Closing summary
We will leave our live coverage of Donald Trump’s second stint in the Oval office here for the night, but will return on Thursday to keep you updated. In the meantime, here’s what happened today:
In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the far-right network created to host Steve Bannon’s podcast, Donald Trump said that the FBI should investigate what he called “the Jeffrey Epstein hoax” as part of a criminal conspiracy against him.
In a series of posts on his social media platform X, Elon Musk mocked Trump’s wild claim that files related to the federal investigation of Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime Trump friend, are “a hoax”.
Trump told reporters that he was “surprised” when Jerome Powell, the chairperson of the Federal Reserve, was appointed by Joe Biden. But Powell was appointed by Trump himself in 2017, before being reappointed by Biden in 2022.
Trump claimed that Epstein had “died three or four years ago”. But Epstein died in federal custody in 2019, when Trump was president, not during the Biden administration.
The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper explained that Trump’s claims of a conspiracy makes no sense. “According to Trump, all the top Democrats got together and said: ‘Let’s create some fake files that destroy Trump’s political career’. They don’t ever use them,” Klepper said. “They let Trump get elected. Don’t use them. Let Trump get elected again. Still don’t use them. And then, once he’s the president, hope he releases the files without ever looking at them.”
In a lengthy Truth Social post Trump dismissed the backlash over the Epstein files as a “scam” perpetuated by Democrats and accused supporters who have called for more transparency of “doing the Democrats’ work” by buying into the “hoax”.
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How Trump's claim that the Jeffrey Epstein files are a hoax might make sense
It is not hard to see why people are confused by Donald Trump’s claim that the uproar over his justice department’s refusal to release files from the federal investigation that led to the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 is “a hoax” devised by Democrats to harm him.
As the Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper explained on Tuesday night, the supposed plot makes no sense at all.
“According to Trump, all the top Democrats got together and said, ‘Let’s create some fake files that destroy Trump’s political career’. They don’t ever use them” Klepper said. “They let Trump get elected. Don’t use them. Let Trump get elected again. Still don’t use them. And then, once he’s the president, hope he releases the files without ever looking at them.”
That does seem to be the scheme Trump is trying to convince his supporters he is a victim of, which he compares to the unverified rumors about his behavior in Moscow during a Miss Universe pageant collected by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.
But what makes Trump’s use of the phrase “Jeffrey Epstein hoax” deeply confusing is that, without any further explanation, he appears to be suggesting that the entire furore over Epstein’s crimes was somehow fabricated. That’s what prompted Elon Musk to ask on Wednesday why Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell “is in federal prison for a hoax”.
But what Trump seems to be getting at, without saying so explicitly, is that there are mentions of him in the Epstein files, which would make sense, given that Trump himself told New York magazine in 2002 that they had been friends for years and that he was aware that Epstein was attracted to young women. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said. “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”.
But Trump appears to be arguing, without acknowledging that there are mentions of him in the files, that any such documents are fakes, planted there by his political enemies, making the whole affair, like all evidence that Russia did work to get him elected in 2016, and that he lost the 2020 election fair and square, “a Democrat hoax”.
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