By Nick Catoggio
Friday, July 18, 2025
It goes to show how dead inside we all are now that I
read something last night about a “bawdy” letter the president once sent to an
infamous pedophile about their shared interests and came away thinking it was a
letdown.
“The sexual innuendo here between the commander-in-chief
and a notorious child molester just isn’t explicit enough to do real political
damage,” I surmised.
For days, rumor had it that the Wall Street Journal
was working on a bombshell about Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey
Epstein and that the White House was very worried about it. On Thursday
evening, the
story dropped. According to the report, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s
now-imprisoned procurer, solicited letters from friends of the late
pervert-financier in 2003 to celebrate his 50th birthday and
compiled them in an album as a birthday gift.
Here’s how the Journal describes the “bawdy”
letter that Trump allegedly sent: “It contains several lines of typewritten
text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn
with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the
future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking
pubic hair.”
According to the paper, the text of the letter imagines a
dialogue between Trump and Epstein that cryptically mentions having “certain
things in common.” At one point, the former says to the latter, “Enigmas never
age, have you noticed that?” It ends with Trump wishing his friend a “Happy
Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
All Trump scandals, even the darkest ones, have funny
elements, and this one is no different. Case in point: The president angrily
denied to the Journal that the letter was authentic because “I never
wrote a picture in my life.” It took no time at all after the story was
published for social media to begin filling up with autographed Trump
doodles from the past.
Even funnier was the fact that flummoxed populists
desperate to discredit the piece were reduced to arguing that the president is
too dumb to use fancy words like “enigma” that you might find in, say, a
junior-high vocabulary textbook. And in fairness, there’s something to that.
The Donald Trump of 2025 speaks not so much in sentences as in buzzwords strung
together with nouns and verbs—“strong,” “hoax,” “two
weeks,” etc.
But it wasn’t the Trump of 2025 who supposedly wrote the
letter to Epstein. It was the Trump of 2003, and in middle age, the president
spoke much
more articulately than he does now. Even if, for some reason, you can’t
believe that a busy man whose books were ghostwritten might have also used a
ghostwriter for a letter to a friend, you’re still stuck with the fact that a
middle-aged Trump likely knew and used the word “enigma.”
Because, you see, he knew and used it in
2015.
In a better world, the sort that hadn’t already caused us
all to die inside, the Journal’s scoop would be the true beginning of
the Epstein crisis. It’s further suggestive evidence that the guy who told New
York magazine in 2002 that his pal Jeffrey liked women “on the younger side”
knew Epstein was abusing minors and took no issue with it. And that would fit
with what we know about the president’s character: In Trump’s universe, the
only true moral failing is disliking Donald Trump.
Remember, his administration went
to bat for Andrew Tate. He’s never been subtle about his indifference when
women are abused by him or his allies. In fact, the last time he faced a major
scandal over sexual misconduct, he followed the playbook his fans are following
now by dismissing comments attributed to him on the grounds that they didn’t
sound like him. Guess
how that turned out.
The Journal’s story should be the start of the
crisis for Trump. In reality, it’s effectively the end.
Lines of inquiry.
There are intriguing questions about the scoop that have
nothing to do with what Trump knew about Epstein. To start with, how is it that
the newspaper that broke the story happens to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, of
all people?
“Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it,” the
president complained with palpable disappointment in a Truth
Social post after the news was published. All year long, media companies
have bent over backward to appease Trump for fear of becoming the next target
of his “retribution.” Even as the Journal piece was circulating on
Thursday, news came that CBS had canceled Stephen Colbert’s long-running
late-night show. Was that truly a “financial
decision,” as the network claimed (not
implausibly), or was it another
tribute paid to Trump by its parent company, Paramount, to secure his
administration’s approval for a merger?
In a climate like that, I would not have bet on Murdoch
spoiling his chummy relationship with the president by letting one of his
papers nuke him on Epstein. Especially since his crown jewel, Fox News, might
plausibly be punished for it by losing its special access to the White House,
if only temporarily.
Unless Rupert Murdoch is more committed to journalistic
integrity than any of us believed, I assume that he came to see letting the
story go forward as his least-bad option. Had he quashed it, Journal staffers
might have resigned, creating a different kind of PR headache for him. A
competitor like the New York Times would have inevitably gotten the
scoop, stealing attention that rightly belonged to his paper. And it’s not
clear that the average Republican media consumer would have wanted Murdoch to
kill the story: The politics of the Epstein scandal are (or were) sufficiently
unsettled on the right that Newsmax has begun needling Fox for
not covering it enough.
