Within weeks of becoming president, Donald Trump found there was a sticky piece of gum on his shoe involving the late Jeffrey Epstein that he couldn’t scrape off. This was surprising, because Trump had survived sex scandals involving a porn star, a libel suit over alleged sexual abuse, a tape of crude “locker room” talk about groping women’s genitals, and more.
Trump thought he could cry “hoax!” about his friendship with the billionaire paedophile and his Maga base would meekly fall silent. Some did. Others dismissed the furore as “Me Too” hysteria, or pointed the finger at liberals like Bill Clinton who were in the sex offender’s orbit. But ask Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor whether the Epstein scandal ever truly goes away.
Trump’s election-winning shtick was that his “woke” opponent Kamala Harris was for “they/them” (such as immigrants and transgender people), while “Trump is for You”. This is the year he revealed himself to be for “he/him” and for “they/them”, not us, enriching himself, his family and the billionaire tech and finance bros.
If there is a date when the rot set into the Trump presidency, it was when attorney general Pam Bondi announced on 21 February that a list of Epstein’s clients was “sitting on my desk”. A week later she infuriated the Magaverse’s slavering conspiracy theorists, who were certain there was an establishment cover-up, by releasing binders of recycled old news.
This broke the bond of trust between Trump and his supporters, who felt played for fools. It led Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor-Greene to crash furiously out of his fanzone and announce she was quitting Congress in the new year. But most of all, it made Trump look like the sleazy swamp creature he had always railed against.
And if anyone persisted in raising questions about Epstein, he tried to shut them up, such as by responding “Quiet, piggy” to a female Bloomberg News reporter on board Air Force One. It didn’t work.
On Friday, the Department of Justice was set to release an enormous batch of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was meant to include “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” held by the department and FBI.
This was only reluctantly signed into law by Trump after months of pressure, during which he lost the support of the House and Senate. But his administration has repeatedly slow-walked the process.
In the Epstein files, some previously made public by the House Oversight Committee, are so many photographs of Trump and other bigwigs hanging out with the paedophile surrounded by young women that the phrase by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, about “flooding the zone with sh*t” comes to mind.
There is almost too much of the stuff to process, from novelty condoms with a caricature of Trump’s face and the text “I’m HUUUUGE” to Epstein’s 50th birthday book with a creepy letter and squiggly portrait of a naked young woman allegedly bearing Trump’s signature in place of her pubic hair (Trump is suing The Wall St Journal for claiming he wrote it).
And by the way, Bannon himself – the seedy Mr America First and flamethrowing podcaster – appears in the files, shamelessly offering PR advice and sharing a mirror selfie with the paedophile.
If the US economy were roaring, all might be forgiven. But Trump has busied himself with accumulating up to an estimated $1.8bn for himself and his family, not counting $Trump crypto and other ventures (see the New Yorker on The Year in Trump Cashing In), while Americans are facing an affordability crisis.
This, too, according to Trump, is a “hoax”, but the Epstein saga has weakened his credibility on this score. The President has graded himself A+ on the economy, when voters are scared about jobs, housing and inflation in 2026.
Grasping for legacy, Trump has been prematurely celebrating peace agreements, pressing regime change in Venezuela, naming buildings after himself – the Trump Institute of Peace and now the cultural Trump-Kennedy Center – and desecrating the White House with a vulgar $400m ballroom and an offensive, trolling Presidential “walk of fame”.
Ever the master of distraction, Trump went on television on Wednesday to boast about his alleged present and future triumphs. He promised the voters large tax refunds this spring and offered US troops cash handouts of $1,776 in honour of the 250th anniversary of American independence (to be paid – not out of tariff revenue, as promised – from money for military housing).
Trump also dangled the prospect of cash handouts of up to $2,000 to all tax-payers, similar to the Covid relief payments in his first term. Economists warn this could unleash more price rises but the President was buoyed by inflation coming in lower than expected at 2.7 per cent for November.
With a new, Maga-friendly chairman of the Federal Reserve set to arrive in May, one thing is certain: the 2026 economy will be all Trump’s, not Joe Biden’s. He has to hope the chips fall his way, because persistent questions about Epstein will remain.
We still don’t know the mysterious origins of the sex offender’s purported billions, though we do know a slew of rich, powerful and influential men, including left-wing guru Noam Chomsky and liberal filmmaker Woody Allen, were happy to share his company.
As for Trump, his name appears at least 1,500 times in the files, although he is lucky to have broken off his friendship with Epstein before the paedophile was convicted of soliciting underage sex in 2008. Epstein himself claimed in a letter to his partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, that Trump was “that dog that hasn’t barked” and that a named sex trafficking victim spent “hours at my house with him”.
Maxwell, who is now housed in a cushy, open prison in Texas after a sweetheart deal with the Trump administration, replied to Epstein: “I have been thinking about that.”
Some things, once seen, can’t be unseen, and once thought, can’t be unthought. There is no evidence to suggest Trump committed a crime, but Epstein will be a lasting stain on his legacy.
Call it rough justice, but guilt by association is a Trumpian speciality.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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