Trump Shuts Down Epstein Talk By Talking About Epstein Some More

Friend breakups can be so painful.

Our big handsome cognitively declining boy.

Breakups are tough. Sometimes friend breakups can be even tougher. Maybe you fell out because both of you were interested in the same girl. Maybe one of you was jealous of the other’s personal or professional success. Maybe you were both on a plane that crashed in the Canadian Rockies and one of you became the leader of a band of survivors struggling to find enough food to get you through the brutal winter while the other turned into a weirdo who thought she could commune with the evil forest spirits.

In the case of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, we’re not ruling anything out. But it is funny that both men have at different times offered shifting explanations for why they stopped hanging out and leering at teenage girls together in the early 2000s.

On Monday, Trump offered up a new reason that left us scratching our heads. Not because of what exactly happened, but because of all that Trump may have left out.

Our big boy president was taking questions at a press spray in Scotland while sitting next to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who spent the entire time looking as if he would have rather been in Africa in an army garrison being overrun by Zulus. A reporter asked Trump to explain what led to the “breach” between the two grotesquely wealthy sex creeps 20 years ago:

“But for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, I wouldn’t talk, because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump said.

“He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place,” Trump continued. “Persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it. I’m glad I did, to tell you the truth.”

The “to tell you the truth” is a nice touch. It must have been difficult for literally everyone in the room to not respond with why start now?

But the whole thing is weird for another reason, because it made us ask: Is he talking about Virginia Giuffre?

Giuffre was probably Epstein’s best-known victim, both for having come forward to talk about her experience with Epstein and for the picture of her with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell that surfaced a few years back. It was Maxwell who had first approached Giuffre in 2000 when the latter was employed as a spa attendant at — drumroll, please — Trump’s dollar store Xanadu, Mar-a-Lago.

Giuffre was 16 when Maxwell spotted her at work reading a book about massage therapy and offered her a job as Epstein’s traveling massage therapist. Which she took, because what teenager wouldn’t take a job working for a billionaire who flew her around the world on private jets?

Now, Trump and Epstein had their falling out four years after Giuffre left Mar-a-Lago. So maybe there was a run of Epstein hiring away workers for a few years until Trump hit some sort of critical mass. And maybe Giuffre wasn’t the only spa employee Epstein was after:

But this is the first time, as best we can tell, that “he was poaching my employees” was the reason Trump gave for the breakup. And it’s a sign of Trump’s disordered thinking that his take on this is not that pervert abuser Epstein was using my spa to try and recruit girls into his global sex trafficking ring, but rather, He was stealing my employees. To Trump, the latter is a way bigger sin than the former.

Seems like he should have Jimmy Johned some noncompete clauses for his teenaged pool attendants, along with (we assume) the NDAs he regularly had his workers sign.

Before this, it had been widely reported that the two men fell out after a bidding war for a waterfront Palm Beach mansion that both determined to own. There are also stories that Maxwell tried to recruit the daughter of a Mar-a-Lago member. So far as we know, it was not Ivanka Trump.

Trump later told people he banned Epstein from his club because the latter was a “creep.” His spokesman, Steven Cheung, said the same thing this week.

Whatever it was, it must have been ugly, because when Epstein was arrested the first time, in 2009, Trump was eager to trash the shit out of him:

Brad Edwards, an attorney for some of the alleged victims, said in an interview last year that when he was seeking information from Epstein’s acquaintances in 2009, Trump was “the only person who picked up the phone and said: ‘Let’s just talk. I’ll give you as much time as you want. I’ll tell you what you need to know.’”

Like we said, breakups are tough and hell hath no fury like a Donald scorned.

[New Republic]

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