An Enigma Wrapped in a Wonderful Secret
A new Epstein revelation leads Trump to declare war against the Wall Street Journal.
Hey, look, former Trump lawyer Alina Habba is apparently about to be out as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. Seems good! Now on to the big stuff. Happy Friday.
‘We Have Certain Things In Common, Jeffrey’
by Andrew Egger
All this week, as the Epstein-files controversy dominated the news, MAGA media plainly couldn’t figure out how to handle it. As Donald Trump demanded that everyone stop paying attention to a story his own administration had been hyping up for months and his most devoted fans had been obsessed with for years, you could almost hear the gears of cognitive dissonance grinding in the minds of his most reliable influencer lickspittles.
All that changed in an instant last night after the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell new article about Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The report’s allegations are horrible, and yet you could almost smell the relief coming off Trump-world media in its aftermath. At last the Epstein controversy was back in an arena they knew how to handle: The fake news media was telling new mean stories about the president, and it was their job to attack, attack, attack.
“It was Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, and Ghislaine Maxwell was preparing a special gift to mark the occasion,” the Journal’s report begins. “She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump.”
The 2003 gift was a bound book of birthday letters. According to the Journal, Trump’s was remarkably lurid—“several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. . . . the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
In the text—a short, imagined dialogue between Epstein and Trump—Trump says that “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey” and ends with a wish that “every day be another wonderful secret.”
“Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” he writes.
MAGA’s explosive reaction to the story began at the top. Trump denied that he ever wrote such a letter or, indeed, ever drew anything ever: “I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal, adding later on Truth Social, “I don’t draw pictures.” He called in every favor to try to stop the article’s publication, making phone calls to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its editor, Emma Tucker, and swearing he would sue if they published. Vice President JD Vance called the story “complete and utter bullshit,” asking “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”
This was flailing, back-to-the-wall damage control. Trump’s claim that “I don’t draw pictures” was disproven within minutes of his making it. In fact, a plethora of comparable black-Sharpie doodles drawn by him around that time are already a matter of public record. Vance’s “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump” question was, if anything, even funnier: The alleged letter was written in 2003, one year after Trump told a reporter that Epstein was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” and two years before a hot mic caught Trump telling Billy Bush about his strategy for flirting with women he’d just met: “grab them by the pussy.”
The idea that Murdoch and the Journal would publish a story like this—knowing Trump’s penchant for retributive lawsuits—without being on rock-solid legal footing is laughable; a small army of lawyers no doubt inspected every word of the report. Meanwhile, Trump is the only alleged contributor to deny to the Journal that his letter was real; billionaire Leslie Wexner declined to comment, and attorney Alan Dershowitz simply said that “it’s been a long time and I don’t recall the content of what I may have written.”
In a sane world, Trump’s supporters who have been dismayed by his handling of the Epstein matter might find his unconvincing defenses and farcical counterattacks (not to mention yet another point of proof that he and Epstein were kinda close) disconcerting. But I wouldn’t be shocked if the opposite turns out to be true—that they’re relieved in a way.
Trump’s actions so far this week—railing against his own loyal fans for caring about the same story they’ve cared about forever, insanely calling that story a “hoax” supposedly carried out long ago by Democrats—were in conflict with the broader MAGA cosmology. But MAGA knows how to respond to stories like this. When Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounces a “hatchet job article” that is “like the Steele Dossier that kickstarted the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax all over again,’” their heads start nodding along so fast they risk ligament damage in their necks.
The Journal story has already had one concrete effect: It rattled Trump into a strategy change. After a week of insisting everyone move on and that the files are probably full of Democrat-created lies, he is now directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of “pertinent” grand-jury transcripts in the Epstein case. Bondi responded immediately: “President Trump—we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.”
This development sparks a whole new set of questions. Why would Trump only ask for the release of grand-jury testimony? After all, as many commentators noted, such testimony is likely among the least useful component of the remaining “Epstein files” that could be released, since it will require a lengthy legal process and would not include unredacted information on unindicted co-conspirators, which is supposedly the entire point of the Epstein files. And why should anyone trust Bondi to handle the Epstein files transparently, when she is so nakedly taking her marching orders for what to unseal from Trump himself?
In the coming days, it will be fascinating to see how Epstein true believers handle these questions. Which will be stronger? Their years-long conviction that there’s more to the Epstein story and determination to see it brought to light? Or their Pavlovian response to radicalize against any story the president dubs “FAKE NEWS”? Call it an enigma.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Dangerous Plan to Turn Military Lawyers Into Immigration Judges… The U.S. military is not a civilian law enforcement agency, argue JOHN D. HUTSON, STEVEN J. LEPPER, and F. ANDREW TURLEY.