Another intriguing question concerns how the Journal
got wind of the letter, which had somehow gone undiscovered for more than 10
years and three presidential campaigns.
The Journal story states that the paper’s
reporters “reviewed” the letter, but they don’t claim to have obtained a copy,
which suggests that whoever has possession of the album that contains the
original allowed them to see it without handing it over. They also allege,
interestingly, that pages from the book “are among the documents examined by
Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago,
according to people who have reviewed the pages.”
“Deep-staters” inside the administration could have
conceivably begun leaking material from the Epstein-Maxwell files to embarrass
the president. (I’d say “fire up the polygraph machines” but they run
continuously in Trump’s DOJ.) If that’s true, though, why didn’t the leaks
begin before Election Day last year, when they might have done him real harm?
It doesn’t compute.
Alternate theory, then: Allies of Maxwell, not
“deep-staters,” have possession of the album and chose to leak Trump’s letter
in hopes of gaining leverage for her as she angles for early release from
prison. Coincidentally, her family issued a statement
three days ago declaring that “our sister Ghislaine did not receive a fair
trial” and urging the president to remediate the DOJ’s supposed misconduct in
her case.
If the Maxwell family has the letter, showing it to the Journal
is an implicit threat and an implicit bribe to Trump. The threat: There’s more
where this came from. The bribe: If he figures out a way to let Ghislaine go
free, she’ll say whatever he wants her to say to exculpate him in his dealings
with Epstein. “The 2003 letter? Oh, I forged it. The Clintons told me they’d
murder me if I didn’t.”
One more question. Has there ever been a purer example of
a so-called “limited hangout” than the president’s reaction to the Journal
scoop?
“Limited hangout” is a crisis-management term of art made
famous during the Nixon era. It refers to sharing a little bit of
not-very-damaging truth to mislead others into thinking that you’ve been candid
while you continue to cover up the larger, uglier scandal. It’s a way to meet
the public’s demand for information, hoping they’ll be satisfied with the
morsel they’ve been given and not press further.
Straight from the textbook: “Based on the ridiculous
amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam
Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court
approval,” Trump announced
last night as buzz built around the Journal story. Aye-aye, Captain,
Bondi dutifully replied.
Sure sounds like this administration has nothing to hide, no?
No. Grand jury testimony represents a tiny
fraction of what the Justice Department has gathered on Epstein and
Maxwell. And it’s especially unlikely in this case to reveal dirt on Trump,
considering that testimony was obtained during his first term by federal
prosecutors who were working
for, er, him. If you think DOJ lawyers were pressing witnesses to reveal
whether their own boss is a pervert, you’re the chump for whom the limited
hangout was designed.
Reading all of that, you might come away thinking that
the Epstein saga is gathering force as a political crisis. Not so. Actually,
it’s already begun to subside.
Us and them.
The most notable bit in Thursday’s bombshell—apart from
the leader of the free world allegedly styling his signature as pubic hair in
correspondence with a child-rapist—is the timing. Quote: “Earlier this week,
after the Journal sought comment from the president about the letter,
Trump told reporters at the White House that he believed some Epstein files
were ‘made up’ by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and former FBI
Director James Comey.”
“After the Journal sought comment.” So that
explains it.
For days, the commentariat has puzzled over Trump’s
sudden pivot to claiming that the Epstein files were written by
Democratic smear mongers. That flew in the face of MAGA canon, which
insists that the DOJ has the smoking gun that proves the existence of a vast
left-wing pedophilic conspiracy. If the files are actually a liberal hoax
created to frame Trump, that belief is up in flames. Why would the president
pull the rug out from under his fans that way?
Now we have the answer. He knew the Journal story
was coming and scrambled to get out in front of it before it did him real
damage among Epstein-credulous populists. And the only way he could think to do
so was by throwing his full weight behind turning it into a new loyalty test
for MAGA—to the unprecedented point of purporting to excommunicate
fans from his movement if they didn’t immediately adopt his “hoax”
gloss on what was happening.
It’s the same M.O. he used in 2020 to prepare the ground
for his “stop the steal” campaign. Months before Election Day, with polls
showing him losing badly to Biden, he began planting
seeds of doubt in supporters’ minds that defeat in November could only be
the result of chicanery. When defeat arrived, they were primed to view it
through that lens. He had warned them that election rigging was afoot, and now
here it was.
