Trump worked to kill a story about his friendship with Epstein. Now we know why
He reportedly put pressure on the paper's top editor, Emma Tucker, and even Rupert Murdoch, who controls the paper's business side, claiming that the alleged facts behind the story were nothing but a hoax, and threatening to sue the paper if it forged ahead.
How worked up was he? 'On a fucking warpath,' one administration official told Rolling Stone magazine.
Now that the story has been published – appearing on the Journal's print-edition front page, no less – and picked up everywhere, it's easy to see what Trump was so upset about. And equally easy to see why trying snuff it out in advance became such a high priority.
It's not just that the 50th birthday card he reportedly penned for the future convicted child-sex offender is so damning in itself, with its bawdy sketch and references to shared secrets and 'enigmas' that 'never age'.
It's not just that Trump has been denying a tight friendship with Epstein – who died in jail in 2019 – for some time, and that this would clearly put the lie to that.
It's not just that he really, really wants this scandal to go away since it has been turning swaths of his normally cult-like base against him.
No, there's another element – and a brutal one for the president. It's where the story was published: in the Wall Street Journal, whose conservative opinion side has often backed him and whose news side has a reputation for ensuring that explosive stories are bulletproof: accurate in their facts and fully prepared to stand up under legal scrutiny.
What's more, the newspaper is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, Trump's most important media ally.
Murdoch's rightwing propaganda outfit, Fox News, has been Trump's cheerleader and alter ego for years and played a crucial role in getting him elected twice. (Fox News has been much more docile in recent days, doing Trump's bidding by almost shutting down its reporting and commentary on Epstein and Trump.) And Murdoch's right-leaning tabloid the New York Post tends to stand by Trump, too.
The Journal is widely perceived as right of center politically, with a reputation for pin-striped rectitude. In short, they don't make things up.
When the paper has taken a big swing at exposing wrongdoing – do you remember John Carreyrou's exposé of the blood-testing company Theranos, by any chance? – their reporting holds up.
All of that made JD Vance's complaints ring awfully hollow after the birthday card story ran.
'Forgive my language, but this story is complete and utter bullshit,' Vance posted on X shortly after it published. 'Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?'
And it made Trump's vehement denials and threats look absurd. Even in the Maga mind, the Journal is not the third-rate rag he tried to make it out to be.
One part of Trump's denial efforts fell hilariously flat after he claimed that it's not his style to draw sketches. ('I never wrote a picture in my life,' he claimed.) The internet was soon flooded with his signed doodles and drawings over many years.
Granted, Trump has had a lot of success in recent months in his various suits against big news organizations – in particular CBS News, whose parent company, Paramount Global, recently settled a worthless case for $16m.
Capitulation and cowering has run rampant. And each one of the settlements makes it easier for Trump to start the next court battle with every expectation that he'll prevail, well before a suit ever reaches a courtroom.
This, I suspect, will be quite different. A lawsuit won't make this damning story go away.
And I doubt that Trump really wants to put himself through legal discovery, with all the ugliness that might be exposed.
Will this be an element of Trump's long-awaited downfall? Few are willing to go that far, after all the scandals that have come and come, too numerous to detail and each one regarded as the final straw.
But at a time when Magaworld is finally having its doubts about their dear leader and savior, this one really hurts.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
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