Why Donald Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein Cover-Up Matters

When Attorney General Pam Bondi declared in a memo on July 10 that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” for the countless files, pictures and video held by the Department of Justice related to the late pedophile and wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein she unleashed a firestorm.After serving up red meat to conservative conspiracists for years about Epstein and the elite pedophile sex ring he operated, Bondi turned the tables on them. Instead of revealing the truth as everyone from Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, Donald Trump Jr., billionaire Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance and even President Donald Trump promised, the Trump administration now appeared to be in on the cover-up.Conservative influencers rebelled, castigating the administration for failing to live up to its promise. Trump, meanwhile, made the story worse, claiming the whole Epstein story was a “scam” and a “hoax” cooked up by Democrats like former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He told his supporters to pound sand, calling them “stupid” and “weaklings” and that “I don’t want their support anymore!” Trump and White House officials have spent weeks now trying to calm their conservative allies and strong-arm them into not talking about Epstein anymore.The scandal spiralled further soon after Bondi fired career DOJ prosecutor Maurene Comey, who is not just the daughter of former FBI director and Trump nemesis James Comey, but was also the lead prosecutor on the Epstein case. On Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that among the files seized from Epstein’s property by the DOJ is a bawdy letter Trump sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday back in 2003.The letter includes a drawing of a nude woman with Trump’s signature applied over her pubic region. Trump’s ode to Epstein includes lines like, “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” and “may every day be another wonderful secret,” which can only send the paranoid mind racing. Trump angrily denied the letter was real, claimed he tried to get Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch to kill the story and threatened to sue the Journal, Murdoch and the Journal’s parent corporation NewsCorp.Jeffrey Epstein was "Donald’s closest friend for ten years," Epstein told the journalist Michael Wolff.Seeming to bow to pressure, Trump then directed Bondi to try and get the Epstein grand jury to allow the disclosure of “pertinent” documents. It is, however, unclear whether Bondi would allow the release of documents naming Trump or if the judge overseeing the grand jury would take the extremely rare step of unsealing the grand jury documents. There are also thousands of other Epstein-related documents held by the federal government that Trump did not call to be released.Indeed, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Bondi on Friday claiming that “approximately 1,000 personnel” from the FBI were put on round-the-clock duty to review “approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records” and “instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”Of all the stories, scandals and policies that have followed Trump since he entered politics, why has this one, above all others, caused such enormous blowback from Trump’s own supporters? And why is this scandal not a “distraction,” as some Democrats seem to reflexively claim?Why The Right Is Big MadTo understand the conservative blowup around Epstein, one must first understand the heart of Trumpist politics. These politics have been routinely labeled as populist over the past decade. But this populism is not centred on populist policies designed to help the masses — universal health care, crackdowns on corporations, higher taxes on the wealthy, limits on money in politics or closing offshore tax shelters. Instead of policy, Trump’s right-wing populism provides the masses with attacks on alien others — immigrants, LGBTQ, Black people — and conspiracy narratives of secret elite perfidy, whether it be the Deep State or global elite criminal operations.These narratives of secret elite wrongdoing are, at their heart, stories about inequality and the power of the rich and politically connected at the expense of the ordinary man and woman. But they carry no promise of fixing societal inequalities or raising up those ordinary people. Instead, they promise vengeance and a twisted justice. They effectively enabled the right to co-opt populist anti-elite sentiment in the wake of the wave of events that undermined elite authority like the Great Recession, the mortgage crisis and the Iraq War.The most potent of these narratives to emerge during the Trump era was QAnon. QAnon grew out of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy that claimed (falsely, obviously) that Bill and Hillary Clinton operated a child sex ring out of a pizza parlour in Washington, D.C., for themselves and their Democratic Party friends.QAnon posits that Trump is an avenging archangel sent by God to investigate, bring to justice and put on trial and execute the cosmopolitan elites who rule the world through a global Satanic