New in PN: Trump’s effort to distance from Epstein complicated by his deep ties to Epstein. Full story here

President Donald Trump has spent a second week trying to end, once and for all, his supporters’ obsession with Jeffery Epstein — and distance himself from the disgraced financier and child sex offender that Trump knew for four decades. It isn’t going well.

The attempted in-public coverup took a turn for the worse for Trump on Thursday, with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal blowing the story wide open by publishing the contents of a letter Trump wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.

The letter, which the Journal did not publish, reportedly contains a drawing of a naked woman with Trump’s signature as her pubic hair. It also included an imagined conversation, written by Trump, that alludes to a deep relationship between the two men, seemingly based on their sexual proclivities and appetites.

“May every day be another wonderful secret,” Trump wrote, according to the Journal.

Knowing everything you know about Epstein and Trump read this yourself two-three times and ask what the most obvious interpretation of it would be.

Trump responded to the Journal’s program with an epic crash out, threatening lawsuits and claiming (implausibly) that the letter is “FAKE.”

If Trump is to be believed, the very files that were “made up” by the president’s political enemies are the ones that Bondi used to determine that the Epstein case should now be closed.

Adding to the confusion and speculation are reports that the “raw” footage from outside of Epstein’s jail cell was edited, with between two and four minutes missing from the videos released by the DOJ.

All of this has split Republican lawmakers into two main camps: those demanding that the files be released and those who say they trust Trump, and those who are dodging the issue or pushing more and more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Neither GOP faction has directly acknowledged the many ties between Epstein and Trump himself.

On Tuesday, 211 House Republicans voted against a measure that demanded the release of the Justice Department’s full files on Epstein, with several, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, abstaining from the vote. Now, Rep. Thomas Massie has launched a bipartisan effort with Rep. Ro Khanna to force another House vote on releasing the files.

Meanwhile, Trump has begun insulting anyone still calling for the release of the Epstein files.

“It’s all been a big hoax, it’s perpetrated by the Democrats, and some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net, and so they do the Democrats’ work,” Trump howled.

While it’s possible that Trump wants Epstein to go away because whatever is in those “files” might implicate the president, it’s also possible there’s nothing in them that Justice Department lawyers can use to prosecute anyone — that the investigation has gone as far as it can go.

Either way, Trump supporters are faced with a deeply uncomfortable dilemma: take the president at his word that the conspiracy his top aides have stoked for years is really a nothingburger, or conclude — for the first time in Trump’s political career, and as the rest of the nation has known for years — that their leader is lying to them.