‘Clash of the Titans’...the old movie based on the classic Greek myth about a power battle between gods and men was rolled out across US media a few weeks ago to describe the epic bromance fallout between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two men who might aspire to be demigods.
But it’s being rolled out again to depict another furious feud between the president and a much older and arguably more formidable ally sans God-like pretensions... Rupert Murdoch, aged 94. But there is a common denominator linking both headline-dominating disputes...the late Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most infamous paedophile power broker whose past VIP cronies included Prince Andrew, Trump himself and Bill Clinton among a host of others.
When, without citing any evidence, Musk posted on his X platform that Trump’s name was on the massive secret dossier being held by US law enforcement, the president exploded, Murdoch’s Trump-friendly Fox News network largely played the story down and took the president’s side.
The mutinous MAGA challenge
But there were a few tricky problems for Trump and his White House. Most notably his MAGA base who have been demanding the release of all the government papers associated with Epstein, the financier who died in ‘peculiar’ circumstances in jail while awaiting trial on a mass of charges of sex trafficking under-age girls, along with his since convicted British girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late disgraced Mirror newspaper baron (and my onetime boss), Robert Maxwell.
Now, Trump’s MAGA army are notoriously conspiracy theory obsessed and have long been convinced the Epstein files contain a ‘client list’ of prominent people, including senior Democrats, and that the ‘truth’ has been buried by a ‘Deep State’ establishment cover-up. So, where would they have got that impression from? That’s the problem increasingly dogging Donald Trump now.
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his chief allies, including his VP running mate JD Vance, whipped up their support base by demanding the release of the Epstein files and supporting the idea a damning list with blackmail undertones was indeed being covered up and that his second term administration would make it public. Among those vocally supporting the campaign pledge were allies like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, since appointed director and deputy director of the FBI. So was the equally vocal loyalist Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general and boss of the Justice Department who hold the Epstein investigation files.
Unsurprisingly, the MAGA base expected the election pledge to publicly ‘expose’ the files to be honoured. When it wasn’t, some MAGA supporters — not just the conspiracy theory addicts — started demanding to know why not. Their social media accounts went viral with angry complaints, some even posted footage of them burning their MAGA caps in protest. The first MAGA ‘mutiny’ was building up.
List or no list? ...that is the question
Step forward, then, Attorney General Bondi to announce that the much-hyped ‘Epstein List’ didn’t exist after all and that the other prop the Trump campaign team had promoted, that Epstein may have been murdered in his cell to ‘silence’ him, wasn’t true either and he had committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell while both guards assigned to watch him were asleep.
The problem there was that only a week or so previously Bondi had appeared on Fox News to ‘confirm’ the list’s existence and — stupidly or not — boast that it was on her Washington desk.
Unsurprising again, the MAGA mob wasn’t convinced and started turning on the president it had hitherto worshipped. In turn, Trump himself did something out of character... he lambasted his core supporters as ‘deluded’ and ‘weak’ and accused them of falling for a ‘boring’ Democrat ‘hoax’ blatantly ignoring that it was a conspiracy theory / cover-up repeatedly promoted by himself and his team throughout the 2024 election campaign. Even some pro-Trump voices on Capitol Hill are debunking his latest absurd ploy, implying former Presidents Biden and Obama were somehow laying a pre-planned plot to embarrass him in future.
The infamous pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones branded the president’s decision not to release all the files as ‘over the top sickening’ while Trump’s white nationalist supporter Nick Fuentes publicly called him a ‘fat stupid joke’. The leading media personality and Trump confidante Tucker Carlson and his former chief adviser Steve Bannon were among those criticising the White House’s U-turn. Elon Musk resurfaced on X accusing the man whose presidential run he bankrolled of a ‘cover-up’.
On Capitol Hill, cross-party support has been building for the full release of the Epstein files. Showing distinct signs of panic, Trump has ordered Bondi to apply to the judge who presided over a Grand Jury hearing into Epstein to release some sealed evidence. The trouble is that the Grand Jury evidence would only represent a fraction of the investigation files compiled by the FBI and Justice Department during their overall investigations into Epstein’s criminal activity, which includes a vast collection of emails, videos, photographs, text messages, witness statements, private jet passenger logs et al.
In January 2024, for example, Trump posted on his social media platform that he had never flown on Epstein’s private plane, even though flight records showed he had done SEVEN TIMES. He also posted that he didn’t know ‘Prince Andrew of Britain’ despite the existence of several photos of them together.
Temporarily, at least, the White House thought the Bondi move would reduce the media and political firestorm and calm the mutinous MAGA movement. It was showing some signs of calming troubled waters until last week when Rupert Murdoch and his highly-respected Wall Street Journal newspaper entered the fray.