pedophile conspiracy. This coming justice is referred to as “the storm.” Polls in 2022 have shown that about 25% of Republicans were QAnon believers and only 48% fully rejected QAnon ideology, and conservative influencers have made their careers or played footsie with QAnon beliefs in the Trump era.Conservative influencers touted Attorney General Pam Bondi's release of "The Epstein Files: Phase 1" in February. The files had already largely been made public.That such an absurd story, which has parallels with antisemitic theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and blood libel, has taken root and plays a key role in American politics may seem nuts, but the QAnon narrative has a long pedigree back to the first written narratives among English settlers in America.The very first narrative texts produced by English settlers were captivity narratives that told the story of Puritan women captured by Satanic Indian tribes and eventually rescued, returned and purified by Christianity. After the War of Independence, fear of elite conspiracies ran rampant in politics as Thomas Jefferson and others assailed the Federalist Society of Cincinnati and Federalists attacked Jefferson as a tool of the Illuminati. In the 1820s, the Anti-Masonic Party became a potent force around tales that Masons were killing men who challenged them. Anti-Catholic nativism coalesced around Maria Monk’s 1836 book — largely believed to be fiction — that followed the tropes of the captivity narratives to claim a vast Catholic Church sex conspiracy. QAnon follows in this long tradition that was labeled the “paranoid style” by 20th century historian Richard Hofstadter.While QAnon is not real, Jeffrey Epstein is. He was a wealthy elite who hung in the most elite of circles with friends in politics, business, technology, science, higher education and intelligence services and ran a sex ring that preyed on teenage and preteen girls out of mansions in New York and Palm Beach and an island in the Caribbean. He is reported to have provided the services of his underage sex ring to elites, including British Prince Andrew and others. This is the actual thing.Conservatives and other conspiracy followers have played up the unreleased Epstein files as providing the truth about elite pedophilia rings that will lead to the “storm” promised by QAnon. So when Trump refuses to release the Epstein files, whatever they may be, and then publicly attacks his allies for bucking him, he inverts the narrative and becomes its target. Instead of an avenging archangel, Trump becomes a fallen angel. You know who else is a fallen angel?This Is Not A DistractionThere are countless scandals of Trump’s that are far worse in terms of their destructive impact on people — mass deportation, Jan. 6, cutting health care and foreign aid funding — than his cover-up of the Epstein case. But that doesn’t mean this story is in any way less important. If anything, it could be the key to undo the tie that binds him to at least part of his base.That’s because Trump doesn’t want them to know what is rather easy to find out from reading non-conservative news: that Trump was good friends with Epstein for years. This has been public knowledge for years, but it does not seem to have penetrated the MAGA mind, yet.Trump met Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s onetime girlfriend and partner in crime. In the 1980s, Ghislaine was a socialite using her father Robert Maxwell’s business to make her way in New York and London. Robert Maxwell was a powerful businessman in London who was deeply connected to Israeli and Soviet intelligence services and, upon his death, was revealed to have been a thief and a fraud. Trump and Robert were also the kind of frenemies that only rich people can be — friendly acquaintances who try to outbid each other for business acquisitions. Ghislaine used her father’s connections to become friends with Trump and introduce him to Epstein in the late 1980s.In 1992, Epstein and Trump were captured on video by NBC laughing and ogling women at an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. “She’s hot,” Trump leans over to tell Epstein at one point before whispering something into his ear that leaves Epstein doubled-over in laughter.Trump invited Epstein to a more private party in January 1993 where the two were the only men at a “calendar girl” event with 28 models hosted at Mar-a-Lago.Donald Trump invited Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to a tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago with his then-girlfriend Melania Trump in February 2000.“I said, ‘Donald, this is supposed to be a party with V.I.P.s,’” George Houraney, the head of American Dream Calendar Girls who flew the models down for the event, told The New York Times in 2019. “You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”“This is a Jeff Epstein party, basically,” Houraney told The Guardian in 2019.Houraney even warned Trump about having Epstein around young women, recounting to The New York Times what he said to Trump, “‘Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls.’”Later that year, Epstein was in New York with model Stacey Williams, whom he was dating, and decided to stop by Trump Tower to see Trump, according to Williams. Upon meeting Trump, Williams recounts Trump groping her in front of Epstein while the two men continued to chitchat and smile at each other. Williams described it as a “twisted game” between the two. Trump has completely denied this ever took place.