The Trump administration is attempting to square up Donald Trump’s stray attacks on his Epstein-concerned supporters, arguing that the president doesn’t deserve criticism after he insulted his supporters for expecting updates on the Jeffrey Epstein case.
At a White House press briefing Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the Epstein “hoax” that Trump keeps referring to is strictly the idea that Democrats “ever wanted transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein,” deriding it as an “asinine suggestion” that Democrats sought answers about the prolific child sex trafficker.
But if Trump and his party want transparency, they have a funny way of showing it. On Tuesday, Republicans unquestioningly fell in line to support their leader’s narrative that there’s nothing to see here, blocking a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.
“The president has been transparent, he has followed through on his promises to the American people, but he doesn’t like to see Democrats and the mainstream media covering this like it’s the biggest story that the American people care about,” Leavitt told reporters, referring to Trump’s alleged connections to a man that orchestrated an international network to abduct children to his island in the Caribbean for the sexual gratification of his upper-class clients.
Instead of focusing on the despicable alleged ties, Leavitt told the room full of reporters that she wanted them to take pity on Trump.
“The president has been working so hard this week,” she said.
The botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague the Trump administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” A YouGov/Economist poll conducted earlier this week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the Trump administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”
In the wake of the scandal, Trump has repeatedly offended key portions of his base who believed his repeat campaign promises to make the details of Epstein’s case public, referring to them as “stupid” and accusing “naive Republicans” of being “duped” by the Democrats.
High-profile conservatives, including Elon Musk, have speculated that the administration’s continued delay in releasing the Epstein case files is due to the fact that Trump himself might be implicated in the documents, a suggestion that was buttressed Wednesday by one of Trump’s former employees, who claimed to have witnessed the socialite duo partying with young women in the late 1980s and referred to Epstein and Trump as “pretty good buddies.”
Remember that up until Trump assumed his grip on the Republican Party, it wasn’t uncommon for politicians and their dynasties to be unrooted by the mere suggestion of impropriety.
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