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What do Russia and Epstein have in common? Trump.

Chris Brennan   Paste BN

I spent a solid week watching Donald Trump struggle to escape a scandal he created by saying something incredibly dumb and then – halfheartedly – trying to walk it back.

It all felt familiar. Maybe even inevitable.

In July 2025, Trump is trying to move past his political exploitation of conspiracy theories still swirling around his now-dead former cruising buddy, the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

In July 2018, Trump was trying to move past his astonishingly stupid claim that he took Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word that Russia had not tried to influence the 2016 presidential election, a conclusion America’s intelligence agencies had already reached.

With Trump, it felt like only a matter of time until these scandals merged. 

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Let’s go back to 2018, with the bitter bipartisan backlash to Trump’s eager, embarrassing embrace of Putin as they stood together at a summit in Helsinki, Finland. 

Back home at the White House, a day after that fiasco, Trump finally offered this concession – “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.” But, being Trump, he had to chip in that other countries might have also meddled.

Seven years later, Trump and his lackeys have enraged his supporters by trying to quash talk about Epstein and whether he left behind a “client list” of powerful people he blackmailed.

Trump’s limited range of intellectual resources grows ever narrower when he is emotional about being embarrassed, like when his own “MAGA” movement turns on him. So it's predictable that he’s now reaching so very hard, with an assist from Tulsi Gabbard, to deflect attention to his number-one nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

Trump, on July 22, accused Obama of treason when asked about Epstein. Trump’s theory here, juiced by Gabbard, is that Obama used talk of Russian election interference to discredit Trump’s 2016 election win and hobble his first term in office.

There have been, of course, plenty of investigations into all that, many of them conducted while Trump was president from 2017 to 2021. One of them, a bipartisan report from the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate in August 2020, cited "irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

The lead Republican on that report, Marco Rubio, is now Trump’s Secretary of State.

Trump’s pathetic pivot to demonizing Obama feels so road-worn and tired – and predictable – that I can’t be surprised that it is not gaining traction.

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