On July 17, the Wall Street Journal published an exposé by Khadeeja Safdar and Sadie Gurman, detailing a racy — and, in context, rather damning — 2003 birthday message from real estate developer Donald Trump to financier Jeffrey Epstein, who later allegedly killed himself while awaiting trial on charges of sexually trafficking minor girls.

Trump followed his usual crybully playbook: Deny everything, scream “fake news!,” issue clearly false statements (“I never wrote a picture in my life”) to make the story sound implausible, sue for some ridiculous amount of money ($10 billion).

While I tend to distrust “scandal” stories in “mainstream media” outlets, those very predilections on Trump’s part make this particular story more, rather than less, credible.

Would the Journal have called those predictable consequences down on its own head without ensuring it could justify every comma in the story? I doubt it.

Would the Journal‘s owner, Rupert Murdoch, have allowed publication if he wasn’t convinced himself? Murdoch’s Fox News has already paid out nearly $800 million for making false PRO-Trump claims about the 2020 presidential election, with another $3 billion still on the line. He’s a very rich man,  but he’s been burnt on this kind of thing before and likely learned his lesson.

So: The story’s claim that Trump gifted Epstein a doodle of a naked woman, accompanied by a note averring that “we have certain things in common,” to the “age” of “enigmas,” and to shared “secrets,” will likely stand up in court, if it ever gets there. And the Journal and Murdoch probably wouldn’t have published the story if they weren’t willing to go there.

“What did the president know,” US Senator Howard Baker (R-TN) asked during the Senate’s hearings on the Watergate affair,  “and when did he know it?” He’s also reported to have informally mused that “it is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.” We know how that all came out, of course.

One big difference between Watergate and this affair is that Nixon went down over, basically, refusing to let his underlings take the fall for the initial burglary.

There’s no one Trump won’t throw under the bus without a second thought, and there probably wouldn’t BE a scandal if Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino hadn’t busked for their administration jobs on, partially, claims that they’d bring out the whole truth on Epstein.

Would a few ritual human sacrifices adequately propitiate the gods of public opinion and legal process this time? Well, maybe. How many “ladies and gentlemen … we got him” moments has Trump already preempted or survived?

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if the naked lady in the doodle is Brünnhilde, and whether she’s about to sing.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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