President Donald Trump on Monday took a break from his $10 million taxpayer-funded golf vacation in Scotland to announce new import tax increases on Americans and also to put forward a new explanation of why he broke from Jeffrey Epstein: because the child sex abuser was hiring away the help from Mar-a-Lago.
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Previously, the story being pushed by White House staff about Trump’s supposed falling-out with Epstein some 20 years ago was that he was “a creep” — a seeming reference to a story Trump had told associates that he was angry about Epstein’s conduct toward a daughter of one of the members at his Palm Beach, Florida, country club.
But in an hour-long question-and-answer session with reporters at his golf resort in Turnberry, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer seated beside him, Trump gave a brand-new reason for why he ended his long friendship with Epstein, who was found hanged in his jail cell a month after his arrest in 2019.
“He did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump told reporters. “He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata.”
One of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, was recruited by Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell away from her job as a teenage locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago to work for Epstein as a masseuse. It’s unclear if Trump was speaking about Giuffre, or who and how many “people” he meant.
Trump on Monday also did not rule out giving Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for her role as Epstein’s accomplice, as well as participating in child rape herself, a pardon.
“I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it… Right now, it would be inappropriate to talk about it,” he said while also trying to downplay his relationship with Epstein.
“I never had the privilege of going to his island,” he said, referring to Little St. James in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein brought girls to be raped by him and his friends. “And I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island.”
In a 2002 interview, Trump praised Epstein for his taste in women. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” he told New York magazine.
As public pressure has mounted for Trump to release investigatory files on Epstein that would shed light on the friends and associates who participated in his crimes but were never charged, the president has tried to minimize that 15-year friendship during which they frequently socialized.
“I have nothing to do with the guy,” he told reporters Friday as he was leaving the White House to start his five-day Scotland trip.
That trip has centered on Trump’s golf hobby as well as a marketing event Tuesday at his resort in Aberdeen, where he is to participate in the grand opening of a second golf course there.
Trump traveled Friday to his resort in Turnberry, where on Sunday he met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a hastily arranged get-together to discuss the outlines of a new trade agreement between the United States and the bloc of 27 nations.
“We have a trade deal between the two largest economies in the world. And it’s a big deal. It’s a huge deal,” von der Leyen said, seeming to adopt a strategy used by many foreign leaders of humoring Trump by praising him and describing all his actions with superlatives.
In reality, the announced 15% tariff on European goods is a many-fold increase in the import tax that existed before Trump returned to office in January and will result in commensurately higher prices on products that come in from those countries.
Trump and many of his top aides repeatedly claim that tariffs are paid by the exporting nation, but that assertion is false.
On Monday, Trump claimed he will impose a blanket tariff on imports from nations that do not reach specific trade deals with the United States at between 15% and 20%.
Whether he has the legal authority to do so is unclear. Both the United States Court of International Trade and a trial court in the District of Columbia have ruled that he lacks the ability to impose such taxes unilaterally, but those rulings are on hold, pending appeal.
Trump’s five-day, four-night vacation is costing American taxpayers at least $9.7 million in travel and security costs, according to a HuffPost analysis, which brings his golf tab up to $52 million in his first six months in office. Taxpayers spent $152 million for Trump’s golf outings during his first term.