Elon Musk keeps adding fuel to Trump's Epstein scandal. It might be his most effective launch

San Francisco Chronicle​

5 days ago

In death, the late accused sex trafficker and money man Jeffrey Epstein is causing his ' closest friend,' President Donald Trump, more problems than he did before he passed away in a New York prison cell in 2019.
It's ironic, or some might call it just deserts, that a conspiracy theory pushed by his supporters about Epstein's purported client list now threatens to engulf the second Trump administration. Trump, after all, built his entire political career spreading metastasizing conspiracy theories into the American body politic. Recall the Obama birth certificate slander?
Of course, Trump's encouragement of paranoid fringe groups like QAnon, which, when not focused on their belief that the late John F. Kennedy Jr. is the president of the United States in exile, helped spread lies about pedophiles working out of a D.C. pizza parlor.
The ignition point of this story, however, can be credited to another former Trump friend: Elon Musk. Furious over the president's deficit-swelling budget, Musk took to X and let fly with a haymaker.
'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,' he wrote on the platform whose AI chatbot can't seem to stop spewing antisemitic garbage. 'That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!'
Musk later deleted the tweet, but has since poured more gasoline on the fire that ensued after Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI tried to assure the country there was no Epstein client list and that it was time for the conspiracy theorists to shut up.
'Just release the files as promised,' Musk wrote in a post over the weekend.
It's hard to know whom to root for in a spat between loathsome characters. The problem for Trump is that any sentient American knows that he had a special relationship with Epstein and his longtime girlfriend/pimp Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for procuring underage girls on Epstein's behalf.
Of Epstein, Trump said that 'I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.'
And there's video of Epstein enjoying it alongside Trump as the two ogled young women on a Mar-a-Lago dance floor in 1992.
As for Maxwell, Trump even told Axios's Jonathan Swan that her 'friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. She's now in jail. Yeah, I wish her well. I'd wish you well. I'd wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.'
She was proven guilty, for the record.
Trump said on Tuesday that 'I don't understand it, why they would be so interested. He's been dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don't understand what the interest and what the fascination is. I really don't.'
This is an unusual assertion by Trump, who would be utterly fascinated if Joe Biden or his family were involved. Epstein, it should be noted, died during the first Trump administration. Nothing to see here, folks … move along.
Perhaps the fascination with Epstein's death stems from the revelation that there appears to be a three-minute gap in the surveillance video of Epstein's jail cell.
No doubt, conspiracy-curious members of the Trump administration have also played a part in inflaming the story.
So did members of Team Trump. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino made a point of keeping the Epstein conspiracy speculation alive before their appointments, and Bongino apparently threatened to resign over Bondi's handling of the case.
Or perhaps the reason Epstein now haunts the president stems from the Trump family itself. In a 2024 social media post, Donald Trump Jr. quipped that he kept hearing 'about some of the Jeffrey Epstein clients names being released today, but I'd be willing to bet that something happens between now and then that prevents those names from ever coming out.'
The Trump administration itself also made a big show of January's release of part one of the Epstein files, setting off initial paroxysms of glee in the MAGA media community that quickly turned to groans after the dump turned out to be one big nothingburger.
As Musk has continued to add rocket fuel to the Epstein story, some parts of Trump world seem to be realizing they have a problem on their hands. While the House of Representatives narrowly put down a vote Wednesday to force Trump to release the Epstein files, Speaker Mike Johnson strongly signaled that might not be enough to satisfy the GOP's conspiracy theorists' wing.
'I don't know that she was specific about a list or whatever, but she needs to come forward and explain that to everybody,' Johnson said after the vote.
Trump also inched closer to throwing Bondi under the bus.
'Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release,' he said Wednesday of his AG.
As Trump squirms in the face of something he cannot explain away to a base that still believes him largely infallible, the Epstein story poses perhaps the first real test of his second term.
On Thursday, with the story continuing to simmer, Trump called it a 'SCAM' and a 'hoax' cooked up by Democrats, and he also decried his supporters as 'weaklings' for falling prey to it.
Presumably, that would include Trump's former national security adviser, former Gen. Michael Flynn — that paragon of conspiracy theorist candor — who on Saturday weighed in on social media: '@realdonaldtrump please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away.'