“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking…we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things…we ha—and are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable” said the President of the United States with extreme incredulity yesterday. This was in response to a question about allegations that Jeffrey Epstein worked for an intelligence agency, as well as one about the missing minute from the video that Trump’s Department of Justice released of the night that Epstein died. The questions were directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi who began to answer before Trump interjected with a rant which honestly, I would file under yet another example of how he’s a very bad poker player.
This is all poker table psychoanalysis, so hard journalism is out the window here, but man oh man, if some guy at the table were making big bets and talking in the showy way that Trump does in this video, I would raise him immediately. It sure seems like Trump really wants people to stop talking about Epstein, just days after his FBI and DOJ announced that a significant portion of MAGA has wasted a lot of their lives and there is no “client list” and they need to move on. To my read, this is a sloppy, strenuous attempt to push back on their narrative and create a new one. To give you a sense of how it’s going, Mike Cernovich shared the video of Trump’s rant and wrote “We will continue talking about Epstein.”
My personal stance on Epstein, like with UAPs, is I don’t know, but there sure is a lot of good evidence suggesting some kind of elite cover-up of something. We should be careful in assuming that we know what that something is, because with how much money Epstein was connected to, there’s a lot of garden variety elite scandals we’ve seen before that this could be, with the sex crimes potentially confined to a smaller Epstein network than the one that exists in cultural lore.
But Trump is not exactly convincing me to trend towards the less conspiratorial side of my brain with this sweaty interjection. My gut instinct watching that clip of him trying to shame people into forgetting about a thing his administration was hyping up just a few months ago is that there’s real meat on this bone, and Trump has seen it. Perhaps he thought he could release some Epstein files that exposed elites long connected to Epstein without implicating himself or his network, but as soon as his DOJ got a look at the files, maybe that became much more difficult.
It’s hard to get a read on what exactly the plan is here that is actively alienating some of his most die-hard supporters. Five months ago, Trump’s administration was promising a “client list” and now they say there is no “client list,” and all of a sudden a man who has flown on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane thinks it’s “unbelievable” that people are still talking about a sex trafficking pedophile with some kind of connection to two presidents, one of the richest men in the world and literal royalty.
I don’t know man, I’m afraid to say any more at this point. Even Jake Tapper can see that we are being “played for fools” by Trump on this Epstein stuff, and it’s extremely difficult not to look at Trump’s longstanding connections to Epstein being the thing that changed his administration’s February stance of ‘fuck yeah we’re gonna expose everyone’ to their current conclusion that ‘there’s nothing to see here and you’re all rubes for caring about this.’
We know there was a network of people around Jeffrey Epstein who aided and participated in his sex trafficking operation. We also know there was a network of elites like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton who hung out with Epstein on numerous occasions, and Epstein even said that he was Trump’s “closest friend.” How much overlap those networks have is the central question in all of this, and Donald Trump thinks it’s a “waste of time” to talk about it.
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