It took Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman to cut to the chase: if Trump didn’t sign the birthday card or other documents released by Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, the reporter asked in a quiet yet insistent tone, what’s the working theory as to why he’s in there?
“The president has one of the most famous signatures in the world,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, replied on Tuesday. “The president did not write that letter. He did not sign those documents.”
Leavitt will have to do better than that. The typewritten message inserted into the sketched outline of a nude woman looks like compelling evidence of a close – and laddish – relationship between the US president and the world’s most notorious paedophile sex trafficker.
Typically full of brio and swagger, the White House is scrambling this time because Trump is behaving so out of character. For years, he has inverted the politician’s playbook by saying the quiet part out loud and flaunting misconduct in public. When, in a 2016 presidential debate, Hillary Clinton accused him of dodging taxes, Trump retorted: “That makes me smart.”
But now, he is acting like the thing he always scorned: a typical politician. Watergate was lethal to Richard Nixon because of the cover-up and reporters chipping away to gather precious information. British deputy prime minister Angela Rayner spent more than a year fending off rightwing press scrutiny of her finances before being forced to quit this week over underpaid tax on a flat.
The Trump of old would have done the opposite and released all the Epstein files, as he promised during the election campaign, even if they were personally incriminating. Better to brazen it out, lie about it and deploy some whataboutism than prolong the stench of secrecy.
Instead, he has berated reporters for harping on the subject. On Tuesday the man who usually has a comment on everything told NBC News: “I don’t comment on something that’s a dead issue.”
He has also made crude efforts to clear his name. He became the first sitting president to sue a media outlet for defamation when he brought a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for $10bn for reporting on the existence of the birthday book and letter. If the case goes ahead, the Journal’s lawyers would very likely get the chance to depose Trump about his relationship with Epstein.
In July, Trump’s justice department interviewed Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting underage girls for the financier. The department later released a transcript and audio recording of the interview, in which Maxwell says Trump was “never inappropriate with anybody”. She was then moved from a prison in Florida to a cushier, minimum-security facility in Texas.
Related: Epstein 50th birthday book: who is in it and what did they say?
The flailing leaves Trump’s pugnacious team in unfamiliar territory. When the 2003 birthday letter was released by congressional Democrats, White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich posted various pictures on X of Trump’s signature over the years and wrote: “it’s not his signature” – convincing no one.
At Tuesday’s briefing, Leavitt offered a similar defence, which implies that a cunning time traveller must have skipped back 22 years to plant Trump’s signature in the documents so they could try to blow up his future presidency.
But she also insisted: “I did not say the documents are a hoax. I said the entire narrative surrounding Jeffrey Epstein right now that is absorbing many of the liberal cable channels on television is a hoax that is being perpetuated by opportunistic Democrats.”
Pressed on what she meant by a hoax, the press secretary argued: “The hoax is the Democrats pretending to care about victims of crime when they do not care about victims of crime.”
It won’t wash this time because Democrats smell blood, because Trump’s own supporters remain fixated and because the president’s refusal to release the Epstein files only adds to the intrigue. Trump’s response to the scandal is very un-Trumpian. Nothing could do more to fuel speculation that something truly devastating is contained within their pages.
