Trump Responds to Statue of Him and Jeffrey Epstein Holding Hands

A statue depicting President Donald Trump and deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein frolicking hand in hand appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

The 12-foot-tall statue—made mostly of foam and wire, but painted bronze—is accompanied by three plaques. The middle plaque reads “In Honor of Friendship Month: We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend’ Jeffrey Epstein.” It then directly references the introduction to the strange letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for the pedophile financier’s 50th birthday book: “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.”

The other two plaques have Epstein’s name and the corresponding lines of the poem, and vice versa for Trump’s.

This statue represents the ongoing public fascination and outrage over the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to suppress further investigation into the Epstein files given his close friendship with the notorious sex predator.

The statues seemed to have struck a nerve within the Trump administration, as they responded almost as quickly as the statues were erected.

“Liberals are free to waste their money however they see fit—but it’s not news that Epstein knew Donald Trump, because Donald Trump kicked Epstein out of his club for being a creep,” a White House spokesperson told TMZ. “Democrats, the media, and the organization that’s wasting their money on this statue knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”

This response is pretty insufficient. Trump has recently said he kicked Epstein out because he “stole” workers from him. There have also been reports that they fell out over a real estate deal. Either way, this story that Trump was some white knight who defended the honor of the women of Mar-a-Lago doesn’t hold up with his own words.

Additionally, the Trump administration has not been transparent. The overwhelming majority of thee “thousands of pages of documents” the Justice Department released on Epstein were already mostly public information. It’s clear that these paltry excuses from the president aren’t going to make any of this go away.

President Donald Trump isn’t willing to say he distrusts Russian President Vladimir Putin, amid escalating tensions over drone incursions in Europe.

Speaking to the press Tuesday during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the U.S. president provided paltry answers when pressed on whether he still trusted Putin.

“I’ll let you know in about a month from now, OK?” Trump said.

Trump has repeatedly extended a limp “two-week” deadline for Moscow to make progress on talks with Kyiv to end its deadly incursion into Ukrainian territory. Still, the U.S. president seems unwilling to apply any pressure on Putin, and now it seems his autocratic ally has earned himself yet another month.

Trump also appeared to play dumb about a drone sighting Monday that shut down the airport in Copenhagen. “Have you been briefed on the latest alleged drone incursions in Denmark? What do you think of that?” asked one reporter.

“Where? Where are they?” Trump asked.

“Denmark, Copenhagen,” the reporter clarified, asking for a response to the incident that the Danish government suspected was “possibly Russian sabotage.”

“Well, I have no response until I find out exactly what happened. I know about it. But they don’t know what happened. But we’re gonna find out very soon,” Trump said.

Earlier this month, Trump acted completely clueless about the more than a dozen Russian drones that entered Polish airspace. A spokesperson from the Kremlin has denied the “unfounded accusations” of drone incursions, and said such allegations were “no longer taken into account.”

Since then, there have also been incursions by what are believed to be Russian drones in Estonian and Norwegian airspace.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said it was “too early to say” who exactly had been behind the latest drone sighting, but Trump had been present at the U.N. General Assembly in New York earlier that day as NATO leaders condemned the Kremlin for the series of “escalatory” incidents involving drone and fighter jet incursions across allied airspace. NATO warned that it would use “all necessary military and non-military tools” to defend itself.

The Justice Department is going to bat for Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist who still has yet to pay the $1.3 billion he owes the victims’ families.

A DOJ letter, signed by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin and shared publicly by Jones, pledges the agency’s intent to investigate retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, who testified in the Sandy Hook families’ joint defamation case against the InfoWars host. Aldenberg was one of the first responders to the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

Martin accuses Aldenberg of “acting for personal benefit” by participating in the trial, which effectively bankrupted Jones and awarded Aldenberg $90 million.

“As you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit. I encourage you to review those,” Martin wrote to Aldenberg’s attorney.

The specific requests made by the DOJ pertaining Aldenberg’s participation refer to his employment at the FBI, whether he made clear that his testimony was made in a “personal capacity,” whether he recused himself from certain cases due to a potential conflict of interest, and whether Aldenberg had a relationship with communications firm Berlin Rosen for purposes related to “newsjacking,” which the letter did not define.

Jones also shared an image of himself with Martin, the two gleefully posing next to each other.

In his own statement, Jones claimed that the “DOJ’s task force on government weaponization against the American people has launched an investigation into the democrat party / FBI directing illegal law-fare against Alex Jones and InfoWars.”

