The country’s top journalists have gotten too used to just quoting the crazy things Donald Trump says and leaving it at that — when often what he says requires analysis and explication for the public to fully understand the depths of his depravity.
That has perhaps never been more true than it was on Tuesday, in relation to Trump’s comments about how he split with his pedophile racketeer friend Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein “stole” young women who worked at Mar-a-Lago then “hired” them for himself.
Mainstream coverage was almost entirely stenographic, with some discussion about how the comments conflicted with previous explanations and about how the timeline didn’t quite add up.
But a close read of the comments leads to an inescapable and highly damning conclusion: That as early as 2000, Trump knew what Epstein was doing.
He knew that Epstein was “hiring” girls under the age of 18 for some reason. But hiring them for what? Epstein was a financial adviser, not a fellow spa owner.
And Trump knew full well that Epstein, as he famously put it in 2002, “likes beautiful women… on the younger side.” (At the same time, he called Epstein a “terrific guy” who’s “a lot of fun to be with.)
In short, he knew Epstein was “stealing” his employees – starting with Virginia Giuffre, then a 16-year-old spa assistant – to rape them and make them sex workers.
And he didn’t care.
His comments were effectively a confession.
But somehow this obvious conclusion escaped most of the reporters covering Tuesday’s comments, cheating readers and viewers of their real significance.
You didn’t see any such indication in the headlines. In fact, you didn’t see major headlines at all, when it should have been a lead story.
The New York Times story was listless and focused mostly on how Trump’s new comments conflicted with both a previous White House explanation that Trump had barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago “for being a creep” and a prior Times article that traced their falling out to a 2004 real estate deal. (For what it’s worth, yet another version of the story is that Trump kicked Epstein out of the club in 2007 for hitting on the teenage daughter of a club member.)
The Washington Post story was stenographic, even euphemistic (replacing the word “stole” with “poached” in the headline.) The closest the Post came to a critical reading of Trump’s new account was to point out that it “left several questions unanswered about why he and Epstein stopped socializing, and it does not entirely fit the timeline of their relationship, which ended roughly two decades ago.”
(Indeed, the official party line at the Post now appears to be that the storm over Epstein has calmed.)
ABC did a three-minute segment on Trump’s comments on “World News Tonight” – with extensive audio excerpts but no analysis.
The closest any mainstream journalist got to explaining the real significance of Trump’s comments came in the fifth paragraph of CNN reporter Aaron Blake’s story. “The answer doesn’t just call into question Trump’s honesty about his relationship with Epstein, but also his potential knowledge of the accused sex trafficker’s misconduct,” Blake wrote. But he pretty much left it at that.
Independent journalist Marcy Wheeler was the first person I saw cutting to the chase, writing in her blog that “Trump casting Epstein as merely having stolen employees – even young women from the spa – would be a pretty shocking way to characterize recruiting someone into a sex-trafficking ring.”
She concluded: “The whole thing certainly adds to questions about what Trump knew and when about Epstein’s activities.”
On Instagram Tuesday afternoon, MeidasTouch cofounder Brett Meiselas reported that “Donald Trump just made one of his greatest admissions to date about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein.” Meiselas’s analysis: “This comment appears to implicate Trump directly in Epstein’s trafficking scheme. At a minimum, it shows that he knew.”
Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer posted on social media: “Given this new comment, it seems highly likely that Trump knew what Epstein was doing.”
And on Tuesday night, MSNBC host Chris Hayes got pretty close to the nub of the matter in a portion of his segment on the Epstein scandal. “So Donald Trump now says that he ejected the world’s most notorious traffickers and abusers of minor women and girls from his life because the guy kept stealing his spa workers,” Hayes said.
Hayes then he asked rhetorically: “You split up the friendship — 15 years — because he was grooming and recruiting staff to go abuse them — but you didn’t do anything about it?”
Hayes’s conclusion: “It’s a very strange thing to say. It’s also a narrative that, like so much with Trump, has just this little kernel of truth buried inside it.”
Here, for the record, is the full transcript of Trump’s comments about Epstein on Air Force One on Tuesday:
Q. Mr. President, you said yesterday your falling out with Jeffrey Epstein was over him taking some of the workers from your business. But your administration in the past said that you threw him out because he was a creep. So, can you explain that discrepancy?
Trump: Well, maybe they’re the same thing. You know, it’s sort of a little bit of the same thing. But, no, he took people that worked for me. And I told him don’t do it anymore, and he did it. And I — I said stay the hell out of here.
Q. What did they do? So, is that what you — what was meant by being a creep?
Trump: Who are you with?
Q. Me? I’m with — I’m in the travel pool, but I’m with NBC News.
Trump: NBC? NBC, fake news. I don’t care. NBC’s one of the worst. What else do you have?
Then a bit later:
Q. Just to button up on Mar-a-Lago, you’re saying that Jeffrey Epstein poached two of your staffers. Who were they? Were they young?
Trump: I don’t want to say two or I don’t want to say any number. You’re talking about many years ago. But yeah, he took people and, because he took people, I said don’t do it anymore, you know, they work for me. And he took — beyond that he took some others. And once he did that, that was the end of him.
[Crosstalk]
Trump: I didn’t like — when they steal people I don’t like it.
And then again, a bit later:
Q. Mr. President, Epstein has a certain reputation, obviously, but just curious, were some of the workers that were taken from you, were some of them young women?
Trump: Were some of them?
Q. Were some of them young women?
Trump: Well, I don’t want to say, but everyone knows the people that were taken and it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad, but that story has been pretty well out there and the answer is yes, they were. Yeah.
Q. Yes, they were young women? What did they do? Like, what were their jobs?
Trump: In the spa.
Q. In the spa?
Trump: Yeah, people that work in the spa. I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago and people were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone. And other people would come and complain this guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people.
Whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want them taking people and he was fine and then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, out of here.
Q. Mr. President, did one of those stolen persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?
Trump: I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. Yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know, none whatsoever.
Doesn’t that sound like a confession to you?
And at the very least, there are some essential follow-up questions that Trump needs to be asked. Among them:
Q. What exactly did you think Epstein was “hiring” the girls he “stole” from your spa to do?
Q. Epstein, through Ghislaine Maxwell, “stole” Virginia Giuffre from your club in 2000, when she was 16. But you didn’t actually eject Epstein from the club until 2007. You seem to be saying that it was when Epstein “stole” a second girl that you ejected him. Was that in 2007?
Q. How long did you continue to be friends with Epstein after he “stole” a 16-year-old girl from your spa to do who-knows-what?
Q. As you stated in 2002, you knew Epstein liked beautiful young women. You also knew by then that he had “hired” at least one 16-year-old girl. Why did you continue to be friends with him?
Q. Can you please clarify the whole timeline of how long you were friends with Epstein, what ended the friendship, and when you realized he was hiring girls to be sex slaves?
Oh check this out! Just as I was hitting publish it turns out some brave soul in the press corps asked Trump today: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?” Trump turned and walked away without answering.
One of my few living heroes, the great muckraking investigative reporter Morton Mintz, passed away on Monday at age 103. Please read the appreciation of him that I wrote for his 100th birthday.