Deny, Delay, Deceive, Distract

A guide to sorting Trump’s Epstein garbage

An activist puts up a poster showing President Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein near the US embassy in London on July 17, 2025 [Thomas Krych/AP Photo]

The Trump White House and GOP leaders are desperate to keep the Epstein scandal from spreading further. It’s become an all-consuming, existential crisis for Trump, because, as I’ve written about earlier, his QAnon-infused base remains in open revolt and the story continues to have life, to the dismay of Republican leaders.

It’s been 17 days since Axios first broke the story that the Justice Department intended to bury the Epstein case. Yet the headlines and my poor inbox continue to be jammed full of stories, intrigue, and even high stake legal maneuvers as Trump and his cronies scramble to somehow get out ahead of the crisis.

With everything they’re throwing at this, how can we parse it all, and how can we get a clear sense of the Trump playbook? For this sordid project, I’ve come up with a handy guide. Everything they’re doing falls into at least one of Four Ds: Deny, Delay, Deceive, Distract.

Let’s walk through the Four Ds and see how they play out in real time. With this template, you should be able to identify each Trumpy ploy as it emerges and toss it into the correct refuse container.

Deny

This whole Epstein mess began with a huge 180 denial.

After years of QAnon hyping up the Epstein files while the Trump folks and their right-wing influencers egged them on, including saying how Trump was the “storm” that would bring down the satanic Democratic pedophile cult in D.C., his Justice Department published an infamous memo. It suddenly claimed, contrary to everything officials had indicated before, there is no Epstein client list, there’s nothing to see here, and there will be no further investigations or charges.

That, as we have seen, went over quite poorly with Trump’s base. So Trump quickly issued a statement that made things much worse. He criticized his own followers for remaining interested in files that Trump suddenly claimed had been created by his political enemies:

“For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Admin….”

For the first time ever, Trump was ratioed on his own social media platform.

On July 16, Trump doubled down on his rhetoric and began to call the Epstein files a “hoax,” saying his own supporters were “weaklings” for believing it. This—surprise surprise—coincided with the next big shoe to drop, a story Trump had been asked to comment on.

On July 17, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report about Trump’s creepy letter from 2003, given to Epstein on his 50th birthday inside a leather-bound book. (You really can’t make this up.) It was a typewritten message, as Trump has often sent others, but in this case it was surrounded by a heavy marker drawing of a naked woman. Trump reportedly signed his name to make it look like her pubic hair. The letter contained shady references to the two men having “certain things in common” and sharing “another wonderful secret.”

Truly eye-popping stuff.

The denials came again, and furiously. Trump denied that he wrote the letter, denied that he would ever communicate like that, and denied that he ever drew pictures at all. All of these denials, as I discussed in my write-up on the letter, were false.

He also filed a $10 billion defamation suit against Dow Jones, the parent company of the WSJ, again denying everything. But the story is well sourced and the paper stands behind it.

Delay

One of Trump’s favorite tactics is to run out the clock and push matters off. Time is usually his friend, especially when it comes to accusations of his criminal wrongdoing. He knows the passage of time could cause public interest to die down or some other big news story to push something like the Epstein matter out of the headlines.

Speaker Mike Johnson understands the assignment. After a series of embarrassing votes, where the GOP had to block Democratic efforts to release the Epstein files, Johnson had seen enough. He announced he would shut down Congress until September rather than allow more such votes.

This includes all Rules Committee votes to release the Epstein files, which were about to go south in that body for Johnson. It also averts a bipartisan discharge petition, driven forward by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), that would force a floor vote. There are reportedly enough GOP signatures on that petition for it to pass, and Massie is pulling no punches when it comes to Johnson:

Who’s he gonna pick? Is he going to stand with the pedophiles and underage sex traffickers? Or is he gonna pick the American people and justice for the victims? This is the ultimate decision the speaker needs to make. And it’s irrespective of what the president wants.

[Narrator: To no one’s surprise, Johnson picked Trump.]

Deceive

Deception is another superpower of the White House, made easier because the MAGA base is comparably easy to fool.

Trump wants to give the appearance of transparency, even though his administration has tried to bury the Epstein files. So his team came up with a legal sleight of hand: The White House announced it wants grand jury transcripts from the Epstein case released. Doesn’t that sound like full transparency?

In fact, it’s a transparent ruse. The transcripts would be generally useless to show Trump’s involvement with Epstein because Trump wasn’t on trial. So even if the judge agrees to release the grand jury transcripts, that will take time (more delay) and won’t answer anything about Trump’s involvement because the transcripts are just a small part of the evidence gathered in the case.

It’s like the old logical fallacy:

All ducks are birds.

Trump is a chicken.

Therefore Trump is not a bird.

UPDATE: Since publication this morning, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg denied the request for the grand jury transcript release, writing that the court’s “hands are tied” because the government had not requested the grand jury’s findings for use in a judicial proceeding, abd district courts are generally prohibited from unsealing grand jury testimony except in narrow circumstances.

