Hosts of MSNBC’s flagship morning show have eviscerated Donald Trump for burrowing himself away from reporters after throwing a spectacular tantrum over new revelations about his relationship with perhaps the most notorious sex trafficker in U.S. history.
“For all of the criticisms one can level at President Trump, he’s extremely accessible to the press,” Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire said Tuesday. “He is—but he has not taken a single question from the press since the Wall Street Journal broke the story about the birthday letter he allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein.”
“We haven’t seen him since,” he added. “And it does sound, I’m told from aides, that he has been angry about some of the coverage.”
Published last Thursday, the WSJ’s report revealed Trump had allegedly, in 2003, sent a birthday greeting to Epstein featuring a scribbled drawing of a naked woman alongside a bizarre imagined exchange between the two men about “enigmas” and “wonderful secrets.”
The president is now suing the newspaper to the tune of $10 billion over the story, which he says is “fake,” “false,” and “malicious,” and which comes at a time when Trump is already facing intense scrutiny over the extent of his relationship with the disgraced financier.
Despite once describing Epstein as a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump has for years courted far-right conspiracy theorists who believe Epstein’s crimes formed part of an international pedophilic cabal, and that his 2019 death was orchestrated as cover for his uber-wealthy envisioned accomplices.
Buoyed by campaign promises to release findings on the Epstein case in full, that courtship backfired spectacularly just a few weeks ago, with many MAGA supporters now foaming at the mouth after the Justice Department and FBI issued a memo stating the convicted pedophile died by suicide and that, contrary to rumors long-cherished by the far-right, he kept no “client list” of co-conspirators.
In the days since the Wall Street Journal’s story first ran, Trump has indeed shied away from the press while embarking on a virulent Truth Social spree featuring a truly bizarre array of posts, from AI-generated videos of President Barack Obama being arrested for some as-yet-undetermined crime to demanding an NFL team return to its racist former name.
“The New York Times is reporting this morning pretty much what everybody in Washington and New York, anybody that followed politics have concluded,” host Joe Scarborough reflected. “And that is: Donald Trump is throwing everything at the wall.”
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