Donald Trump has been stunned into silence
It’s been forty-eight hours now and… nothing. Donald Trump’s friend Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors across state lines, in a scandal that includes Trump’s Secretary of Labor, and appears to involve Trump in some still unknown โ but surely ugly โ way. So what has Trump said about it?
Nothing at all. Not one word. Not one tweet since Epstein’s arrest on Saturday night. This is coming from a guy who explodes on Twitter with defensive rage whenever anyone insults him, or any new scandal erupts in his direction. Donald Trump spent today complaining about Great Britain, attacking Fox News, and retweeting fake quotes about himself from fake accounts. But he still has yet to address the Epstein arrest โ even to try to distance himself from it.
Smart money says that a high profile figure shouldn’t even publicly deny his own alleged scandals unless they reach a certain threshold of their own accord, because preemptively denying a scandal can serve to give it further fuel. But this is not advice that Trump generally abides by. He attacks his scandals head-on, with as many absurd lies as possible, confident in his ability to convince everyone (or at least his braindead base) that his lies are the real truth.
Donald Trump generally only goes quiet about one of his scandals when they’re the truly ugly kind, where he’s simply too afraid to address the matter at all. Maybe Trump will finally erupt about Jeffrey Epstein tomorrow morning, insisting that he’s never even met Epstein, despite all the evidence of their friendship, and their disturbing quotes about each other. But it’s telling that, thus far, Trump has been afraid to even so much as touch the subject at all.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report