Character Actors

I will begin with a question. Do we really need visual evidence of Donald Trump or other associates of Jeffrey Epstein taking advantage of a young girl to disqualify them for any public or private position of authority in the United States? While pedophile might be the Nobel Prize for most deviant behavior, many people have been ostracized for much less. George Santos was expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives for lying about almost everything on his resume. Rachel Dolezal, a former Spokane, Washington NAACP leader, was dismissed for falsely claiming to be black. The NBA forced Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver to sell the team after an investigation that documented racist and misogynistic slurs directed at players and employees.

In all three cases, the “crime” was lack of character, maybe with the exception of Santos, whose side-hustles included felony fraud. Bottom line? The organizations of which these individuals were a part said, “We don’t need anything else.” Simple stated, they no longer wanted to associate with or be represented by people of such low moral character.

Which brings me to this week when two main figures in the Trump administration claimed, despite knowing Jeffrey Epstein, they did not participate in sexual abuse of any young girls. In the immortal words of one Rhett Butler, “Frankly, my dear I don’t give a damn.” Why? In their attempts to create cover stories, they have exposed their character, if not their genitals. Even if their excuses make sense, it does not absolve them of their amoral behavior. However, as Judge Judy loves to say, “If the story doesn’t make sense, it probably isn’t true.

I will start with the lesser of two weasels, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.* Yesterday, Lutnick tried to clean up his own personal PR disaster after emails in the latest DOJ dump of files referenced a 2012 lunch on Epstein island. He admitted such before the Senate Appropriations Committee.

I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation. My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. We had lunch on the island, that is true, for an hour, and we left with all of my children with my nannies and my wife… I don’t recall why we did it.

Howard Lutnick/February 10, 2026

No one accused Lutnick of any wrongdoing. Rather they focused on his previous description of what he had claimed was his first and final encounter with Epstein. Lutnick, coincidently, lived in the Manhattan townhouse next to Epstein. In an October 2025 interview on “Pod Force One,” Lutnick described a “neighborly visit” during which Epstein showed him a massage table in the middle of his house. Epstein tells his guest he gets a massage “every day.” Not just any massage, “the right kind of massage.”

Lutnick then tells the show’s host, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, that he and his wife left immediately and:

…in the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again…So, I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn’t going because he’s gross. That’s my story. A one and absolutely done.

Howard Lutnick/October 1, 2025

“Ever again” turned out to be less than a decade. That should be the least of our concerns. As stated on this blog’s home page, my mission was not to have answers to everything, but to ask better questions. In this case, I was particularly troubled by two questions the senators did not ask him. First, if Lutnick’s WIFE was with him when they were so disgusted by the sight of the massage table, why on earth would SHE agree to have lunch on Epstein island, much less bring their four kids with them? Second, if Lutnick was not a client of Epstein’s sexploitation empire, what NET gain did he anticipate by having lunch with someone he once described as so GROSS.

For the main event, I present none other than Donald J. Trump. This incredible cover story begins with an April 2020 FBI file, part of the January 31 DOJ dump of redacted Epstein material, in which the interviewee claims Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter told him about a 2006 telephone conversation he supposedly had with Trump. In court, this would be considered hearsay and not permitted as evidence.

Palm Beach Country Club is a Jewish country club. A lot of wealthy people are there and they flock together. Mar-A-Lago is a mixture of everyone. DONALD TRUMP told [redacted but since identified as Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter] that he threw EPSTEIN out of his club. TRUMP called the PBPD to tell him “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this”. TRUMP told him people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting. TRUMP said MAXWELL was EPSTEIN’s operative, “she is evil and to focus on her”. TRUMP told that he was around EPSTEIN once when teenagers were present and TRUMP “got the hell out of there”. TRUMP was one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating EPSTEIN.

FBI FD-302/April 4, 2020

I try not to spread conspiracy theories; so I will simply point out a few facts and let you come to your own conclusion.

