President Donald Trump has a record of being loose with the facts. He says things that are so easily fact-checked. He doesn’t care, however, because he believes that his followers will believe anything he says. The evidence appears to support this.
Trump recently called his supporters “foolish” and “stupid.” Of course, Trump understands that all these characteristics that he now associates with his supporters are why they have remained loyal to him for so long.
As many have stated, there must be incriminating evidence in those Epstein files regarding Trump, as he is working hard to keep them hidden and to get his supporters to change the subject. He has blamed everyone from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden for the “fake” information contained in the Epstein file held by his Justice Department and FBI offices. The problem with this argument, however, is that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and jailed during the Trump administration. In addition, when Trump calls something “fake,” you know it is real, as in the fake 2020 election results and the fake charges of sexual assault made against him.
Trump is always blaming Biden for something or another. Just the other day, he lamented about the appointment of Jerome Powell to lead the United States Central Bank. “He was a terrible chair. I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him.” Of course, it was Trump, not Biden, who appointed Powell in 2017. But, hey, let’s talk about Biden’s state of confusion.
The president is grasping at straws as he can’t decide who to blame for the report, which he desperately wants to keep secret, including former FBI Director James Comey. Speaking of Comey, in the middle of all of this, the Trump administration decided that it was a good idea to fire federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, who helped to prosecute the case against Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Well, that doesn’t look suspicious at all.
Trump follows the same patterns and routines when trying to establish his version of a story he doesn’t like. This is being played out today as he has filed a lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal for a story they broke about correspondence between Trump and Epstein that appears to show that Trump and Epstein shared, in Trump’s words, a “wonderful secret.” I wonder what that secret could be?
What isn’t a secret is that Epstein and Trump had been good friends for years and that, interestingly, Trump appointed Alex Acosta as his secretary of labor during his first administration after Acosta negotiated a very unusual plea deal with Epstein in 2008 that largely ignored the most serious charges against him regarding the alleged trafficking of young girls. Acosta allowed Epstein to plead guilty to state charges of soliciting a minor.
After he joined the Trump administration, however, the Miami Herald reported in 2019 that Epstein had abused dozens of girls and documented how Acosta shut down an FBI investigation of the more serious charges against Epstein. Sounds like a cover-up to me. After this was exposed, Acosta resigned from the Trump administration. But why did Trump give him the job in the first place?
Federal investigators in New York picked up the Epstein case, and he was arrested on multiple sexual exploitation and abuse charges involving young girls. While in jail, Epstein killed himself, according to the FBI.
What we know from the New York case, however, is that Epstein faced charges of sex trafficking of minors and the abuse of young girls at his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico, London and a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
For years since 2019, MAGA supporters, encouraged by Trump, pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking young girls to Democrats, including Bill Clinton, and that Democrats likely had Epstein killed to protect their own. He also said that Democrats were keeping the Epstein file a secret to hide all of these facts. Today, however, we are learning that it is Trump who wants the Epstein file to be kept under wraps. I wonder why?
Meanwhile, the Justice Department seems to be working hard to protect Trump’s involvement with Epstein. Sen. Dick Durbin reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured the FBI to put 1,000 personnel to work in 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein records and flag any records in which President Trump was mentioned. I wonder what they are up to?
Many Democrats believe this will finally wake up Trump supporters to how Trump has manipulated them for the past 10 years. This is wishful thinking, at best. The MAGA crowd is unable to connect the dots. Trump says that they are “stupid” and “foolish.” They will likely prove him correct, again.
Tom Zirpoli is the Laurence J. Adams Distinguished Chair in Special Education Emeritus at McDaniel College. He writes from Westminster. His column appears on Wednesdays. Email him at tzirpoli@mcdaniel.edu.
