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Donald Trump had two opportunities yesterday, and another this morning, to dispel any nagging sense that he is hiding incriminating information about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He did not make the most of them. Instead, he delivered an impersonation of a cornered man coated in flop sweat desperately trying to talk his way out.
Appearing on the White House lawn in the morning, the president responded to a question about whether Attorney General Pam Bondi had briefed him on the Epstein investigation.
“She’s given us just a very quick briefing, and in terms of the credibility of the different things that they’ve seen,” Trump replied, “I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden infor—and we went through years of that, with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”
This was a rather strange statement. If Trump and the Justice Department had discovered a plot to devise fake government files to discredit him, as he seemed to imply by comparing the Epstein scandal to the “Russia hoax,” that would warrant at least a medium-size conversation, rather than a very quick briefing.
Also, Trump had claimed a few days before, on social media, that the files were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” Perhaps Trump’s update yesterday merely overlooked some of the perpetrators, but if Bondi has now exonerated Hillary Clinton and former CIA Director John Brennan of any involvement in the supposed Trump-Epstein frame-up, that, too, sounds like the sort of finding that would merit more than a brief check-in.
Later that day, at Andrews Air Force Base, Trump fielded another Epstein question. Asked why his supporters care about the issue, Trump expressed befuddlement. “I don’t understand it, why they would be so interested. He’s dead for a long time, he was never a big factor in terms of life,” Trump said of Epstein.
It’s hard to say exactly what Trump meant by a big factor in terms of life. Who among us is? If Epstein doesn’t clear this bar, then not many people do. Certainly not, say, Rosie O’Donnell, but that didn’t stop Trump from reintroducing the comedian as a topic of national discussion this week.
Trump proceeded to explain that the main issue holding back Epstein from being a bigger factor on the life scale is that his activities were simply uninteresting. “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” he said. “It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring.”
So he’s telling us that there was a plot involving the director of the CIA and FBI, two former presidents, and a former first lady to falsely implicate the current president in a pedophilic sex ring run by a mysterious billionaire, and the reason not to ask about the issue is that it’s too boring?
Maybe Trump is just such an earnest policy wonk that he can’t imagine why people would get distracted from meaty topics such as the substance of his trade deal with Indonesia, in favor of fluff like the Epstein scandal. And maybe he’s so committed to moving on from the past that he doesn’t want to expose the cabal of Trump enemies who fabricated a scurrilous charge against him.
But that doesn’t really sound like the Trump we know. Indeed, given that he has spent eight years obsessing over the alleged crimes of Obama, Comey, Brennan, et al.—and just last week his Justice Department floated criminal charges against them related to their “Russia hoax” activities in 2017—one struggles to understand why, by his own account, he would stumble upon a wildly unethical and probably illegal scheme to undermine him by the people he is preoccupied with criminalizing, but decide to shrug it off gracefully.
In another post on Truth Social this morning, the president blamed his supporters for falling for a Democratic hoax. “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” he wrote, proceeding to disavow anybody who expresses interest in the story: “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”
The post did not explain what the Epstein hoax consists of. Is the hoax that the Trump administration promised to release a client list but failed to do so? That his administration is hiding something? Trump seemed to define the hoax as any attention to the matter at all. The non-hoax take on the Epstein story appears to be silence followed by changing the subject to the administration’s unbroken string of triumphs.
Sometimes people sound guilty even if they aren’t, especially if they’re government officials. Still, whatever probability you had in your mind that the Epstein files contain damaging material, you should probably raise it after listening to Trump’s remarks on the subject yesterday.
*Illustration Sources: Win McNamee / Getty; Rick Friedman Photography / Corbis / Getty; Archive Photos / Getty; Getty.
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