Putin Belongs Before a Court, Not at the ‘Peace Table…’ Real peace in Ukraine will require justice and accountability, writes GEN. MARK HERTLING.
Trump Is Caught in His Own Trap… He has no one to blame for his Jeffrey Epstein problem but himself, writes MONA CHAREN.
Why The Supreme Court Is Broke… On George Conway Explains, SARAH LONGWELL talks with law professor LEAH LITMAN about the Supreme Court’s partisan shift, Barrett’s internal battles, and Jackson’s sharp criticism of pro-Trump rulings.
‘Eddington’ Review… SONNY BUNCH on 2020: The year we all went a little nuts.
JVL + John Ganz… JVL chats with JOHN GANZ, author of Unpopular Front, on Substack.
The Bad New Normal: Six months into the Trump administration, what’s changed on immigration and deportation? A lot. What does it signal about the future? Not much good. AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK joins Conversations with Bill Kristol to discuss.
Quick Hits
PAM THE GOAT: Most of the Trump coalition has spent this week plainly longing to make Attorney General Pam Bondi the scapegoat for the administration’s shambolic handling of the Epstein files. Trump himself, however, has notably stood by Bondi, repeatedly praising her stewardship of the matter.
So it was a little surprising to see Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly deflecting all Epstein questions back to Bondi at yesterday’s White House press briefing. Does Trump have knowledge of what’s in the files that have yet to be released? “Not to my knowledge,” Leavitt said, “and that’s a question for the attorney general. And the president has told the attorney general, if they have any more credible evidence, they should release it.” What is stopping the administration from releasing more redacted Epstein files? “Those are questions for the Department of Justice, those are also questions for the judges who have that information under a seal,” Leavitt replied. “That’s out of the president’s control.”
WELLNESS CHECK: Nudging Bondi back under the bus wasn’t the only notable thing Leavitt did at yesterday’s briefing. She also broke some news about Trump’s health, revealing the president had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition in which the body has difficulty returning blood from the legs to the heart. Leavitt described the condition as “benign and common”—the Wall Street Journal notes it affects 1 in 20 adults—and noted that “there was no evidence of deep-vein thrombosis or arterial disease.” The diagnosis explains a recent mystery about Trump’s appearance: the swelling of his calves and ankles, as seen in recent pictures.
Leavitt also offered an explanation for a second medical mystery: The bruising that’s been apparent on the back of Trump’s right hand, occasionally covered by what appears to be a thick layer of pancake makeup. The press secretary said that was simply “minor soft tissue irritation from frequent hand-shaking and the use of aspirin,” an anticoagulant which can indeed make people bruise more easily. The bottom line: Trump remains healthy, but he is getting quite old—by the time he leaves office, he’ll have broken Joe Biden’s record as the oldest president in history.
A TRAGIC MUSK: His legislative demands keep getting ignored, his old buddy the president is speculating about having him deported, and his car company is circling the drain. Elon Musk can’t stop taking Ls these days.
This week has brought another batch of unkind headlines for Tesla. The Wall Street Journal reported that longtime vice president of sales, Troy Jones, is leaving the company, which has its quarterly earnings call next week. Its nascent robotaxi product, which is already chasing Alphabet’s Waymo, now needs to look over its shoulder at more startup competition: Yesterday, Uber announced a $300 million partnership with electric vehicle maker Lucid and software startup Nuro to develop and deploy its own fleet of self-driving taxis. Meanwhile, Tesla stock slid yesterday after Bloomberg reported that the United States would impose a new 93.5 percent tariff on Chinese graphite, a key component in electric-vehicle batteries.
Cheap Shots
I'm going to do something I never thought I'd do. I yield the floor to holocaust-denying, white supremacist, Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes:
“And now he says if you are not on board with the Epstein coverup I don’t want your support. You’re a weakling. F**k you. F**k you. You suck. You are fat. You are a joke. You are stupid. You are not funny. You are not as smart as you think you are.
And honestly, and if you watch my show, you know I’ve been very critical. I’ve never been this far. This just goes to show this entire thing has been a scam. When we look back on the history of populism in America, we are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history. The Liberals were right. The MAGAs were had. They were.
When we look back in history, we will see Trump as a scam artist."
This is sounding less and less like a completely crazy conspiracy theory and more like a perfectly plausible plot line in a “Law and Order” episode…and the best alibi so far is “I’m not clever enough to use the word enigma”.