• There is no contemporaneous evidence of Trump’s 2005 phone call to the Palm Beach Police Department. Even press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked about the phone call during Tuesday’s daily briefing, replied, “Look, it was a phone call that may or may not have happened in 2006, I don’t know the answer to that question.”
• In July 2025, Trump claimed the reason he ended his friendship with Epstein was because he had recruited Mar-a-Lago massage attendant Virginia Giuffre to be his traveling masseuse. According to Trump, “He took people, I say ‘don’t do it anymore’, you know they work for me… beyond that, he took some others. Once he did that, that was the end of him.”
• Although a witness to Epstein’s hanging out with “teenagers,” Trump’s first-hand account is nowhere to be found in the Florida state attorney Alexander Acosta’s investigation or his 2009 Epstein indictment.
• Trump, who has a story involving an unnamed friend for every other situation, has never mentioned this story.
• Trump officially announces his 2020 re-election campaign on June 18, 2019.
• Jeffrey Epstein dies in his cell at the NYC Metropolitan Correction Center on August 10, 2019 while awaiting trial. His death re-ignites interest in release of the Epstein files.
• The interview between an FBI agent (name redacted) and the interview subject (name redacted) in which the phone call first appears is dated October 18, 2019.
• The “date of entry” for the FD-302, used by FBI agents to “memorialize interviews”, is dated April 23, 2020. Why would it take six months for the interviewer (name redacted) to type up, finalize and enter the report into the FBI system?

Again, there are more questions than answers. Other than an undocumented recollection 13 years after the fact, what other evidence do we need to ensure the account of Trump’s phone call to Michael Reiter actually took place? If Trump was “one of the first people” to report Epstein’s criminal behavior, why, in July 2019, when asked if he had knowledge of Epstein molesting girls, he replied, “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.” Is it a coincidence that Reiter’s second-hand account, in which Trump is portrayed as “hero” rather than “possible accomplice,” was conducted two months after Epstein’s death? Finally, is it significant that, prior to Epstein’s death, release of the Epstein files would not include this potentially exculpatory document which is counter to many of the other one million Trump references in the unredacted files (per Representative Jamie Raskin’s disclosure)?

These facts explain why I see no need to prove either Trump or Lutnick were clients of Epstein’s sex trafficking empire. How they handled potential inquiries into their association with Epstein is all you need to know about their lack of a moral compass. Let’s assume, for argument sake, neither Trump nor Lutnick are guilty of anything “untoward,” Lutnick’s euphemism for statutory rape during the Senate hearing. Then why would they lie about the timeline during which they supposedly distanced themselves from one of the all-time heinous pedophiles and then re-engaged with him?

Most people would be ashamed for simply associating with Epstein after his 2009 conviction. For example, David McKillips, former CEO of Chuck E. Cheese, resigned immediately after his name appeared in the Epstein files. [There is probably a great joke about Epstein palling around with the CEO of an enterprise which caters to young children, but I’ll give McKillips a pass for doing the right thing by stepping down.] Ironically, both Trump and Lutnick constantly talk about running the government like a business. If they honestly believed that, why haven’t they followed McKillips example? Or Brad Karp, disgraced chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a multi-national firm specializing in corporate law?

Obviously, they have no shame, requiring a more creative solution to this dilemma. This being Academy Award season, there is only one logical response to Trump and Lutnick. Nominate them for an Oscar for “Best Performance by an Actor Impersonating Someone with Character.” Then, having reached this infamous pinnacle of stardom, suggest they ride off into the sunset by limousine, accompanied by the Count Basie orchestra.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

*Those of you familiar with “The Capitol Steps,” a comedy troupe comprised of congressional staff that got its start as entertainment at a Christmas party, know that each performance ended with co-founder Bob Strauss’s signature routine, “Lirty Dies,” a bit including spoonerisms, transposing the first letters of two or more words. Sadly, Strauss passed away in 2007 and the troupe disbanded in 2021 after 37 years together. In 2005, I had lunch with Bob when we were both panelists at a creativity seminar in Cincinnati. Every time I see the Commerce Secretary’s last name “Lutnick,” I think about how much fun Bob would have had with that one.