President Donald Trump doesn't understand the intense public interest in his former associate Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes, and he's furious that his administration officials and outside allies have been unable to make the issue go away.
The issue exploded back into the public consciousness in July after the Department of Justice and FBI announced no further evidence about the case would be released despite Trump's campaign promises to expose others involved in the sex trafficking network.
The Wall Street Journal published a new report Tuesday on White House efforts to control the fallout among the MAGA faithful.
"Trump was used to having absolute control over his base. The Epstein issue was an anomaly: a negative story on which many of his supporters didn’t seem inclined to follow his lead," the Journal reported.
The White House had believed the president's supporters would move on and the issue would blow over, but instead the Epstein matter resulted in multiple meetings in the Situation Room and months of strategic planning by senior administration officials as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) continued leading ongoing congressional efforts to get the Epstein files released.
“This may be the worst managed PR event in history,” said Ty Cobb, who led the White House response in 2017 to the special counsel probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. “You’ve got multiple mouthpieces, and they’re all covering their own a-- now.”
The president has expressed concerns to aides that some of his friends might be mentioned in the Epstein files, while at other times he worried aloud that the files could have been doctored to harm him, the report stated.
But mostly he's frustrated by the lingering fixation with it.
"Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in New York and Florida and has said he fell out with him before his first arrest in 2006, told aides he couldn’t understand why people were so obsessed with the deceased financier and sex offender, according to people familiar with his comments," the Journal reported. "People don’t understand that Palm Beach in the 90s was a different time, he groused."