Can Trump Deflate the Epstein Birthday-Book Scandal?

Opinion|Can Trump Deflate the Epstein Scandal?

Suppose that you work for the Trump White House and the boss calls you in with a special request: He wants stronger pushback against the attempts to keep the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in the headlines.

What might you offer him? Let’s take the task seriously: The president of the United States keeps saying the Epstein story is overblown, fake news, and you’re supposed to back him up in a way that doesn’t seem laughable, that’s actually grounded in the apparent facts.

The best argument would go something like this. There is a real Epstein scandal, in which the deceased financier recruited and sexually exploited underage girls. But the Epstein mythos, in which lots of powerful men were supposedly his clients and his operation was linked to Israel’s Mossad or some other intelligence agency, has been largely manufactured by paranoiacs and attention seekers and credulous believers. And now it’s being cynically amplified by critics of this presidency — by liberals looking for any weapon ready to hand and by far-right critics of President Trump’s foreign policy who want to drive a wedge between the United States and Israel.

Your brief would note, first, that despite all the attention focused on this story, all the media investigations and lawsuits, the only man besides Epstein to be forced into a legal corner has been the hapless Prince Andrew, who arguably had reasons to make the story go away, even if he wasn’t guilty.

This could mean that the most powerful men involved in the scandal are good at intimidating accusers. But it could also mean Epstein really was just following his own perversions, not catering to (or gathering kompromat on) his wealthy friends.

If that sounds implausible, your brief would emphasize that the court-of-law claims that landed Epstein in prison were all against him specifically, with no mention of a parade of big-shot clients seeking underage sex. It would note that the leading accuser describing a large ring of powerful predators, Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, was extremely unreliable (to put it generously) in her allegations. And it would point out that her unreliability was shared by a number of other later accusers — one of whom trafficked in antisemitic conspiracism (“All the Jewish people I met just happen to be pedophiles who run the world economy”), while another claimed to have witnessed Epstein transform into “an alien reptilian creature.”