, in fact, killed himself, that his infamous “client list” did not exist, and that no files from the investigation would be released. The next day, Trump responded incredulously to a reporter’s question about Epstein during a cabinet meeting on live TV.

“Are you still talking about Jeffery Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump said before bringing up deadly floods in Texas and calling the question a “desecration.”

Bondi then shocked Trump’s conspiracy-fueled supporters when she contradicted her claim from a February appearance on Fox News that a list of Epstein “clients” was “sitting on my desk right now.” Instead, she insisted she was simply talking about the larger Epstein case file.

“I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was ‘it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed’ meaning, the file,” Bondi said.

For years, Trump supporters have believed the president would blow the doors open on Epstein, thus exposing a supposed network of liberal child predators and criminals populating the highest echelons of American society. Now, Bondi and Trump are telling them that there’s nothing to see.

Trump’s sudden dismissal of the Epstein case has left his MAGA base scrambling for an explanation. Led by an influential group of pro-Trump media personalities, the questions and accusations have been flying.

“Trump is trying to nuke his base,” MAGA influencer Tim Pool said.

Tucker Carlson suggested Trump’s dismissal of the Epstein case could prompt revolt among the MAGA base.

“You’re creating true radicalism when you do stuff like this,” Carlson said last week. “To insult the population and say, ‘No, you’re a conspiracy theorist,’ I think you’re really playing with fire.”

Glenn Beck has vacillated between outrage and possible forgiveness. On Tuesday, he explained why Trump’s base is so upset.

“After months of promises of transparency, after Pam Bondi TOLD US the evidence was sitting on her desk and the SDNY was withholding information, we were told the list never even existed,” Beck tweeted. “We were told to move on after being LED ON.”

By Wednesday, Beck joined Trump in speculating that the Biden administration planted evidence of Trump’s ties to Epstein in the files — but for some reason didn’t release them during the 2024 presidential campaign — and noted congressional Democrats’ “sudden” interest in releasing the files.

Meanwhile, Trump said on Tuesday that he had seen at least some of the investigative files during a “very quick briefing” from Bondi. Trump then claimed that files “were made up by [former FBI director James] Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden administration.”

If Trump is to be believed, the very files that were “made up” by the president’s political enemies are the ones that Bondi used to determine that the Epstein case should now be closed.

Adding to the confusion and speculation are reports that the “raw” footage from outside of Epstein’s jail cell was edited, with between two and four minutes missing from the videos released by the DOJ.

All of this has split Republican lawmakers into two main camps: those demanding that the files be released and those who say they trust Trump, and those who are dodging the issue or pushing more and more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Neither GOP faction has directly acknowledged the many ties between Epstein and Trump himself.

On Tuesday, 211 House Republicans voted against a measure that demanded the release of the Justice Department’s full files on Epstein, with several, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, abstaining from the vote. Now, Rep. Thomas Massie has launched a bipartisan effort with Rep. Ro Khanna to force another House vote on releasing the files.

Meanwhile, Trump has begun insulting anyone still calling for the release of the Epstein files.

“It’s all been a big hoax, it’s perpetrated by the Democrats, and some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net, and so they do the Democrats’ work,” Trump howled.

While it’s possible that Trump wants Epstein to go away because whatever is in those “files” might implicate the president, it’s also possible there’s nothing in them that Justice Department lawyers can use to prosecute anyone — that the investigation has gone as far as it can go.

Either way, Trump supporters are faced with a deeply uncomfortable dilemma: take the president at his word that the conspiracy his top aides have stoked for years is really a nothingburger, or conclude — for the first time in Trump’s political career, and as the rest of the nation has known for years — that their leader is lying to them.

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