By publishing the guaranteed-to-go-global story of how Trump allegedly contributed a sketch of a naked woman with his signature forming a scribble of pubic hair, along with a ‘bawdy’ letter to Epstein said to conclude: ‘Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret’. It was apparently for a book of ‘tributes’ being compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell to mark Epstein’s 50th birthday.
‘Well, I never wrote a picture’.
As an intrigued world now knows, Donald Trump denies the whole story, insisting in mangled grammar that he has never in his life ‘wrote a picture’ and that he is ‘suing the ass off’ Murdoch’ and his ‘pile of garbage WSJ’ for $10billion, although many US legal experts doubt he can succeed given the First Amendment limits. Unless Trump can prove the august paper deliberately acted out of malice while knowing the story to be untrue. While ample evidence exists that Trump does ‘doodle’ and even auctioned some in the past — albeit not of the naked woman variety.
For their part, Murdoch and his British editor of the WSJ, Emma Tucker, had rejected calls from the president denying the story and demanding they shouldn’t publish. Ironically, Murdoch had been Trump’s guest only a few days earlier at the World Club Soccer Final and at the White House last month. Murdoch and his WSJ lawyers are standing by their story and refusing to buckle as two major US broadcast networks — ABC and CBS — have done recently when faced with questionable multi-million dollar legal threats by Trump over unrelated issues. Critics accuse the networks’ corporate owners of caving in to protect their wider business interests from a vengeful, transactional POTUS.
The Epstein headlines on both sides of the Atlantic spell out why Trump is rattled like never before in his presidency. ‘Has Trump been ensnared in his own web of Maga lies?’ asked the Guardian over its report from its Washington correspondent David Smith (July 19th). The same day, the paper’s main leader headline read: ‘The alarming truth about Trump, Maga conspiracists, and the Epstein scandal’. It began: ‘Donald Trump has thrived on conspiracy theories — birtherist lies that Barack Obama was born outside the US; the lunacies of the Q-Anon movement; false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. All centred on the idea the ‘deep state’ was lying to, and thus cheating, ordinary people. Mr Trump was their tribune... it’s hard not to feel schadenfreude now that he’s at the sharp end of a theory that he encouraged and his allies eagerly pushed.’
Over at the Mail, Andrew Neil’s column headline (July 19) was ‘Trump’s habit of spreading Deep State conspiracy theories has come back to bite him — and he’s unleashed forces he can no longer control’.
An inveterate Trump-watcher, Neil’s concluding paragraphs make the pertinent point: ‘Bashing the mainstream media only gets you so far. Trump has been hoist with his own petard. His penchant for spreading Deep State conspiracy theories has come back to bite him on his bottom. There was a time when it was only MAGA that cared much about the Epstein files. No longer. America’s appetite has been whetted. A new Reuters poll reveals that almost 70% of Americans now think Trump is withholding information that should be in the public domain to protect himself.
‘For a country so deeply divided that is quite a consensus. Trump would be wise not to defy it.’
Murdoch’s Times in the UK has covered the story comprehensively but carefully — clearly conscious not to play into Trump’s predictable tactic of painting himself as the ‘victim’ of a Murdoch-wide ‘witch-hunt’.
Inevitably, international print and broadcast coverage media has refocused on the 20-year friendship between Epstein and Trump which can be illustrated by a plethora of video footage and still photos, some of it at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion where Epstein’s most famous victim, the late Virginia Giuffre was recruited.
Inevitably, too, there has been hefty refocusing on Trump’s excruciating 2002 New York magazine interview in which he paid tribute to Epstein as a ‘terrific guy... he’s a lot of fun to be with. It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life’. Trump’s defenders are working overtime now to stress that he and Epstein fell out over a business deal some time before the latter’s initial paedophile conviction in Florida.
This week, the New York Times unearthed a 1992 revelation about how a bevy of two dozen nubile young women were invited to a ‘calendar girl competition and party’. But the only two attendees turned out to be Messrs Epstein and Trump with what went on behind closed doors said to be shrouded in mystery.
Across the Atlantic, frenzied, fascinated political interest has also centred on how much the Trump / Murdoch / Epstein furore could damage The Donald’s presidency or — conversely — Murdoch’s own media power base. A couple of political website headlines hyperbolically suggested the Epstein scandal fallout could ultimately bring Trump down. In reality, it is unlikely to produce the kind of smoking gun that would force a resignation or trigger a presidential indictment. But what it almost certainly will do is kill Trump’s lingering dream of a constitution-bending third term. It could also imperil his grandiose legacy ambitions and throw into question the longer-term future of the MAGA movement itself.
