Try as he might – and he really has tried – Donald Trump and his team cannot find an approach to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that works for the increasingly embattled US President.
During the campaign to return Trump to the Oval Office, several of the leading figures in his orbit – including Kash Patel, now the FBI director, and Pam Bondi, the Attorney General – hammered the Epstein Files as an issue. Not only would they fully disclose the files, they promised, but they were sure it would show how complicit the Democrats were in Epstein’s crimes.
Trump himself, surely aware of his own long and close friendship with Epstein, was always more reticent to make big promises on document disclosures, but he seemingly did nothing to stop these pledges being made to his base, who clearly care deeply about the issue.
Once he was actually back in power, the tone soon changed. Bondi invited leading conspiracy influencers into her office, handing them huge binders of Epstein-related documents – only for it to emerge that they were just printouts of files that had long been in the public domain.
Each time the story surfaced over the summer, Trump himself would go on long social media rants all but demanding his followers pay attention to literally anything else.
Usually, when he tries to change the narrative, it works. This time, it has failed again and again. Congress successfully passed a law forcing through the disclosure of the Epstein files, and Trump’s Department of Justice is at least trying to look like it’s complying – even though it has missed legally mandated deadlines, over-redacted documents, and appears so far to have been selectively releasing them to try to implicate Trump’s political opponents.
Nowhere was this more obvious than with the release of pictures of Bill Clinton, by far the most prominent Democrat to have a known relationship with Epstein. The first batch of documents, put out on Friday afternoon, conveniently had almost no references to Trump, and nothing that wasn’t already known. They did, however, contain multiple pictures of Clinton – some with Epstein, and one in a hot tub with an unidentified woman.
On Monday, Trump gave his first comments on the release of the documents, and on the surface they look like he’s taking pity on poor President Clinton. “I’ve always gotten along with Bill Clinton; I’ve been nice to him, he’s been nice to me,” he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago. “I hate to see photos come out of him but this is what the Democrats – mostly Democrats and a couple of bad Republicans – are asking for.”
Trump said it was “a terrible thing” that pictures of people who associated with Epstein were being released – “everybody was friendly with this guy,” he added – saying “a lot of people are very angry” the documents were being published.
This hardly smacks of a joined-up PR approach: the President’s team at the DoJ seem to have handpicked which documents to release on time and subject to intense scrutiny, and seem to have hoped that throwing Clinton and a few celebrities under the bus might distract attention from Trump’s longstanding friendship with Epstein.
Now, the President seems to be condemning that approach, at least on the surface. But to many, his remarks might read like the kind of crude threat made in a second-rate Mafia movie – nice reputation you have here, Mr Clinton, sure would be a shame if someone trashed it.
More than that, there is a detectable tone of self-pity in Trump’s comments. Most of us did not know Jeffrey Epstein, weren’t friendly with him, and certainly didn’t fly on his jet or party with young women with him – Donald Trump is accused of having done all three. It is not hard to imagine why he might be complaining about these disclosures.
Clinton himself, through a spokesman, is striking a very different tone. Rather than complain about the releases, he has said he has nothing to hide and had no objections to any documents in which he is named or pictured being published in full – and said he supported the full cache of files being released as soon as possible.
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If Trump and his team are trying to subtly pressure Democrats into backing off, it isn’t working. Most Democrats don’t care if the reputation of Clinton – a man who left office 25 years ago – is damaged by the disclosures, and Clinton himself looks unconcerned, too.
Trump, by contrast, comes across as rattled. He has thrown everything he had at distracting from this story and none of it has worked.
What should have been a single, final document dump is instead a steady trickle of releases, each being pored over as it comes out. The latest drop, of some 11,000 documents, came overnight. People will want evidence and the story just keeps getting fed, and becoming bigger.
The tale of Trump’s political career – of his life itself – has been one of getting away with it. Now, the narrative seems to be changing. No wonder he’s scared.
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