The Most Pathetic Republican Excuses on Trump Epstein Birthday Letter

GOP lawmakers are tying themselves in knots to defend President Donald Trump after his unsettling, sexually suggestive 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was released Monday. The damning document appeared in a scrapbook that the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed from the deceased sex criminal’s estate.

Below are some of the most pitiful reactions and denials from congressional Republicans.

1. “We’ve seen autopens they’ve used in the Biden administration”—Tim Burchett

Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, shown the letter by CNN’s Manu Raju, denied its veracity and weaved a fanciful narrative.

“I mean, anybody can do a signature. We’ve seen autopens they’ve used in the Biden administration,” he said, adding, “I’ve never known Trump to be much of an artist either”—even though, as Raju noted, there is actually a history of Trump making sketches.

“So you think really someone might have just forged this somehow?” Raju asked.

“Yeah,” Burchett replied. “I mean, ‘somehow’? It’s so easy to do.”

The Tennessee congressman suggested the document was created by the Biden administration, despite it having come from Epstein’s estate. “They’ve had all this stuff for four years, and now they’re bringing it out? I just don’t buy it,” he said.

Asked how the Biden administration could possibly be behind the letter—given that it was contained in a 2003 book subpoenaed from Epstein’s estate—Burchett replied, “I mean, was I there in 2003 when they got it? Were you? No. That’s the problem. You got to look at the chain of command on this stuff.”

2. “It’s not his signature”—Byron Donalds

Representative Byron Donalds of Florida joined the chorus of conservatives claiming that Trump’s first name at the bottom of the letter is different from the president’s current autograph. (Analyses, however, show the 2003 sign-off to be a perfect match with contemporaneous examples of Trump’s signature.)

“From what I see, it’s not his signature,” Donalds told reporters. “I’ve seen Donald Trump sign a million things.”

“This doesn’t look like his signature to you?” a reporter asked.

“Nope!” he replied.

Donalds is, indeed, quite familiar with Trump’s signature—or, at least, its current iteration. In July, when Trump was seeking to rally the GOP around his signature tax and spending plan, Donalds was among a gaggle of Republicans to visit the White House and leave with signed MAGA merchandise. (Burchett was there too, and posted a video online afterward in which Donalds encouraged him to show off his signed goodies.)

3. “Been a little busy today”—Mike Johnson

House Speaker Mike Johnson reacted to the letter by reflexively deferring to the president’s word.

First asked about the message on Monday, Johnson said: “Been a little busy today. I haven’t dialed in on that. I’m told that it’s fake.”

Asked again on Tuesday, Johnson said that he had not seen the drawing: “I’ve heard about it. But no,” he told reporters, per PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins. “And the White House say[s] it’s not true. So.”

Never mind that Trump has been caught in lie after lie about Epstein.

4. “I take the president at his word”—James Comer

House Oversight Chair James Comer on Monday deflected questions about Trump’s letter, accusing Democrats of attempting to score political points.

“The Democrats, they find one thing in there and they promote it and try to get a narrative. This investigation’s about providing justice and accountability for the victims,” Comer told reporters, apparently seeing pursuing accountability and scrutinizing the commander in chief’s close relationship with Epstein as incompatible.

On Tuesday, Comer, like Johnson, approached the claims of the man known as the most dishonest president in U.S. history with utmost credulity.

“The president says he did not sign it,” Comer told CNN. “So I take the president [at] his word.”

5. “I haven’t seen it”—Jim Jordan

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio appears happy to take the ignorance-is-bliss approach on the matter.

Asked about the letter by CNN’s Raju, he said, “I don’t know if that’s legit, and I haven’t seen it. I’ll take a look at it.”

“Don’t you want to learn more about Trump’s relationship and friendship with Epstein?” the reporter asked him on Monday.

“No,” he said. “I want to have [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel in next week, where we’ll ask him about all kinds of things.… I haven’t seen it. Don’t buy it.”

Throughout the Epstein affair, Jordan hasn’t always been so quick to dismiss new evidence—or, at least, not when it’s favored Trump.

When it was revealed that Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell told the FBI that Trump wasn’t guilty of any misdeeds, Jordan was eager to believe the claims of the convicted sex trafficker currently angling for a pardon from the president.

“This confirms what we all knew,” he told Fox News at the time. “We knew President Trump didn’t do anything wrong here.”

In a massive loss for election denialism accountability, the 15 Michigan electors who signed a document falsely stating that Donald Trump won their state in 2020 have now gotten off scot-free.

On December 14, 2020, 16 Michigan Republicans masquerading as “duly elected and qualified” electors gathered in the basement of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters and signed a certificate stating that Trump had won Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes. The certificate was sent in to the National Archives. This was of course a lie, as Joe Biden won Michigan by three points. Nonetheless, their move was one of many similar stunts pulled by Trump supporters across the country, as they also submitted false certificates declaring his victory.

“We signed a blank piece of paper,” one of the electors, Michelle Lundgren, said. “And that’s all [I] can tell you.”

Each of the 16 electors except one, who reached an agreement with the state attorney general’s office, faced charges of forgery, conspiracy to commit election law forgery, and uttering and publishing.

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in 2023.

Now, five years later, Judge Kristen Simmons, appointed by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has thrown out their cases.

“This is a fraud case, and we have to prove intent, and I do not believe there is evidence sufficient to prove intent,” she told the courtroom on Tuesday.

