Donald Trump is alarmingly disengaged from reality—and never more so than when he is asked about his close friend the late Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 while in jail awaiting trial for trafficking children for sex. Trump was asked about Epstein this Tuesday, during a televised cabinet meeting where he and his inner circle took questions from reporters. Trump’s behavior at the whole event was distressing for anyone who believes a sitting president should have a minimum level of functional cognition.

Trump unleashed his now-familiar flood of lies—such as the claim that China, the world’s leader in wind power, has “very, very few” wind turbines. He also went on a peculiar digression about possibly “gold-leafing” the corner moldings of the Cabinet Room ceiling, saying, “It won’t look good because they’ve never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting it is easy, but it won’t look right.” While the president was physically present in the room, he was not really all there.

Trump started to splutter with rage when reporter Steven Nelson of the Trump-supporting New York Post brought up the Epstein case, which has been in the news since Sunday after the Department of Justice and FBI had just declared that Epstein’s death was a suicide, that there was no “client list” that Epstein used to blackmail his many famous associates, and that there will be no further charges against anyone related to the case.

These findings naturally raised questions, since many in Trump’s administration—including FBI director Kash Patel—had previously virulently questioned the claim that Epstein committed suicide and had alleged a government cover-up of his crimes. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi even told Fox News that Epstein’s client list is “sitting on my desk right now.” She now claims she was merely talking about Epstein’s “file.”

Steven Nelson queried this about-face and also raised the pertinent point about a statement made by Alex Acosta, who served as labor secretary during Trump’s first term and before that had been the US Attorney in Miami who made a sweetheart deal with Epstein in 2007. When he was being vetted by Trump’s transition team in 2016, Acosta warned them about the Epstein case: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” Neither Trump nor Bondi was willing to answer the elementary question of which intelligence agency, foreign or domestic, Epstein belonged to.

Instead, Trump fumed with affected anger at the very raising of Epstein’s name as inherently contemptible. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump raged. “Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.” He added: “I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, when we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”

Current Issue

May 2026 Issue

Trump has good reason to want the Epstein case relegated to ancient history. Although Democrats have never made an election issue of it, Trump was for many years a close friend of Epstein. In 2002, Trump told New York magazine, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Trump claims that he broke off relations with Epstein before he was convicted of sex crimes. In 2017, Epstein himself described Trump as one of his “closest friends.”

Trump is not the only one who wants to move on from the Epstein case. Writing in The Washington Post, Amber Phillips upbraided the Trump administration for encouraging Epstein conspiracy theories—which she contended came from “far right” groups. According to Phillips, “The far right is at war with itself this week over unsubstantiated beliefs, about which Trump administration officials helped fan the flames: the purported existence of a secret list of powerful people who paid financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse teenage girls.”

By this logic, Trump’s sin is not that he’s covering up the Epstein case but that he and fellow Republicans raised conspiracy theories about it. This is a comforting story for anyone who might want the Epstein story to be buried and forgotten, but it makes little sense.

On the face of it, the claim that the Epstein story is “unsubstantiated” and a “conspiracy theory” is absurd. When Epstein died, he was facing charges of sex trafficking. His accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in 2022. Men who consorted with Epstein and Maxwell, notably Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom, have paid financial settlements to victims. Are we expected to believe that Epstein and Maxwell engaged in sex trafficking and kept company with powerful figures—but that no one other than Epstein or Maxwell were guilty of any crimes?

Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown, whose excellent reporting led to Epstein’s rearrest in 2019, has posted many objections to the Trump administration’s contention that the case is closed. On the social media website X, she noted, “The report on Epstein’s death lists numerous ‘security camera system failures’ at the time of his death. So unless the FBI found additional video—since the probe was released by the DOJ—that footage was not considered conclusive.” Brown further noted that

there ARE massive amounts of FBI/DOJ files that have not been released, or those that are available are so heavily blacked out that they are unreadable. The FBI and DOJ can release these files (redacting the names of victims) so that the public knows what the FBI did—and didn’t do—to investigate others involved in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. The “list” is a red herring—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t names contained in those FBI files.

Brown also retweeted a statement from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who noted, “Given the evidence my investigators have seen, this reeks of a coverup.”

Significantly, Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s longtime lawyer who had negotiated his 2007 sweetheart deal, affirmed that there is a cover-up. In a video, Dershowitz said, “I know for a fact documents are being suppressed and they are being suppressed to protect individuals. I know their names and why they’re being suppressed, I know why they are being suppressed, I know who is suppressing them. But I’m bound by confidentiality from a judge…so I can’t disclose what I know. But hand to God, I know…the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them and that’s wrong.”

To their credit, congressional Democrats and some Republicans are challenging this cover-up and calling for further investigation. The Guardian reports, “The House judiciary committee’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin, together with 15 other Democrats sent a six-page letter to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, accusing her of withholding some Epstein files to protect the president from any damaging disclosures.” But it isn’t only Democrats raising these questions. MAGA figures such as Tucker Carlson are also criticizing the Trump administration. Utah Senator Mike Lee, himself a figure of the far right, tweeted on Tuesday, “Was Epstein a government asset?” That is not a bad question.

The fact that Democrats are taking up the Epstein case is heartening. Politically, it is worth doing both on the merits and because it divides the Republicans. The Epstein case is an extreme version of the problems of plutocracy that Bernie Sanders has tried to make central to Democratic Party politics.

But it is worth noting that Democrats have been very late to the Epstein investigation, letting far-right conspiracy theorists dominate the discourse. Perhaps that is because Epstein’s circle included prominent members of both parties. In 2019, Christine Pelosi, daughter of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tweeted, “This Epstein case is horrific and the young women deserve justice. It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may—whether on Republicans or Democrats.”

Who are these “faves”? One name that springs to mind is former president Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s jet and was named in court records on the Epstein case along with the late New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.

If Democrats have pulled their political punches on Epstein in the past, they need to abandon any of their “faves”—whether prominent politicians or donors—and focus on the facts of the case. There is a cover-up here, and it stinks to high heaven. An opposition party worthy of the name would be screaming bloody murder right now.

Because if Donald Trump thinks no one is interested in the Epstein case, he’s simply wrong. As the Miami Herald reports, a recent YouGov poll shows public confidence that justice will be done in the case has eroded. According to the newspaper, “Just 15% of respondents said they were very or somewhat confident that investigations would occur, while 67% said they were not very or not at all confident.”

Those two-thirds of Americans who feel that the investigation won’t occur have ample reasons for their cynicism. But there’s little hope for changing the poisonous dynamics of contemporary politics unless Democrats prove them wrong. Trump’s botched handling of the Epstein file was entirely predictable—and creates an opening for a politics that really does hold elite criminals accountable.