The White House’s bizarre attempt at an internet joke was the perfect setup for Democrats to blast the president’s ties to infamous child sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
On Thursday, the White House’s official X account shared a pixelated image of President Donald Trump, 79, sitting in the Oval Office.
An hour later, the official account for Democrats on the Homeland Security committee responded with a pixelated photo of their own, but in this one, Trump had a friend with him.
The blocky pic depicts arguably the most famous photo of the president with Epstein, with the two standing side-by-side at Mar-a-Lago with Trump’s hand on the convicted sex trafficker’s right shoulder, circa February 1997.
Within the files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, one report shows that Trump was accused by awomanwho alleged that he sexually abused her when she was 13.
Key details of the woman’s background and history that she provided to the FBI were verified as true by The Post and Courier, suggesting that she told the truth about numerous aspects of her life in her interviews.
Her account to the FBI claimed that Trump forced her to commit a sex act on him around 1984, following her recruitment by Epstein, who was a friend of Trump’s at the time.
Though the president has repeatedly claimed that he expelled the sex offender from Mar-a-Lago, a redacted email included in the Epstein files seems to imply that the president may have stretched the truth.
New York Rep. Dan Goldman shared the email on the House floor last week, which suggests that Epstein was “never asked to leave” Trump’s club, and shows Trump saying he “may have been” on Epstein’s plane and at his house.
“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to the Daily Beast. “And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
Trump’s ties to Epstein were not the only source of criticism on the post. Other political personalities called out the unseriousness of the administration amid the president’s war on Iran, which has already claimed the lives of 13 American service members.
“This isn’t a f---ing game,” wrote political commentator Brian Krassenstein. “Americans are dying in war and you are sending cryptic tweets.”
“What the f--- is this?!” said Cenk Uygur, founder of the progressive online news show,The Young Turks. “Weirdo trolling when there’s a political race going on is one thing, it’s a completely different thing when American lives are on the line and jagoffs in the White House are playing silly games instead of figuring out what to do in Iran.”