Jones made his name and living by labeling the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people, a “hoax.” His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

Jones reported $9 million in personal assets in a 2024 bankruptcy filing, while InfoWars’ parent company Free Speech Systems held $6 million in cash, with roughly $1.2 million worth of inventory, according to the Associated Press. The company was later auctioned off, with the satirical newspaper The Onion temporarily coming out on top as its next potential owner.

Jones filed for bankruptcy in 2022 after losing his case against the victims of the tragedy. Jones himself filed earlier this month to liquidate all of his assets so that he could begin to put a dent in paying off the massive debt. Days later, the judge overseeing the personal bankruptcy case, Judge Christopher Lopez, approved the switch from reorganization to liquidation. Lopez also dismissed the company’s bankruptcy filing, noting that InfoWars had failed to reach an agreement with the victims’ families that would have allowed Jones to keep the business in operation while paying them millions of dollars per year.

The former Senate aide who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault has just received Russian citizenship.

Tara Reade blew up national headlines in 2019 when she condemned the culture of Biden’s Senate office and further accused Biden of inappropriately touching her while she worked on his staff in 1993. Numerous major U.S. media outlets reported Reade’s story but backtracked once discrepancies and inconsistencies in her narrative began to appear.

After Biden was nominated as the official Democratic candidate in the 2020 election, Reade’s story shifted into one of sexual assault. She accused Biden of pushing her against a wall, putting his hands under her clothes, and penetrating her with his fingers. Biden vehemently denied the allegations, and former Senate office staff members did not recall or corroborate Reade’s account.

Some of Reade’s other accusations also lacked credibility: Reade claimed she was fired for retaliation, but a PBS investigation that interviewed more than 70 former Biden staffers found that wasn’t the case. Instead, her colleagues recalled that she was fired for poor performance.

Some of Reade’s fiercest critics speculated that she was a Russian asset, in part fueled by since-deleted Medium posts and tweets in which she publicly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. Five years on, that theory has earned a bit more credibility.

“This was a very special day,” Reade posted on X Monday, resharing a clip of her on RT, a Russian state-controlled television station. “I am now a Russian citizen! What an honor. Thank you to President Putin for this amazing honor of signing a decree making me a citizen and keeping me safe when I applied for asylum.”

Reade also gave a pointed shout-out to Maria Butina, a Russian parliamentarian and self-admitted Kremlin agent who was convicted in 2018 for conspiring to act as a clandestine foreign agent on behalf of Russia in the 2016 U.S. election. Butina leveraged her ties at the National Rifle Association, including her boyfriend—longtime Republican fundraiser Paul Erickson—to develop back channels between Moscow and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Butina first attempted to get face time with Trump as early as July 2015.

Reade first announced her intention to defect to Russia in 2023, when she claimed she no longer felt safe in the United States. Around the same time, Moscow had announced its intention to build a migrant village for American conservatives to take refuge from “liberal gender norms.” However, the project has since collapsed due to low demand, Russian outlet Vot Tak reported in July.

“I am a lucky girl,” Reade concluded.

President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to squash acts of resistance to its authoritarian policies—including its extrajudicial immigration crackdown—by tying all opposition to the supposedly nefarious work of antifa, a group that doesn’t actually exist.

Trump signed an executive order Monday illegally designating antifa, short for anti-fascist, a domestic terror organization. “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” the order states.

But antifa is a movement, not a so-called organization. It lacks a central structure, and is instead a loose network of individuals and groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism.

The order also lists activities the Trump administration claims are the work of the shadowy group, including “armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.”

Some critics have argued that this language opens the door toward a law enforcement crackdown on protesters and activists who have nothing to do with actual political extremism or violence.

“Trump’s Executive Order on Antifa is written such that someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist,’” wrote Zeteo’s Prem Thakker on X.

Across the country, Trump’s Department of Justice has repeatedly struggled to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials. The Department of Homeland Security has vastly overstated claims of widespread violence against ICE officers, claims that crumble under the slightest scrutiny.

Using Trump’s executive order, law enforcement officers and prosecutors could potentially tie protesters they wish to punish to antifa. Proving affiliation to a group with no actual members is impossible, so assigning membership to antifa becomes arbitrary and easily weaponized. It’s not surprising that Trump’s efforts to punish the anti-fascists green-lights a furtherance of, well … do I even need to say it?

