President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.
“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”
The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.
The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.
“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”
He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”
He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”
And yet, the first lady’s remarks redirected focus onto a story line that her husband and his administration have been thrashing against for a year. Just last week, the attorney general lost her job in part over her inability to contain the furor, which has now been reignited.
After Mrs. Trump spoke, the internet lit up with speculation about what could have prompted her to come forward. Mr. Trump insisted she was simply fed up with her press coverage.
But once she did, old photographs of her and Mr. Trump palling around with Mr. Epstein and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of facilitating years of sexual abuse, went viral again. The spectacle braided two narratives that officials in this White House always approach with utmost caution: the deeply private first lady and the deeply poisonous Epstein saga.
Mr. Trump projected sang-froid about it all on Friday. “I don’t mind anything having to do with Epstein,” he said, insisting he had been exonerated from all things Epstein related. “The only thing I don’t like is I waste a lot of time” having to talk about it.
But he was talking about it again because of something his wife chose to do. Was he upset that she had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?
“No,” he said. “I never get upset.”
He said that after he watched Mrs. Trump’s statement, he thought to himself: “She had a right to talk about it, because the fake news covers her so inaccurately.”
“Would I have done it that way?” the president mused. “Perhaps not, perhaps, I don’t know.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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