“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said in 2024 when telling her story.In 1997, the two attended a Victoria’s Secret party hosted by Epstein’s biggest client, Limited Brands (which owns Victoria’s Secret) head Les Wexner. Epstein and Maxwell invited Trump to a party with Prince Andrew, who has been accused of sleeping with underage girls provided by Epstein, in 1999. The next year, Trump hosted Epstein and Maxwell at a tennis tournament at Mar-a-Lago along with his new girlfriend, Melania Knauss, who is now the first lady.When New York Magazine profiled Epstein in 2002 as he began to cultivate a public persona, including jet-setting to Africa with Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, Trump sang his praises.“Terrific guy,” Trump said. “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.”The next year, Trump penned the letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday that the Wall Street Journal disclosed on Thursday.But that was near the end of their friendship. In 2004, Trump outbid Epstein for a Palm Beach mansion behind the latter’s back before flipping the house a few months later to a Russian oligarch for 2.5 times the amount he paid. The two fell out and remained on the outs.Before then, Epstein said he was “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years” in a recorded interview with journalist Michael Wolff. Trump appears throughout the Epstein documents that have been made public. He is recorded as flying on Epstein’s private jet eight times. There are paper memos noting that Trump called Epstein at home. And Trump’s name appears in Epstein’s black book of contacts with 16 different phone numbers.When Epstein was deposed in 2016 and was asked under oath if he ever socialized with Trump in the presence of minor girls, he claimed his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself and refused to answer. (He invoked his Fifth Amendment rights at least 600 times during this deposition.)Epstein would be arrested for having sex with minors in 2006, but was given a sweetheart plea deal by federal prosecutors in 2008. He would only plead guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution and sentenced to 18 months in prison, although he was given special treatment and allowed to leave on “work release” for much of the time.Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed in February 2025 that Epstein's client list was "sitting right now on my desk to review," but now claims it does not exist at all.When Trump first came into office, he appointed the architect of that plea deal, Alexander Acosta, as his Secretary of Labor. But reporting by the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown in 2018 revisiting Epstein and his sweetheart deal uncovered up to 80 Epstein victims. That reporting led to Acosta’s resignation and the reopening of the Epstein investigation. He was charged and arrested again in 2019 and then died, allegedly by suicide, in a jail cell that same year.Much remains unknown about Epstein and his crimes. What was his actual business? How did he actually amass the nearly $600 million estate he left behind? To whom did he prostitute out his stable of young women and girls? Did he use pictures and video of these encounters to blackmail business leaders, presidents and other important people? What was his relationship with American and foreign intelligence services?Rather than a distraction, as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the scandal on Thursday, Democrats should see Trump’s Epstein cover-up as a two-pronged opportunity. It can act as a wedge-issue to pit him against his base and pry away low-information voters who may be tuned into conspiracy news, but not political news. This is precisely the constituency the party has struggled with the most, according to a study by Data for Progress.Democrats have batted around ideas like creating a liberal Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host who endorsed Trump in 2024, teaming up with influencers or trying to go viral on social media, somehow. But perhaps meeting these voters where they are and bringing attention to the topics they do follow, however far afield from policy, might actually work.The Trump-Epstein scandal also allows Democrats to take for themselves the master narrative of elite perfidy amid widespread inequality and turn it against Trump. People may be drawn to narratives about an oligarchy of the wealthy or the tyranny of a would-be dictator, but here is a preexisting narrative that tells that same story, one of the corruption of the elite and the inequality they revel in, that puts Trump at its very heart.By demanding the truth come out, they can promise that every day can be another wonderful revelation.Related...Trump Lashes Out At Rupert Murdoch Over WSJ Epstein BombshellTrump Once Gave Epstein A Racy Birthday Card With A Strange Note: ReportTrump Goes Off On His Own MAGA Base: 'I Don’t Want Their Support Anymore!'

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