There’s another deceptive strategy in the works. The White House has stated it intends to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers—and this should set off alarm bells. As Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian reported this morning,

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (Trump’s former personal attorney) announced a meeting with Maxwell (whom Trump previously wished well). Maxwell is currently appealing her conviction. What could possibly be the basis for the number two person in the Justice Department to meet with the woman at the center of the criminal enterprise that now threatens to envelop Trump in a scandal like none other in his sordid career?

It’s worth pointing out what kind of lawyer Todd Blanche is. As Lev Parnas, who eventually flipped on Trump and became the target of Blanche’s attacks, wrote:

I was fighting to reveal the truth about Trump’s shadow diplomacy in Ukraine. But instead of standing for justice, Todd Blanche did everything in his power to keep that truth buried. He made contradictory statements to the press. He tried to seal documents I was preparing for Congress. He tried to silence me.

And now? Blanche is back. This time, his job is to do the same thing to Ghislaine Maxwell.

Parnas predicted Blanche would propose a quid pro quo to Maxwell’s lawyers:

Blanche will try to cut a deal. Offer leniency, maybe even early release. And in return, he’ll want a story. One that implicates someone like Bill Clinton and clears Trump. He’s not going to Maxwell for facts—he’s going for leverage.

His prediction came from direct experience with Blanche:

I know that playbook, because I lived it.

Back then, it was Bill Barr pulling the strings. Rudy Giuliani. Todd Blanche. They told me to stay quiet. Told me if I said nothing, I’d walk free….

They don’t want to hear the truth. They want to shut her up.

Just like they tried to do with me.

Because they don’t want justice. They want control.

The plan to get Maxwell to cooperate is so obvious, even the Jewish Space Lasers lady, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), asked the right question. As the New York Times reported,

Ms. Greene also expressed skepticism about Ms. Maxwell’s testimony, noting that she was most likely “bartering for something,” like a presidential pardon.

A pardon may not even be needed. Maxwell could be convinced to lie and claim Trump isn’t implicated in exchange for a reduced sentence as a Justice Department ploy. Under Rule 35 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Department can file a motion in a case seeking reduction of a sentence if the defendant has provided “substantial assistance” in an investigation of another person.

I would never put anything past this Justice Department when it comes to overt corruption and the protection of the President. Maxwell would have a lot to gain from helping the White House deceive the public. She also may worry that her erstwhile boyfriend and partner in sex trafficking died while in custody, that there is some kind of weird editing going on with the video footage, and that she could meet a similar fate if she does not play along.

Distract

“Look over there!”

Whenever Trump is in trouble, he has been able to deflect and distract by either talking about, or in some cases creating, some other shiny story for the press to chase.

He’s trying that now, in fact, and is throwing everything at the wall. This includes the shiniest story he can think of: accusing Obama of treason and threatening to jail him. That will change the subject!

But this time, it’s not working, except on Fox which dutifully talked non-stop yesterday about Obama and barely at all about Epstein. Instead, new stories keep emerging because reporters are highly incentivized to land them and the public remains transfixed on Epstein/Trump.

Take yesterday’s story by CNN, which unearthed photos of Epstein attending Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples. A reporter from CNN called Trump on the phone to get his comment on the photo, and an angry Trump called the network “Fake News” and hung up. That’s sure to rack up clicks and views.

CNN also discovered previously unseen video of the two men chatting and laughing together at a 1999 Victoria’s Secret runway fashion event.

In newsrooms across the country, editors are wondering why they aren’t breaking more Epstein stories the public remains so hungry for.

So the story isn’t going away as Trump had hoped. And his Hail Mary efforts to draw focus away from it only serve to underscore how much he wants it gone.

Driving the wedge

Democrats are starting to understand why the Epstein matter could prove electoral gold. It’s not just about suggesting Trump is in those files and has committed heinous crimes. It’s about how the GOP itself has now unmasked itself as the party actively protecting rich pedophile criminals from justice and accountability.

Many MAGA and QAnon are shocked—truly shocked—to witness the Democrats call for release of the Epstein files while the Republicans vote to keep them secret. They were told for years it would be the exact opposite. And now things are so bad, the GOP actually had to shut down Congress and run away rather than vote on it.

How do you square that with their claims that they are for transparency and truth? Someone is lying, and it’s probably the ones who act like they’re lying.

There’s more. If the GOP is that hell bent on protecting billionaires who hurt and raped children, doesn’t that carry over into everything else it has done to protect them? That’s right: The GOP is on the side of billionaires when it comes to tax breaks, corruption, pollution, you name it. They said they were for the little guys, the working class, the victims, but that was a lie. Just like they’re lying now and covering for Trump over Epstein.

This is a gut-level thing for many MAGA voters. The idea that they were on the side of exploited children was the secret sauce to winning their support. It’s what caused millions of them to turn out for the GOP and feel really good about their vote.

Now that feeling of righteousness has soured to a feeling of deep betrayal. And that betrayal runs bone-deep for millions. Democrats would do well to recall the wisdom of Maya Angelou here:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.