Why did Melania hold a news conference, denying any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?
Some theories
Trump’s rule for “flooding the zone” has been straightforward: Whenever the subject that everyone’s talking about becomes too uncomfortable for him — he changes it.
Too much Jeffrey Epstein? Send federal agents to Minnesota to brutalize American citizens. Too much brutality by federal agents? Fire the head of Department of Homeland Security and start a war with Iran. War goes badly? (Well, we’ll soon find out.)
So, why did Melania Trump hold a news conference? