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There Can Only Be One Reason for Melania Talking Epstein. It’s Not Good

Why on earth would the first lady voluntarily raise her husband’s worst scandal? It seems crazy—but it shows how low he has fallen.

Opinion

Donald Trump has apparently decided that being heavily linked to a notorious sex trafficker, while bad enough to make him want to start a war to distract from it, is not as bad as being seen as a genocidal maniac.

So, it appears, he decided today to have his wife make an extraordinary statement at the White House, to change the subject back to the previous scandal.

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At least that was one of the conclusions that could be drawn in the wake of first lady Melania Trump’s appearance, at which she said, “The lies linking me with Jeffrey Epstein need to end today. I’ve never been friends with Epstein. I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, Maxwell. My email reply to Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence.”

The email correspondence to which she was referring began with the salutation “Dear G!,” included flattering references to a story about “JE” in New York magazine and to Ghislaine Maxwell’s appearance in a photograph. Then, following a question about a recent Maxwell trip to Palm Beach, Mrs. Trump concluded with a suggestion that Maxwell, now serving time for sex trafficking in federal prison, give her a call when she is next in New York City. It was signed “Love, Melania.”

Needless to say, given that the exchange is now a matter of public record, suggesting that the president’s wife never had a relationship with Maxwell, seems a stretch. As for her not having a relationship with Epstein, within moments of her appearance, the internet was flooded with images of the first lady looking very cozy with Epstein and Maxwell.

Because there is a ton of evidence attesting to the fact that she did, in fact, have a relationship of some sort with both of them.

As a result, the first lady’s bizarre intervention raises a couple of questions. One is why? The other is why now?

There is speculation that she may have raised the issue in anticipation of the next stages in a legal matter in which she is involved. But, beyond that, since she could not exactly commandeer the White House and use it as a stage for a personal statement without the approval and support of the president’s own staff, a larger question becomes, why would they go along with it?

Surely they would know that it would cause a media sensation (which it did). And we also know that it has been a priority of the White House to get the Epstein story out of the news for a long time now.

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Indeed, it has been asserted that one of the reasons that Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired and the president’s former attorney Todd Blanche was made her temporary replacement was because the president was frustrated with Bondi’s inability to make the story go away.

Yet now, it’s the big news out of the White House today. By choice. (Unless, Melania went rogue which, while a delicious possibility, seems very unlikely again, because of the logistics and the way the event unfolded center stage at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.)

Why? Could it be that the war in Iran which many felt was, like the attack on Venezuela before it, designed to change the subject from Epstein, had started to be an even bigger problem for the president? Not only was it a strategic fiasco which has left Iran with seemingly more global clout and potential new revenue sources, but Trump’s Tuesday morning threat to erase Iranian civilization off the map shocked the conscience of the world.

Trump was being seen thanks to his genocidal threat as a monster and a madman by the entire world. Even his hastily arranged, patched-together ceasefire could not undo the damage caused by Trump’s shocking expression of ghastly intent. And it does not seem likely to hold long enough to restore Trump’s desire to be seen as a master of power diplomacy.

What is more, Trump couldn’t help himself and offered more threats in a Truth Social post late on Wednesday evening along with a promise of turning his attention to new “conquests.”

While it is unlikely anyone in the White House explicitly said, “OK, it’s better to talk about Epstein than about behaving like Hitler” (in part because there seem to be plenty of folks in the White House that don’t consider “behaving like Hitler” a bad thing), it does seem that they were desperate enough to change the subject to OK the First Lady’s appearance which all involved must have known would be a newsmaker.

(Trump told an MS NOW reporter who caught him on the phone during “a war meeting” that he had “no prior knowledge,” which itself seems hard to believe.)

That Melania then went on to call for Congressional hearings at which the victims of Epstein could be heard must not have sat well with a president and those around him who have been working like crazy to stop just that from happening. So, there is clearly more to this story than meets the eye. And it will be very interesting both to get to the bottom of it and to watch the media spend the days and weeks ahead trying to disprove the first lady’s Sergeant Schultz-like assertion: “I know nothing.”

For now, we are left with an apparent choice by the president and his team to return the Epstein story to center stage, and with the abundance of evidence that their primary goal was to get people to stop thinking about the president’s catastrophic decision to attack Iran and his despicable performance as commander-in-chief.

Unless, of course, the president was as blindsided by his wife’s statement as anyone else and we therefore must conclude the old guy is no more aware of, or in control of, what goes on in the White House than he is of anything else at the moment.

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David RothkopfChief Global Affairs Columnist

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