“Don’t worry, this story will run for days,” one confident editor told me on Wednesday as we debated when the Epstein story would wind down. Indeed, rumours that an explosive story about Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein have been circulating Washington all week. Then on Thursday night, the Wall Street Journal published extracts from a birthday card Trump wrote to Epstein in 2003. Complete with lewd drawings, Trump allegedly ends his message with: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Whatever could he mean? The president has, naturally, said the words in the WSJ story did not sound like him and rang up the newspaper’s editor Emma Tucker and proprietor Rupert Murdoch to threaten them with lawsuits. For a brief moment, Maga closed ranks, dismissing a story from the mainstream media and supporting Trump’s denials. The Vice President emerged from his recent silence on the Epstein saga to call the story “complete and utter bullshit”. But this is a risky strategy. Remember that Trump initially said the Access Hollywood tapes in 2016 did not sound like him before having to admit that he was in fact the culprit.
Like then, you should expect this story to run on for a while yet. If there are more revelations, it makes sense for Tucker to spread them over a few days, turning the screws on the administration and humiliating those who questioned their reporting. The story already seems to have prompted Trump to tell the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to publish any “pertinent” files from the 2019 Grand Jury indictment of Epstein for sex trafficking. (These files are thought to contain only a fraction of the government’s information on Epstein, and could still yet be kept secret by a court.)
The Epstein story quickly ran away from the president, inflaming his supporters online and making him look like a hypocrite for promising to release the case files and then telling everyone to move on. His position is contradictory: he says the idea that there is a conspiracy is a hoax, but also that the Democrats — including the Clintons, James Comey and Obama — were behind keeping the files secret. And then he chose to release those very files. Is it a hoax, a Democratic conspiracy or simply a tragic case whose details will confirm the official story?
The question now is what will satisfy the Maga base. Trump has long pushed conspiracy theories so that his voters see him as their only champion in the fight against a corrupt, paedophilic elite. That strategy is now coming back to consume him. This is by far the most dangerous scandal he has faced this term because it might erode the trust his base has in their dear leader. It is a test of whether that trust is actually blind faith.
[See more: Donald Trump can’t escape Jeffrey Epstein]
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