His problem with the Journal’s Epstein story is
that he didn’t have months to prepare the ground to discredit it this time. He
had days. So he speed-ran his 2020 playbook, essentially, compressing months of
mutterings about the next Democratic “hoax” into 72 or so hours of frantically
insisting that Trumpists must choose between believing in him or caring about
Epstein. It was an impromptu experiment in whether he could brute-force a sea
change in opinion among his cult on one of its core convictions in less than a
week by turning the demagoguery dial to 11.
I think it succeeded.
Numerous MAGA influencers who had been wavering on
whether to side with Trump or with their conspiracy-crazed audiences on Epstein
reacted with Pavlovian
predictability to seeing their leader blindsided by the right’s archenemy,
the liberal media. (Yes, “the liberal media” includes Rupert Murdoch’s
newspaper. Any publication whose news coverage deviates from Trumpist
propaganda is considered enemy turf.) Even Elon Musk, who’s been gleefully
needling the president over Epstein, fell in line sheepishly. “It really
doesn’t sound like something Trump would say tbh,” he tweeted about the
letter.
“Nothing unifies MAGA more than a little bit of suspected
fake news,” a Republican close to the White House chirped
to Politico. That’s the last five days of Trump’s messaging strategy
distilled to 12 words. Me or the fake news? Us or them? Once it came to
that, there was never a doubt which way a movement created by and for
demagogues would tilt. That a damaging story published by a reputable newspaper
would cause Trump supporters to grow less skeptical of the president,
not more, is an elegant
commentary on how corrupting populism is.
That’s why I say that the Journal’s bombshell is
effectively, and ironically, the end of the scandal as a political threat to
Trump rather than the start. MAGA simply lacks the civic integrity to keep
pursuing the truth about Epstein now that it’s been transformed, stupidly and
cynically, into a referendum on the media. If they cared earnestly about the
truth, Thursday’s scoop would galvanize them to demand more answers from the
DOJ. What they actually care about is having their suspicions confirmed that
prominent Democrats are degenerate child traffickers.
If the Epstein files aren’t going to do that for
them—worse, if there’s a chance that they’ll show that Donald Trump is a
degenerate—then they’d rather not know. They’ll back off and let the matter
drop, especially once the president’s limited hangout gives them a pretext to
say they’re satisfied.
Well, most will.
Dead inside.
There will be a faction of hardcore populists who persist
in raising the Epstein matter, even as the rest of the right drops the subject.
It will probably be the same Tuckerite faction that
continues to object to bombing Iran and sending weapons to Ukraine even as the
great mass of Republican voters falls instantly
into line with Trump on both subjects.
That’s the nucleus of “fundamentalist
MAGA” that’s taking shape ahead of 2028. Devotees who believe the future of
the party lies in moving further toward postliberalism have strategic reason to
try to foment grassroots suspicion about the president.
But that position will be ghettoized, with most
Republicans opting instead to pass the latest loyalty test, as they always do.
Granted, the polling that I flagged
on Wednesday shows real interest among Republicans about seeing what’s in
the Epstein files, but there’s no evidence that their frustration about that is
overriding their support for Trump. On the contrary, his
job approval is solid. Given a choice between blindly backing him and
satisfying their curiosity about a fiendish elite pedophile with lots of
powerful friends, we can be very confident about how they’ll choose.
Besides, Trump is savvy enough to keep flogging the
us-and-them angle he’s created to reinforce his argument that credulity about
Epstein makes one a dupe in a liberal-media ploy. I believe him when he says
he’s going to sue Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal; even if he
doesn’t win, and he almost certainly won’t, the ongoing litigation will remind
Republicans periodically of who their enemy is in this episode. Or maybe Trump
will end up squeezing Murdoch into paying him off via a “settlement” as he
recently did with Paramount.
Come to think of it, that might explain why Murdoch was
willing to let the Journal publish the piece. Ultimately, all he needs
to do to smooth this over is to cut Trump a check.
When the dust settles, I suspect the average American
will be left without a way to satisfy his or her curiosity about Epstein. Lord
knows, the Trump Justice Department isn’t going to let a little thing like
public interest or democratic accountability cause it to release information
that might upset the boss. Meanwhile, media outlets that pursue the story will
know to expect fierce “retribution,” financial and otherwise, for doing so. And
to what end? To have Trumpers who claimed to care deeply about pedophilia six
days ago scream in their faces about “fake news”?
Thank goodness we’re all dead inside, as otherwise the
pathos of our national decline might kill us. Happy weekend.
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