Lies and U-turns from Trump's team over the Epstein files
The Epstein scandal is following him everywhere – even when he went to Scotland to sign an EU trade deal last week, he was asked if he'd rushed to get the deal done to knock the Epstein story off the front pages.
'You gotta be kidding with that,' Trump replied.
A few weeks earlier, he responded to another reporter by asking: 'are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years … are people still talking about this guy, this creep?'
The answer is yes: six years after his death in a New York jail, the world is still talking about him, and specifically, about Trump's connection to him.
Today on The Detail we look at the chaotic, dramatic, ongoing saga of Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the fallout that Trump's waffling on the issue has had on some of his far-right allies.
The clamour to release the Epstein files became a MAGA movement obsession, when supporters of Trump became convinced they were full of the names of powerful Democrats, including ex-Presidents.
QAnon used the files to push ideas about a deep state cover-up of a network of global pedophiles, and one of the people giving a nod and a wink to those theories was the now head of the FBI, Kash Patel. He made his living from spreading rumours such as Epstein actually being murdered by the Clintons, and that there is a cabal of satanic pedophiles within the Democratic party.
On the election trail, Trump repeatedly said he would declassify the files.
He became US President on January 20, and within short order, the Epstein files were back in the news cycle.
But now it looks like Trump himself is in the files, backed up by evidence in conservative newspapers including the Wall Street Journal.
You don't have to look hard to find pictures of the two together. They allegedly had a falling out in the early 2000s and hadn't spoken for years before Epstein's arrest in 2019.
Suddenly, officials have tried to go quiet about Epstein's client list, variously saying it doesn't exist, or that there's nothing to see in there.
But a small army of FBI agents have been diverted from other duties to comb through thousands of pages of documents taken from Epstein's residences, looking for Trump's name, and Patel has now testified that Epstein did in fact die by suicide.
There are signs of Trump's supporter base turning on him over the issue, and Trump isn't helping calm them down with his attitude towards it.
Jay Kuo is a former attorney based in New York who writes a political and legal newsletter called The Status Kuo.
He says the more conspiracy-minded of the MAGA base have a lot to chew on, thanks to the Trump team's handling of the issue.
'They keep either making sloppy statements, or inconsistent statements, or riling up their base and then yanking the rug back. So it's sort of a roller coaster ride for the MAGA base.'
Kuo says Trump-appointed officials spent years saying that once they were in power they would expose all these people and bring them down.
'That's why it's really interesting that now they find themselves in the position they have to disown a lot of that. It puts them in a very tough spot vis-a-vis their original audiences.'
Trump's story, he says, keeps changing.
'What's interesting is the idea that the MAGA people have never put two and two together that Trump's name appears in the Epstein files, for example on the flight logs, I believe it's eight times.'
Kuo says many just don't believe it's true, even though it's very clear that he is in there. But he says this has been the longest-lasting scandal involving the President and it's not going away.
'In this case though, he's lying to his base. The base that trusted him. He was supposed to bring the storm – that's the QAnon thing – he was going to come in, sweep out government and drain the swamp, and then arrest all these Democrat satanic pedophiles.
'It's absurd on its face but a good percentage of the American public actually is QAnon-believing or QAnon-adjacent. Sadly it's around 20 percent.
'The danger [Trump] faces is that he runs the risk of having this very, very emotionally charged, sort of imbalanced group of folks coming after him now for having failed them, made false promises to them. And the vitriol online and the outrage is like nothing the GOP has ever seen.'
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