Trump rope-a-dopes MAGA
Donald Trump is feeling the heat over his efforts to bury the Jeffrey Epstein files he promised to release for his MAGA base. The administration’s decision not to has “outraged parts of Trump’s base, which believes the government is shielding high-profile people involved in the criminal enterprise,” the Washington Post reports. They believed Trump was their champion in “a broader fight against what they see as the corrupt elite.”
Podcaster and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on Thursday issued an expletive-filled tirade against Trump over the Epstein controversy. (I won’t bother quoting him. Better you listen.)
Accustomed to and skilled at making his base believe whatever he wants, Trump is desperately trying “to bury one conspiracy theory under another,” Ramesh Ponnuru writes in the Washington Post. Trump is trying to kill evidence of his own complicity with Epstein’s sex trafficking by claiming the rumors, the files, the investigation’s work products, etc., are yet another elaborate hoax perpetrated by his political enemies. (How many is it now?) Even if the events and evidence they turned up happened during his first administration the way Epstein turned up dead in his cell. A suicide, Attorney General Pam Bondi claims. A “suicide,” MAGA screams back.
Ponnuru, editor of The National Review, mocks Trump’s efforts to steer his conspiracy-addicted base toward this new conspiracy theory:
It’s therefore time, Trump says, to stop talking about Epstein. The lingering questions are a “scam” and a “hoax” spread by the president’s enemies, who he said “made up” the so-called Epstein files and then didn’t release anything incriminating while they were in power for reasons he hasn’t quite yet articulated. Trump’s theory has even less evidence going for it than the one he wants us all to forget (although Democrats, overjoyed at the rift in Trump’s ranks, are certainly fanning the controversy now).
Former Trump pal Elon Musk on his former Twitter platform joked, “Wow I can’t believe Epstein killed himself before realizing it was all a hoax.”
So now Trump thinks he can placate his furious base by asking Bondi to seek release of “any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony” in the Epstein case “subject to Court approval.”
The Washington Post adds:
Trump’s announcement came minutes after he pledged to sue the Wall Street Journal over its Thursday evening report, which said that he contributed a drawing of a naked woman to Epstein’s 50th birthday album in 2003. The letter concluded with “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the Journal report.
“President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist.”
Joyce Vance explains why Trump’s attempt to placate angry minions like Fuentes is so much rope-a-dope:
Release of the grand jury material, or as Trump would have it, only the bits that are “pertinent,” isn’t automatic. Federal prosecutors need a court order to disclose grand jury testimony; they can’t just do it on their own.
Federal rules and conditions must be met.
Even if the government can shoehorn its request into one of these categories or another provision of the rule, it will take time. There may be objections from Ghislaine Maxwell, whose case is still on appeal. And, DOJ would have to make a “strong showing of particularized need” that “outweighs the public interest in secrecy” in order for the release to be ordered.
That is, this appears to be a more sophisticated application of a standard Trump tactic for wiggling his way out of a tight spot: delay, delay, delay.
All of the possible impediments to releasing grand jury material may well be the point for Trump. He can say, yet again, that he tried and the courts stood in his way. Even a delay, while lawyers brief the matter and a judge schedules a hearing, could work in Trump’s favor if the fickle public loses interest in the issue and moves on, and he lives to fight another day, yet again. That could explain this strategy.
It might work if the rest of us let it.
Don’t.
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