Trump Claims He ‘Never Wrote a Picture in My Life.' He Actually Drew Plenty of Them
The president on Tuesday denied that he wrote the letter or drew the picture in an interview with the Journal, threatening to sue the newspaper if it published the story. 'I never wrote a picture in my life. I don't draw pictures of women,' he said, according to the Journal. 'It's not my language. It's not my words.' Despite the president's insistence that's he's never doodled during his 79 years on earth, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Take for example, this mediocre sketch of the Manhattan skyline drawn by Trump that raked in $30,000 at an auction. Featuring the Trump Tower at the center, the picture was created by the now-president two decades ago for a charity event.
Then there's the marker drawing of the Empire State Building that Trump scrawled for another charity auction in 1995, which sold in 2017 for $16,000.
Trump himself has boasted about his artistic benevolence, and in a 2010 book titled Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success, he wrote: 'Sometimes being a giver will open you up to new talents. Each year I donate an autographed doodle to the Doodle for Hunger auction at Tavern on the Green. It takes me a few minutes to draw something.… Art may not be my strong point, but the end result is help for people who need it.'
According to Journal, the album was part of the documents reviewed by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell following allegations of sexual abuse. It's unclear if any of the pages in the leather-bound collection are part of the Trump administration's recent examination.
News of the alleged letter arrives amid an ongoing MAGA revolt as the president's supporters continue to condemn the Justice Department's memo announcing the administration's belief that Epstein killed himself in prison, and that the department was effectively closing its case. The president's relationship with Epstein has been under renewed scrutiny since. The pair were photographed together many times during the 1990s and early 2000s, were shot on video at a party together, and Trump appeared in flight logs for Epstein's private jet.
Trump today continued to deny that he signed the letter or scribbled the bawdy drawing. 'The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,' he ranted on Truth Social. 'These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don't draw pictures.'
More from Rolling Stone
Republicans Obey Trump, Vote to Cut Funding for NPR and PBS
'Five-Alarm Fire': Texas Dem Sounds Off on Trump's Bid to Gerrymander Midterms
The No Kings Playbook to Confront Trump's 'Authoritarian Breakthrough'
Best of Rolling Stone
The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign
Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal
The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
11 minutes ago
- New York Post
Just say no to Big Dope — and its push for even more legal marijuana
Will more marijuana use make America a better place? Not many who've seen and smelled what legalizing the drug has done to cities like New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco would say so. Yet President Donald Trump is contemplating a change to marijuana's federal classification that would make it easier to buy and more profitable to sell. The pot industry — Big Dope — is heavily invested in getting its product recategorized from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug. Industry leaders ponied up for a $1-million-a-plate Trump fundraising dinner earlier this month to hear what the president had in mind, according to The Wall Street Journal. The president should ignore the well-funded cannabis lobby: What matters is what more and cheaper marijuana will mean for ordinary Americans. Twenty-four states have legalized recreational use of the drug, despite the ugly results experienced by the first state to do so. Taking advantage of high Democratic turnout the year of President Barack Obama's re-election, activists passed a Colorado ballot measure to make pot legal back in 2012. Legalization didn't take effect until 2014, but by 2022 marijuana use in Colorado and other states that had then legalized was 24% higher than in states where recreational use remained illegal. A study by the South Korean scholar Sunyoung Lee published in the International Review of Law and Economics this year examines what's happened to crime levels in US states that legalized pot. Lee reported his findings 'do not yield conclusive evidence supporting a reduction in crime rates after legalizing recreational marijuana. Rather, they underscore notable positive associations with property crimes and suggest potential correlations with violent crimes.' The marijuana lobby claims that drug prohibition, not the drug itself, drives violent crime. That would be a bad argument even without evidence like Lee's, which suggests legal weed makes crime worse. After all, any profit-driven criminal enterprise could be shut down by simply legalizing the crime in question. If bank robbery were legal, bank robbers wouldn't need to use guns. If auto theft were legal, carjackers wouldn't have to use force, and there wouldn't be any violence associated with black-market chop shops because the chop shops would all be as legal as the commercial marijuana industry is today. Legalize everything Tony Soprano does, and Tony won't have to get rough — but he'll only do more of what he was doing before. Libertarians who argue for legalizing drugs to stop drug violence are closer than they realize to the radical leftists who argue property crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. The psychology is the same: They sympathize with the people who make it harder to live in a civilized society and reject society's right to defend its rules. There are downsides to laws against marijuana, just as there are costs to protecting private property and citizens' bodily safety. But the costs are well worth paying when the alternative is passivity in the face of aggression, handing your belongings or your life over to any thug who makes a demand. For a time marijuana legalization was sold to voters as just a matter of leaving people alone to consume whatever they want in private, without bothering anybody else. Yet millions of Americans have now lived long enough with pot legalization, or the non-enforcement of laws still on the books, to know the pot lobby perpetrated a fraud. What the country has actually had to deal with is pot smoking so rife in public that the offensive smell — and the sight and sounds of intoxication — smacks you in your face. It's hardly different from dope-users blowing smoke right in your eyes on the street. That's not the worst crime in the world — but neither is shoplifting, and there's no reason to tolerate that, either. Tolerating such things only breeds more tolerance for worse abuses, which is what has led progressives to treat even violent criminals with the utmost leniency. Two scenes in the suburbs of DC convinced me pot tolerance has gone too far. First was seeing an African-American bus driver, on a blazing hot summer day, order two dope-smoking teens to put out their joints and be aware there were children around. To the extent our cities work at all it's because of working-class men like him — and the rest of us have to decide whether we're on his side or the punks'. A year or so later I watched a young mother one bright October afternoon hold her small daughter's hand as they walked through a neighborhood reeking of high-potency pot. The multibillion-dollar weed industry got to advertise its product to a little girl about 4 years old that day. It's an industry that notoriously even sells its drug in candy form, as 'gummies.' Our cities and towns shouldn't be open-air drug dens — and Trump shouldn't let a lobby get high off of making Americans' lives worse. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
New York Times
25 minutes ago
- New York Times
Trump's Show of Force Takes Shape With Guard Troops Poised to Deploy
National Guard troops were poised to deploy in Washington on Tuesday evening as President Trump's plan to use the federal government to crack down on crime in the city began to take shape. Mr. Trump on Monday described the nation's capital in apocalyptic terms as a crime-infested wasteland — a description that ignores the extent to which crime has been falling in the city over the last two years. But it remains unclear whether the eventual show of force will match the president's rhetoric. 'This is only the beginning,' Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. 'Over the course of the next month, the Trump administration will relentlessly pursue and arrest every violent criminal in the District who breaks the law, undermines public safety and endangers law-abiding Americans.' Ms. Leavitt boasted that a federal task force, which includes some local officers, made 23 arrests on Monday evening in connection with a range of crimes. In Washington, a city of roughly 700,000 people, the Metropolitan Police Department makes an average of 68 arrests a day, officials said. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details, said National Guard troops were expected to begin patrolling the streets of Washington by Tuesday night, although city officials said the troops would not have the authority to make arrests. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, and Pamela A. Smith, her police chief, met Tuesday morning with Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the city officials emerged from the meeting saying they were focused on how to make the most of the federal support. Ms. Bowser said she wanted to make sure the federal force was 'being well used, and all in an effort to drive down crime.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
41 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trial in National Guard lawsuit tests whether Trump will let courts limit authority
Minutes after Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth trumpeted plans to 'flood' Washington with National Guard troops, a senior U.S. military official took the stand in federal court in California to defend the controversial deployment of soldiers to Los Angeles. The move during protests earlier this summer has since become the model for President Trump's increasing use of soldiers to police American streets. But the trial, which opened Monday in San Francisco, turns on the argument by California that Trump's troops have been illegally engaged in civilian law enforcement. 'The military in Southern California are so tied in with ICE and other law enforcement agencies that they are practically indistinguishable,' California Deputy Atty. Gen. Meghan Strong told the court Tuesday. 'Los Angeles is just the beginning,' the attorney went on. 'President Trump has hinted at sending troops even farther, naming Baltimore and even Oakland here in the Bay Area as his next potential targets.' Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer said in court that Hegseth's statements Monday could tip the scales in favor of the state, which must show the law is likely to be violated again so long as troops remain. But the White House hasn't let the pending case stall its agenda. Nor have Trump officials been phased by a judge's order restricting so-called 'roving patrols' used by federal agents to indiscriminately sweep up suspected immigrants. After Border Patrol agents last week sprang from a Penske moving truck and snatched up workers at a Westlake Home Depot — appearing to openly defy the court's order — some attorneys warned the rule of law is crumbling in plain sight. 'It is just breathtaking,' said Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, part of the coalition challenging the use of racial profiling by immigration enforcement. 'Somewhere there are Founding Fathers who are turning over in their graves.' The chaotic immigration arrests that swept through Los Angeles this summer had all but ceased following the original July 11 order, which bars agents from snatching people off the streets without first establishing reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally. An Aug. 1 ruling in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to assure they could not resume again for weeks, if ever. For the punch-drunk Department of Justice, the 9th Circuit loss was the latest blow in a protracted judicial beatdown, as many of the administration's most aggressive moves have been held back by federal judges and tied up in appellate courts. '[Trump] is losing consistently in the lower courts, almost 9 times out of 10,' said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. In the last two weeks alone, the 9th Circuit also found Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship unconstitutional and signaled it would likely rule in favor of a group of University of California researchers hoping to claw back funding from Trump's war on so-called DEI policies. Elsewhere in the U.S., the D.C. Circuit court appeared poised to block Trump's tariffs, while a federal judge in Miami temporarily stopped construction at Alligator Alcatraz. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has crowed that his Department of Justice had sued the administration nearly 40 times. But even the breakneck pace of current litigation is glacial compared with the actions of immigration agents and federalized troops. Federal officials have publicly relished big-footing Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who have repeatedly warned the city is being used as a 'petri dish' for executive force. On Monday, the White House seemed to vindicate them by sending the National Guard to Washington. Speaking for more than half an hour, President Trump rattled off a list of American cities he characterized as under siege. When asked if he would deploy troops to those cities as well, the president said, 'We're just gonna see what happens.' 'We're going to look at New York. And if we need to, we're going to do the same thing in Chicago,' he said. 'Hopefully, L.A. is watching.' The Department of Justice argues that the same power that allows the president to federalize troops and deploy them on American streets also creates a 'Constitutional exception' to the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century law that bars the soldiers from civilian police action. California lawyers say no such exception exists. 'I'm looking at this case and trying to figure out, is there any limitation to the use of federal forces?' Judge Breyer said. Even if they keep taking losses, Trump administration officials 'don't have much to lose' by picking fights, said Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and a Constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute. 'The base likes it,' Somin said of the Trump's most controversial moves. 'If they lose, they can consider whether they defy the court.' Other experts agreed. 'The bigger question is whether the courts can actually do anything to enforce the orders that they're making,' said David J. Bier of the Cato Institute. 'There's no indication to me that [Department of Homeland Security agents] are changing their behavior.' Some scholars speculated the lower court bloodbath might actually be a strategic sacrifice in the war to extend presidential power in the Supreme Court. 'It's not a strategy whose primary ambition is to win,' said Professor Mark Graber of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. 'They are losing cases right and left in the district court, but consistently having district court orders stayed in the Supreme Court.' Win or lose in the lower courts, the political allure of targeting California is potent, argued Segall, the law professor who studies the Supreme Court. 'There is an emotional hostility to California that people on the West Coast don't understand,' Segall said. ' deemed a separate country almost.' An favorable ruling in the Supreme Court could pave the way for deployments across the country, he and others warned. 'We don't want the military on America's streets, period full stop,' Segall said. 'I don't think martial law is off the table.' Pedro Vásquez Perdomo, a day laborer who is one of the plaintiffs on the Southern California case challenging racial profiling by immigration enforcement, has said the case is bigger than him. He squared up to the podium outside the American Civil Liberties Union's downtown offices Aug. 4, his voice trembling as he spoke about the temporary restraining order — upheld days earlier by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — that stood between his fellow Angelenos and unchecked federal authority. 'I don't want silence to be my story,' the day-laborer said. 'I want justice for me and for every other person who's humanity has been denied.'