Always a tabloid man
One intriguing reflection came from the legendary US-based British journalist and author Tina Brown, no great admirer of either man. Writing on her ‘Fresh Hell’ Substack, the founder of the influential Daily Beast platform (well over a million readers a day) and the ex-editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and widow of the great Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans, offered this observation / prediction: ‘What rich irony that the defence against the latest assault by Trump on press freedom is now in the hands of the old crocodile Rupert Murdoch, the very media owner whose Fox News gave us Trump in the first place. In 2020, such was Murdoch’s desire to curry favour with Trump and his glued-to-Fox base that the network’s election night editor who accurately called Arizona early for Biden (after getting approval from Rupert) was then fired as a sacrificial lamb to the backlash that followed.
‘Not so this time. Last week, Emma Tucker, intrepid editor in chief of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, was uncowed by Trump’s ranting at her to kill the paper’s scoop, which showed Trump’s suggestive 50th birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein with a porny doodle of a naked woman. But Murdoch’s ethos, if you can call it that, is different with his newspapers than with the anchor-driven bombast meted out on Fox. My bet is he won’t pay Trump a dime for the Epstein story. Even at a grumpy 94, Murdoch is a still a tabloid man to his core. Nothing gets his juices going more than a sex scandal that beats the competition...the old-fashioned populist thrill of embarrassing those in power (and leveraging their fears) has been the six-decade blood sport of Murdoch’s newspaper empire.’
For its international audience, the Financial Times noted the same day: ‘Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch ruptures bond that has shaped the US right... the alliance has been beneficial to both men but has often been fractious.’
But fractured beyond repair over Epstein is the big question taxing the political and media elite now. From personal knowledge, I know that, privately, Murdoch has long dubbed Trump a ‘f***ing moron’ while recognising the pragmatic political and fiscal benefits — not least with Fox News — of backing Trump when it suited his interests. Whether either man is prepared to back down and reconcile this time truly is in the lap of the Gods, you could say.
Frenzied Wednesday
By Wednesday, another major name entered the fray with former president Barack Obama taking the rare step of condemning a successor in a blistering statement. It came after Trump accused Obama of “treason” and the White House even reposted an AI-generated video of him being arrested.
A furious Obama accused Trump’s move of a bizarre bid to try and divert attention from the rapidly escalating Epstein crisis. It coincided with the Republican leader on Capitol Hill declaring the summer recess a day early in an apparent move to thwart cross-party demands for the complete Epstein files to be made public.
Uncharacteristically, Trump is avoiding the cameras and media questions by limiting his extraordinary outbursts to his Truth Social platform.
The White House also reacted angrily when the CNN network released a new tranche of photographs showing Trump and Epstein partying together at the height of the friendship now critically haunting his presidency.
In another drastic development on Wednesday evening, Congress’s House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena ordering Ghislaine Maxwell to face cross-party questioning about Epstein on August 11th. Undoubtedly, Maxwell’s lawyers will be looking for a future reduction in her 20 years jail stretch in return for her co-operating.
But the most dramatic twist on an extraordinary Wednesday came with a new Wall Street Journal report claiming Trump was told by the Justice Department in May that his name appears in the Epstein files multiple times. The White House dismissed it as ‘fake news’.
It is understood Rupert Murdoch personally approved the WSJ running the story.
If true, it opens a can of massive questions. Such as, what is the context and could it threaten his presidency? Is this the reason he and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have U-turned on their longstanding pledge to make all the files public? Certainly, it fuels the mounting public and political pressure now surging way beyond the angry MAGA movement for full disclosure.
As one senior Capitol Hill Democrat put it to me, ‘Much as I despise Trump, I had totally dismissed any possibility of another Watergate. Now I’m not so sure.’
Scotland on alert
From this Friday, the Trump media circus descends on Scotland for a 4-day trip by the president to visit his golf courses there. Billed as a ‘private’ visit — with a fleeting and presumably flattering ‘private’ visit from Keir Starmer fitted in — it begs another question. How private can any Trump trip to Britain be? Scottish police have already called for reinforcements to handle anticipated protest rallies. British reporters and cameramen will descend en masse in the hope of great photo opps or an impromptu Trumpian outburst. Any journo worth his or her salt will boldly try to chip in a non-golfing question about Murdoch and Epstein. Unless invited to do so, you can safely bet the prime minister won’t be posing any.
POTUS will be accompanied by handpicked members of the travelling White House press corps. But one name has been dropped from the travelling media party. It’s the Wall Street Journal’s White House staffer. Quelle surprise, anyone?
Certainly Trump versus Murdoch is the global hot ticket media / political showstopper all set to run and run.
