Is Trump’s Flip-Flop on Epstein Files Enough to Appease His Base?
After facing enormous pressure from his base, Donald Trump has ordered the Justice Department to release additional details pertaining to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The offering was, apparently, more than enough to get a chunk of far-right influencers back on his side.
By Friday morning, conservatives on X were abuzz, trying to find any reason to dismiss a Wall Street Journal report that Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein more than two decades ago for the financier’s 50th birthday.
Self-described “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh wrote on X that the letter, which was reportedly requested by Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, “screams fake.”
“The writing doesn’t sound like Trump at all,” Walsh claimed. Hours earlier, Walsh had insisted that Trump’s efforts to shed his Epstein-conscious base by deriding them as “weaklings” and as “stupid” and “naive” was the “number one way to make sure that I keep talking about the subject.”
Laura Loomer, who earlier this month had called on Trump to throw his attorney general out of the government for her role in the reprised scandal, was similarly busy defending the president by Friday morning.
“I’m calling bullshit on this Trump ‘birthday letter’ to Epstein. It’s totally fake. Everyone who actually KNOWS President Trump knows he doesn’t type letters. He writes notes in big black Sharpie,” Loomer insisted. “Trust me, I would know.”
The Journal reported that the drawing of a nude woman that framed Trump’s letter was done in Sharpie. His signature on the note, which was scrawled between the woman’s legs and resembled pubic hair, was also done in Sharpie.
And Elon Musk, who plainly accused Trump of delaying the release of the Epstein files on the basis that the MAGA leader was implicated in them, elevated a script from his AI chatbot Grok that claimed the Journal reporting was “most likely fake.” Grok cited Trump’s “strong denial” of the story and his threat to sue the newspaper and its owner Rupert Murdoch over the letter’s publication.
But not everyone on the right was sold by Trump’s meager offering.
“Last week, the Dept of Justice claimed the Epstein Files don’t exist but they’re also a Democrat hoax, and there is nothing in them except child sex abuse material,” wrote white supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes. “Now the DOJ, under public pressure, is going to unseal grand jury testimony? Not buying it.”
On Thursday, Fuentes thoroughly mocked Trump as “fat,” “a joke,” “stupid,” and “not funny,” and said that “the liberals were right” and that the country would “look back at MAGA movement as the biggest scam in history.”