Epstein chips away at Trump’s world

Did Jeffrey Epstein really think he could receive or extort a pardon from U.S. President Donald Trump? Recently released correspondence from the late sexual predator seems to suggest he thought he had a shot.

Epstein’s desperate attempts to enlist or threaten Trump to escape prosecution for a broad array of sexual crimes in 2019 were exposed this month after a congressional committee released 20,000 pages of emails and other correspondence between the disgraced financier and his allies.

The emails and other notes strongly suggest he had dirt on Trump of sufficient gravity that the president might have to help him escape prosecution. Also fuelling Epstein’s hopes was the president’s history of granting pardons, which showed virtually no type of criminal or crime was off-limits.

Trump has pardoned murderers, sex offenders and fraudsters who bilked people out of hundreds of millions of dollars and summarily wiped the criminal records of anyone involved in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The New York Times recently reported at least eight people Trump pardoned in his first term have gone on to commit and be charged with additional crimes. Included is a New York man with connections to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was pardoned in 2019 for drug and money laundering offences, and who was just convicted of sexual assault.

With a track record like that, why wouldn’t Trump have moved quickly in his first term to help someone he acknowledged had been a close friend in the not-so-distant past?

Epstein has become the president’s kryptonite, an individual who even posthumously poses a grave existential threat.

So great is the threat that Trump — a man who celebrates his association with criminals and who seems to be immune from fallout from any of his numerous personal criminal and civil transgressions — does not want Epstein anywhere near his orbit.

Trump’s instincts about the threat that Epstein poses, even in death, are spot on.

Although Trump’s broad approval ratings have dipped during his second term, core Republican supporters remain blindly loyal and decidedly unapologetic about their continued support for their spiritual and political leader.

However, Trump’s refusal to meet demands to release the full FBI investigation files into Epstein’s crimes is eating away at the MAGA political coalition.

An August opinion poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts and The Conversation, an academic journal, found that the American public generally disapprove of how the Trump administration has refused to release more information from the Epstein investigation.

More alarming for Trump is the fact that nearly 50 per cent per cent of respondents who voted for him disapprove of his refusal to release the files.

Some believe Trump’s attempts to bury the Epstein story are to conceal his own involvement in Epstein’s horrendous sexual crimes. The new correspondence shows that while Trump may not have actually indulged in some of the same crimes, he may have had full knowledge of what Epstein and his abettors were doing.

Is standing by idly while a predator harvested underage women for the gratification of not only himself but a host of other rich and powerful miscreants a worse crime than others the president has admitted to or which he has been found guilty? To many Americans deep inside his base of support, the answer is “yes.”

Epstein’s suicide made the issue of a pardon moot. However, Trump’s continued efforts to conceal the full details of the Epstein investigation — details which may pull Trump deeper into scandal — seems destined to continue eating away at the MAGAverse from the inside out.