Trump’s targeting of antifa is a grave misdirect committed in the backlash of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death. The actual rate of political violence motivated by left-wing ideologies is dwarfed by the rate of right-wing violence, but the Trump administration has made fast work removing any evidence that doesn’t support its narrative.

President Trump stood before a room full of the most esteemed leaders in the world on Tuesday and decided to tout his (incorrect) poll numbers and plug his merch.

“The American public agrees … I was very proud to see this morning I have the highest poll numbers I ever had,” Trump said, in the midst of a meandering, hour-long speech that attacked climate change, immigrants, and more. “Part of it is because of what we’ve done on the border. I guess the other part is what we’ve done on the economy.” 

What polls is the president referring to? He had the worst first 100 days’ approval rating of any president in the last 80 years. As of Tuesday, just over half of Americans disapprove of the overall job Trump is doing. And he’s doing even worse than ever with women, as they disapprove of him at 61 percent. You’d be hard-pressed to find any poll that confirms Trump’s claim, which raises the question: Where is he getting this stuff from? Is his inner circle just lying to keep him happy?

Trump then moved on to the grifting. 

“I’m really good at predicting things, ya know? They actually said during the campaign that a hat, the bestselling hat: ‘Trump Was Right About Everything’—and I don’t say that in a braggadocious way,” he said, referring to the hats he often gleefully displays in gift shops and online. “But it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. Everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.” 

It’s a sad state of affairs when the U.S. president is talking about his own $40 hats at the U.N. General Assembly. And the more he speaks about how great and respected America is again, the harder it is to take seriously.  

Faced on Tuesday with President Donald Trump’s broken campaign promises on the Russia-Ukraine war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio trotted out a convenient excuse.

When Today host Craig Melvin reminded Rubio of Trump’s long-broken vow to end the conflict within 24 hours, the secretary of state (falsely) claimed that the president had not been speaking literally on the campaign trail.

“The president repeatedly though did say that he would end the war in Ukraine on day one, and we are some 250 days into the administration,” noted Melvin.

“Yeah, but that’s not up to us to end the war,” Rubio cut in. “The Russians have to stop the war, and the Ukrainians have to agree to a peace deal. What the president expressed is that it would be a priority of his.”

In reality, Trump harped incessantly on the 2024 campaign trail about how he would achieve peace in Ukraine in 24 hours. This was not a figurative way to describe the war as a priority; he repeated a version of the statement over 50 times, often making a point to note that he was serious, and that it would be relatively easy to accomplish.

“I’ll have it done in 24 hours. I say that, and I would do that. That’s easy compared to some of the things,” he said in June 2023. A few days later, he said that “it won’t even be a tough one by comparison to other things.”

The following month, he emphasized his seriousness, despite naysayers. “I’ll get that done within 24 hours. Everyone says, ‘Oh, no, you can’t.’ Absolutely I can. Absolutely I can,” he said at one event, adding at another that “it’ll be done within 24 hours, you watch. They all say, ‘That’s such a boast.’ It will be done very quickly.”

During an August 2024 podcast appearance, Trump said, “I will have that war settled when I’m president-elect, meaning before I get to office on January 20.” When another podcaster in October expressed amazement at his vow to end the war before taking office, Trump said he would fulfill it because “you need that credibility.”

As his inauguration drew near, Trump walked back his statement in his December 2024 Time Person of the Year story, acknowledging ending the conflict wasn’t as easy as he made it out to be. About three months into his presidency, he told Time, “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point.”

Rubio seems to be taking that same convenient, but untrue, tack now.

Last week, the president came the closest he’s capable of getting to an admission of failure, saying that he’d thought Russia-Ukraine “would be easiest” to solve, but Russian President Vladimir Putin “really let me down.”

President Donald Trump dedicated a portion of his Tuesday address before the United Nations General Assembly to settle a decades-old score from his days as a real estate developer. In a lengthy digression, he complained that he didn’t get the job to renovate and rebuild U.N. headquarters.

Trump in 2001 offered to renovate the complex for $400 million—“more quickly, much better, and much less expensively” than existing offers, he claimed. He was ultimately turned down, and the refurbishment was completed for $2.3 billion, per the Associated Press. Apparently, he’s never forgotten it—even as a president on the world stage.

“Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex,” Trump told the roomful of world leaders on Tuesday. “I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful. I used to talk about, ‘I’m going to give you marble floors; they’re going to give you terrazzo. I’m going to give you the best of everything. You’re going to have mahogany walls; they’re going to give you plastic.’

“But they decided to go in another direction,” Trump lamented, “which was much more expensive at the time, and which actually produced a far inferior product. And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction, and that their building concepts were so wrong and the product they were proposing to build was so bad and so costly. It was going to cost them a fortune. And I said, ‘And wait till you see the overruns.’

“Well, I turned out to be right,” the president said. “They had massive cost overruns and spent between $2 and $4 billion on the building, and did not even get the marble floors that I promised them.

“You walk on terrazzo, do you notice that?”

President Donald Trump just taught everyone how important teleprompters are.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, Trump immediately assured the audience he would be just fine delivering remarks off the cuff, “because the teleprompter is not working.”

“I feel very happy to be up here nevertheless, and that way you speak more from the heart. I can only say that whoever is operating this teleprompter is in big trouble,” the U.S. president joked.

Trump then embarked on one of his most nonsensical addresses to date, ranting against Europe for embracing the “double-tailed monster” of immigration and green energy. But his criticisms were little more than anti-science claims and racist drivel attacking immigrants.

“I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” Trump ranted.

Trump complained about London Mayor Sadiq Khan, falsely claiming that the city’s first Muslim leader hoped to install Islamic code. “I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it has been so changed. So changed,” Trump said. “Now they want to go to sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that.”

Trump’s remarks about Europe welcoming immigrants were so explicitly racist that they quickly bypassed dog-whistle politics and went straight to barking commands not to dilute European culture. “You’re doing it because you want to be politically correct, and you’re destroying your heritage,” he warned.

He then turned his attention to green energy, appearing to laud Germany for scrapping subsidies for renewable energy projects. “They were going all green. All green is all bankrupt. That’s what it represents,” Trump said. “And it’s not politically correct, I’ll be very badly criticized for saying it, but I’m here to tell the truth. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter to me.”

Trump slammed countries for embracing green energy in an attempt to reduce their carbon footprints, calling climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”

The president criticized past speakers at the United Nations for predicting that global warming would result in catastrophic climate disasters. Those predictions were “made by stupid people who have cost their countries fortunes and given their countries no chance for success,” Trump said.

Trump even used his diatribe against green energy to plug his own merchandise. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. And I’m really good at predicting things, you know?” he said. “They actually said during the campaign, they had a hat: the best-selling hat, ‘Trump was right about everything.’ And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”

The supposed leader of the free world has offered a new rallying cry for the United Nations: “Your countries are going to hell.”

Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, Trump instructed representatives from the 193 member states that they all needed to stop allowing immigration into their respective nations.

“It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders,” Trump said from the lectern. “You have to end it now. See, I can tell you. I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

He continued that the United States had taken “bold” actions of its own to crack down on “uncontrolled migration.”

“Once we started detaining and deporting everyone who crossed the border and removing illegal aliens from the United States, they simply stopped coming,” he said. “They’re not coming anymore.”

Beyond Trump’s rose-colored glasses, the administration’s approach to handling immigration has not been glamorous. Rather, it has strayed into murky legal waters. Over the last nine months, federal immigration officials have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. The administration has also hastily constructed concentration camps in order to accommodate the startling number of detainees.

But actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not originally advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful temporary residents possessing visas or green cards.

As a result, interest in U.S. tourism has plummeted: On Monday, The Irish Times reported that the price of a one-way ticket from Dublin to New York City had dropped to just 50 cents (before taxes and fees).

The radical and xenophobic policies have also made it far less attractive for people to work in the U.S. On Friday, Trump announced that the popular H-1B work visa would come with a new $100,000 price tag, practically eradicating corporate interest in sponsoring international talent while sending immigrants and the U.S. companies they work for into a panic.

Trump, who was jeered and mocked by his U.N. colleagues during his first term, has taken decisive action to peel the U.S. and its influence away from the international caucus. So far this year, the Trump administration has refused to make any payments to the U.N., throwing the assembly into an unprecedented cash crunch. (The United States has historically been the single largest funder of the global alliance.)

The president also withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council, cut funding for foreign humanitarian aid, and ended U.S. participation in Unesco on the basis that the world heritage organization “supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes.” The White House also pulled out of the World Health Organization—another U.N. entity—over disagreements on how the global organization handled the pandemic.