The developments around the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files, and how close President Donald Trump was to his operation, are so revolting to Puck News' John Heilemann that he had some particularly vivid imagery to describe it on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" on Wednesday.
This comes as House Democrats release an email that revealed, among other things, Epstein considered Trump a loyal friend who knew about his abuse of young girls but was "the dog that hasn't barked." He made the comments to co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who was just transferred to a luxury minimum-security prison against DOJ policy after stating in an interview that Trump was innocent.
"Mark Epstein sent Jeffrey Epstein a meme that shows Donald Trump's face on it with the words, 'Would you trust this man with your daughter?'" said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "So that is sent to a deceased child sex trafficker from said deceased child sex trafficker's brother about Donald Trump ... what does that do to your brain? It ties mine in all sorts of knots."
"Well, I mean, Nicolle, the notion that Donald Trump was a sordid figure when it came to how he treated women, that is not news," said Heilemann. "We know what he said on Howard Stern. You know, we know the stories about him at beauty pageants. We know him talking about at one point about, you know, about if he were not her father, you know, about wanting to date his daughter. I mean, that on the edges of Donald Trump's personal life, there has been a lot of seediness."
The bottom line, he said, is that "this is all part of a pattern. This is all part of a consistent picture of Donald Trump. This is the 'grab them by the' guy."
Regarding the Epstein emails, Heilemann continued, "They don't so much seize up my brain as they send me racing off to take kind of like a Karen Silkwood shower, like I want to, like, every time I come up against anything that's a direct source, material thing that touches Jeffrey Epstein. I feel like I need more than a hot shower, more than a cold shower. I need, like, an acid bath to try to get all the scum off of my eyeballs and off of my — that might have dripped somewhere on my body as I absorb these emails. It's just all so scummy."
The question that remains, he said, is "What is it that Trump — what is it that's going to be, that's going to be revealed here? The pattern of behavior suggests it's really bad. We don't know what it is, but there is a pattern here. And ... he's continuing to take on political water with every day. This just gets worse and worse. It's not going away. It's only going to get worse. There's only going to be more of these emails. And yet he continues to stonewall in this completely self-defeating, self-destructive fashion."
The more he does it, Heilemann concluded, the more one gets the impression he has something truly terrible to hide.
"It just continues to get more and more, not directly and not dispositive, but by, by implication, it just continues to get worse and uglier by the day."