Donald Trump’s pet project has been referred to by some in the White House as the “Epstein Ballroom,” the president’s biographer says.
Michael Wolff, on the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head, recounted one White House insider’s admission about how the dead sex offender and former Trump pal is never really going away.
“I had this conversation…the day before yesterday with somebody—a White House circle person in the middle of all of this,“ Wolff, 72, told co-host Joanna Coles. ”We were just talking, and this is a person I’ve gotten to know over quite a long period of time. So we’re quite friendly, and it was just catching up.”
“This person is just sort of going over what’s happening in his world, which is to say Trump world, and he referred to something called the ‘Epstein Ballroom’— without prompting from me,” Wolff went on. “So I said, ‘Wait, the Epstein Ballroom? That’s what you’re calling it?’ And he was kind of sheepish at that moment. But then he said, ‘Well, you know, it has come up more than a few times.’”
Wolff, to whom Epstein delved into his friendship with Trump, 79, in a 2017 interview, said the comment revealed a few things.
“Within the White House… I think that there are two points about this: that the ballroom itself is regarded as bordering on preposterous, and this awareness that Epstein is everywhere in Trump world and that, in fact, everything is a distraction from Epstein,” Wolff said.
Another takeaway, Wolff said, is that there are some in the White House who at least have a sense of “self-awareness” and “irony.”
“They are not Stephen Miller,” Wolff put it, referring to the Deputy Chief of Staff. “They are not walking into this blind. Now, of course, they are not walking out of this, which is, I think, a key point. But nevertheless, they are there, and I’ve found this across writing four books about Trump, that there is a kind of captive world around him that is kind of clear-eyed.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, 28, said earlier this month that the ballroom was Trump’s “main priority.” The controversial construction project, which currently has a price tag of $300 million, will reportedly be named after the president. But some online commentators have since joked that a more fitting name would involve Epstein. Apparently that sentiment has been echoed inside the administration.
“I think it will be officially the Trump ballroom,” Wolff said, “but unofficially, mordantly, the Epstein ballroom.”
When reached for comment, the White House disputed Wolff’s credibility.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Wolff has sued First Lady Melania Trump, 55, alleging she has suppressed “legitimate inquiry” into Epstein and his relationship with the president. Last month, Trump’s legal team threatened a $1 billion lawsuit over what it called “false, defamatory, and lewd statements” by Wolff, and called for him to retract his statement that Epstein claimed that the Trumps first slept together on his private jet, the “Lolita Express.”
Through the lawsuit, filed in New York State court, Wolff can “subpoena the first lady, the president, and anyone else who might shed light on the relationship of Donald Trump and Melania Trump to Jeffrey Epstein,” the author said on last Thursday’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
“In other words, this might be a way to actually get to the bottom of this story, to open the curtain, the dark curtain,” he said. “And we’ll see how they feel about that.”
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The post How Trump Aides Mock Him Behind His Back: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
