Donald Trump Is Trapped
Is President Donald Trump in serious trouble? It’s much too soon to know, but he is struggling to an unusual degree to contain the fallout from the Justice Department’s announcement earlier this month that sought to dispel many of the popular beliefs about Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased infamous financier who faced child sex-trafficking charges. Federal investigators asserted that there was no evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list,” or died by a means other than suicide when he was found dead in his cell in New York City in 2019.
The announcement prompted a wave of internal and external fury among Trump’s supporters, for whom the Epstein case had taken on a totemic significance. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who held a media event in March where aides hoisted large binders that read “Epstein Files” and claimed that new information would soon come to light, received the lion’s share of the blame. FBI Director Kash Patel also came under fire after insisting on Twitter that the Epstein-related “conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been.” His top deputy, Dan Bongino, reportedly considered resigning in protest.
In a post on Wednesday, Trump insisted that the fallout—which, again, came largely from his own supporters and boosters in right-wing media—was actually a scheme by Democrats to distract from how good of a job he’s doing as president. “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 on Truth Social, his personal social-media service. “They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.”
It’s a bizarre statement even by Trump’s own standards. Epstein is arguably one of the most famous American criminal defendants of the twenty-first century. After years of rumors and reports, he was finally hit with federal sex-trafficking charges in July 2019—during Trump’s first term, no less—and held at a federal detention center in Manhattan, where he died by suicide in August before his trial could begin. Trump’s habit of referring to any damaging information as a “hoax” has never been more laughable or concerning than it is here.
