Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. The Epstein scandal is causing some difficulty for Trump.
James Liddell at The Independent:
President Donald Trump has strongly pushed back against the bombshell Wall Street Journal report that alleged he drew a “bawdy” sketch in a birthday message to celebrate convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday.
“I never wrote a picture in my life,” he said in a rebuttal to the newspaper, vehemently denying having anything to do with the card.
In a Truth Social tirade late Thursday, the president declared, “I don’t draw pictures.”
Trump is accused of writing a cryptic note that made mention of a “wonderful secret” in his note to the disgraced financier. The Journal reported that the text was surrounded by a drawing of a naked woman, punctuated by a squiggly “Donald” that mimicked pubic hair.
Analysts were quick to pounce on Trump’s denial, including Media Matters chief Angelo Carusone, who told MSNBC, “I can think of three [Trump sketches] off the top of my head that were auctioned.”
He called in every favor to try to stop the article’s publication, making phone calls to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its editor, Emma Tucker, and swearing he would sue if they published. Vice President JD Vance called the story “complete and utter bullshit,” asking “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”
This was flailing, back-to-the-wall damage control. Trump’s claim that “I don’t draw pictures” was disproven within minutes of his making it. In fact, a plethora of comparable black-Sharpie doodles drawn by him around that time are already a matter of public record. Vance’s “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump” question was, if anything, even funnier: The alleged letter was written in 2003, one year after Trump told a reporter that Epstein was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” and two years before a hot mic caught Trump telling Billy Bush about his strategy for flirting with women he’d just met: “grab them by the pussy.”
The idea that Murdoch and the Journal would publish a story like this—knowing Trump’s penchant for retributive lawsuits—without being on rock-solid legal footing is laughable; a small army of lawyers no doubt inspected every word of the report. Meanwhile, Trump is the only alleged contributor to deny to the Journal that his letter was real; billionaire Leslie Wexner declined to comment, and attorney Alan Dershowitz simply said that “it’s been a long time and I don’t recall the content of what I may have written.”
