The real reason Donald Trump said what he said about Ghislaine Maxwell today
Even as some pundits are purposely missing the point by talking about Donald Trump’s tone, there were two actual storylines coming out of Trump’s press conference today. One was that he still has no clue how to deal with the pandemic and no interest in being honest about it. The other is that he made a point of offering well wishes to an alleged sex trafficker.
We still don’t know precisely what the motivations were of the reporter who used a coronavirus press conference to ask Donald Trump what he thought about the prospect of Ghislaine Maxwell flipping on public figures. But it’s not difficult to figure out why Trump gave such a surreal answer.
First, Trump was clearly caught off guard. He had an easy out; he could have simply said that in the interests of justice, he wasn’t going to comment on an ongoing criminal investigation. Instead he said “I wish her well.” Then he began nervously babbling about Maxwell, admitting that he knows her well, and that they were neighbors in Palm Beach. Then he wished her well again.
It’s clear that Donald Trump is afraid of what Ghislaine Maxwell knows about him. We don’t know precisely what it is, but Trump sure does – and it scares him so much that he was willing to make himself look terrible in public today just to send a signal to her that she shouldn’t flip on him. The last time we saw Trump that afraid of someone, it was Vladimir Putin. Maxwell must have a ton of Jeffrey Epstein-related dirt on Trump.