Prosecutors reportedly had issues establishing that the electors actually knew what they were doing was against the law, as many of the defendants stated that they thought they were engaged in a “legitimate process” that night in December.

“Where’s the evidence of any intent that anybody had to commit to crime?” John Freeman, a lawyer for one of the electors, said in a hearing last year. “It’s all wishful thinking.… It’s a politically motivated witch hunt that has no basis in the evidence.”

Republican Women’s Federation of Michigan president Robyn Peake admitted that Simmons’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that Trump is back in office.

“There’s a possibility that they have been testing the political winds and how things have changed since Trump’s current term to see what is the public opinion and what is the tone of the United States at this point,” Peake said, according to The Detroit News. “We’ve seen a lot of changes in the last almost 12 months and I think the political tone right now is different in the United States than what it was.”

Zohran Mamdani is maintaining a major lead in the race for New York City mayor, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University.

Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, is the preferred candidate of 46 percent of likely voters, handily beating competitors Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Eric Adams. Former Governor Cuomo trails Mamdani in second, with 24 percent of the vote, then Republican Sliwa at 15 percent, and current Mayor Adams at a dismal 9 percent.

Those polled indicated that Mamdani, a democratic socialist, was the best candidate to address their top two concerns: affordability and housing. And around 60 percent of likely voters said that Mamdani was “inspirational”—he’s the only candidate viewed positively by a majority of voters, according to the poll.

Unlike the primary, which employed ranked-choice voting, the general election in November will be a head-to-head race. However, it’s shaping up to be anything but traditional: In deep-blue New York City, the Democratic primary is usually more important than the general in determining the city’s next mayor.

But though Mamdani appears to be headed for victory, he’ll be challenged by two other Democrats, both running as independents: Cuomo, who suffered an unexpectedly brutal loss in the primary, and Adams, whose corruption-plagued tenure seems to be seriously affecting his reelection bid.

And then there’s Sliwa, the Republican candidate, who non-New Yorkers may be surprised to learn does not have the backing of the Trump administration—but is still polling higher than current Mayor Adams.

However, the president has still attempted to pull strings behind the scenes. President Donald Trump and strategists have reportedly been brainstorming ways to get Adams and Sliwa to drop out, creating a one-to-one race between Mamdani and Cuomo, the president’s preferred candidate.

Were that to happen, the new poll shows Mamdani’s lead enduring but shrinking significantly: Mamdani came in with 48 percent of the vote and Cuomo with 44.

Nearly a million fewer jobs were created between April 2024 and March 2025 than previously reported, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The new data, published Tuesday morning, speaks to a weak job market during both former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump’s terms—and is another harbinger of economic turbulence to come.

Despite what monthly payroll tallies indicated, employers added 911,000 fewer jobs from last April until this March. This implies that only 850,000 jobs were actually added to the economy during that time, just half as many as previously reported, according to The New York Times.

This is the second time in a week that Americans have been hit with troubling economic news.

On Friday, the August jobs report revealed that unemployment has risen to a nearly four-year high, and the United States only added 22,000 jobs that month—an underperformance from the projected 75,000.

Annual revisions are normal, but this one is pretty significant: it’s the largest since the 2008 recession. It also comes at a bad time for Trump, who just fired the head of the BLS last month because her jobs report was weaker than expected.

It seems as if the president’s economy is shrinking: The number of foreign-born workers is declining as Trump deports immigrants en masse, and it’s likely that the number of native-born workers isn’t rising to meet the difference. Tariffs are causing people to buy less, and the number of unemployed Americans has grown larger than the stock of available jobs.

No wonder economists are saying that we may be “on the brink” of a recession.

It’s unclear whether President Trump plans to run again in 2028, despite the Twenty-Second Amendment unambiguously barring a president from being elected for a third term.

In a Monday evening interview, Fox News host Brett Baier broached the subject with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—and the wording of the Trump appointee’s response alarmed some observers.

“The Twenty-Second Amendment says you can only run for office for two terms,” Baier said.

“True,” answered Barrett.

“You think that that’s cut and dry?”

“Well, that’s, you know, that’s what the amendment says, right?” Barrett said. “After FDR had four terms, that’s what that amendment says.”

Many online were concerned that Barrett had left room for interpretation, among them California Governor Gavin Newsom, who wrote on X, “The answer is: YES.”

In an appearance on CBS last week, Barrett—currently on a book tour—gave a better answer when interviewer Norah O’Donnell noted that she “explicitly write[s] in the book that the Constitution ‘leaves no room for second guessing when it comes to term limits.’”

“The Twenty-Second Amendment sets a two-term limit,” Barrett said, again citing the history of the amendment’s enactment after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four elections. “So really, I can’t say anything else but just point to the Twenty-Second Amendment. If you ask the question how many terms a president can serve, I would point to the Twenty-Second amendment.”

Trump, for his part, has teetered on the question of whether he sees himself as constrained by the Twenty-Second Amendment—not to mention the Constitution in general.

In March, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he was “not joking” about considering a third term. There are “methods” by which he could do so, he claimed, one being if Vice President JD Vance was to win the presidency, then pass the baton to Trump.

In May, however, Trump declared to Welker that he will be “a two-term president”—though he seemingly couldn’t help but add, “There are ways of doing it.” In August, he said he would “like to run” again but “probably won’t.”

Online, the president sells “TRUMP 2028” hats, with the product description stating: “Rewrite the rules with the Trump 2028 high crown hat.”