DAN HODGES: This one line in Donald Trump’s squalid ‘birthday letter’ to Epstein could end him. No wonder he’s claiming it’s a scam

If you believe Donald Trump, the letter published today in the Wall Street Journal, purporting to be from him to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, is ‘fake news’. According to the report, the message – prepared for Epstein’s 50th birthday – ‘featured several lines of typewritten text framed by what appeared to be a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman’. It is also said to include the cryptic comment: ‘We have certain things in common Jeffrey.’

Trump is threatening to sue. And his allies have already been despatched to angrily defend the President. ‘Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter b******t,’ Vice President JD Vance raged. ‘Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?’

Frankly, yes. That’s part of the problem. We’ve all heard the clip of Donald Trump boasting about how he likes to ‘grab them [women] by the p***y’. We’ve also seen the 1992 footage of him partying with Epstein on his Mar-a-Lago estate. At one point in the video, Trump is seen grabbing a woman towards him and patting her behind.

So yes, the letter – if it exists – would be very much in character. But whether or not it’s real or fake isn’t really that important. Because as far as significant sections of his hitherto unbreachable MAGA base are concerned, Trump is already complicit.

And on this occasion, he has no one else to blame. In August 2019, soon after Epstein’s suicide, Trump reposted a tweet claiming Bill Clinton was implicated in his death. Throughout the 2020 election campaign he continued to peddle conspiracy theories about the ‘real’ cause of Epstein’s death.

Then in 2024, when back out on the campaign trail, he returned to the issue. If elected, he would ‘declassify’ the Epstein files. For his supporters, it became a defining example of their hero’s commitment to finally draining the Washington swamp.

But then Trump won. And suddenly his commitment to exposing the full, squalid saga began to cool.

Pam Bondi, his Attorney General, began dragging her feet on declassification of the files. And the MAGA faithful started to get restless.

Donald and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in 2000

Then in June, former Trump cheerleader Elon Musk sent his ‘bombshell’ missive. ‘Donald Trump is in the Epstein files’, he claimed, ‘that is the real reason they have not been made public’.

Trump’s MAGA supporters were stunned. Musk was one of them. Would he really be turning so brutally on his political mentor if there wasn’t some truth the allegation?

At which point the White House began to frantically backtrack. The Epstein files had been massively overhyped. There really was nothing much to see after all. An FBI memo was published revealing the infamous ‘client list’ supposedly owned by Epstein didn’t actually exist. (A statement which directly contradicted Pam Bondi, who had written to FBI director Kash Patel in which she ‘acknowledged receiving the Epstein files containing’ the convicted sex offender’s ‘list of contacts and a list of victims’ names’.)

This was the moment the patience of the MAGA true-belivers finally snapped. They had been conned. Donald Trump had lied to them. He had no intention of revealing the truth about Epstein. His erstwhile supporters began circulating videos of them torching their coveted Make America Great Again caps.

Trump Senate loyalist Josh Hawley publicly broke ranks to say ‘I think it is maybe a little difficult to believe the idea that DoJ and the FBI … don’t have any idea who Epstein’s clients were’.

And therein lies Donald Trump’s problem. He may be right. There may be no client list. There may be no birthday letter. There may be no Epstein conspiracy.

But he now finds himself in precisely the position his opponents have found themselves in. How does he convince a movement that has literally been fuelled by conspiracies that there is nothing to see?

How can he make those who believed him when he said Epstein flourished at the heart of a malign, all-encompassing establishment cover-up, that there is no cover-up after all?

These are the same people who genuinely believed Hillary Clinton was running a human trafficking racket in the basement of a Washington pizza parlour. How will he now make them embrace his version of the truth, rather than shocking – if enticing – fiction?

The President has claimed the Wall Street Journal article is a ‘scam’. But his entire political career has been built upon scamming the very people who are now turning on him. So he can scream ‘fake news!!!’ all he likes.

The Epstein Affair has now become a full-blown political crisis for Donald Trump. And the blame for that lies squarely with Donald Trump himself.