A ten-foot-tall mockup of a reported birthday message from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein that the president allegedly penned to Epstein in 2003 appeared overnight on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol.
It is the first of its kind to appear in 2026, it’s the latest effort by left-leaning organizations to highlight Donald Trump’s past ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile and alleged sex trafficker who died in federal custody in 2019, through art pieces in downtown Washington, D.C. A statue of the president and the pedophile laughing and holding hands appeared at various locations around the city in the fall of 2025, lasting in one for less than a day.
The newest display, constructed by a group calling itself The Secret Handshake, omits the suggestive references made in the birthday message to Epstein obtained and released by House investigators last year, which was purported to be authored by the president. It instead bore the inscription: “Happy birthday to a ‘Terrific guy!’”, inside the same sketch of a nude woman from the original note. The same group was behind the statue that cropped up repeatedly last year.
Trump has denied writing the letter and sued the Wall Street Journal over its reporting of the alleged letter.
The new display also encourages visitors to sign the card and leave messages, while warning that violent or offensive content will be removed.
A news release from the Secret Handshake stated that the art display was timed around the dead pedophile’s birthday, January 20 — which also this year happens to be the one-year anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration.
“As the release of the Epstein Files continues to remain [a] pressing issue, we felt it only appropriate to celebrate the birthday of the man himself,” a spokesperson for the group told The Independent in an email.
The location of the card puts it prominently on the National Mall with the Washington Monument in the background.
Its placement follows two House lawmakers, Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, filing a request to intervene in the criminal case of Ghislaine Maxwell in the Southern District of New York and requesting that a special master be appointed to oversee the government’s release of the Epstein files.
Congress passed legislation in the fall requiring the federal government to release the entirety of its files pertaining to the criminal case against Epstein, but only a small fraction have come out. The deadline for the files' release was December 19.
Massie and Khanna, a Republican and Democrat, were the original co-sponsors of that legislation. Lawmakers have accused the government of delaying and failing to uphold that law.
Publication of the Epstein files has become a bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill, to Trump’s great frustration. The president has raged at Republicans and demanded that they drop the issue, but the continued public interest around the well-connected, billionaire pedophile has persisted through repeated efforts by the administration to stonewall the release of further information. The reasoning for that stonewalling seems clear: Trump himself has said that people like him who “innocently met” Epstein were being embarrassed by the photos and other information coming out from the case.
The House Oversight Committee also remains fixated on the case, despite Trump’s urgings.
Trump has long denied any wrongdoing as it pertains to Epstein, and has furiously insisted he had no knowledge of his former friend’s activities. The president has admitted that he and Epstein had a falling out after Epstein, hired Virginia Giuffre, then a young girl later identified as one of his victims, away from Mar-a-Lago where she was employed. The president has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing in any of the files released by the Oversight Committee or Epstein’s estate.
“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump told reporters of Giuffre, speaking on Air Force One last July. “He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”
The birthday card is permitted to remain on the Mall through Friday, according to The Secret Handshake.
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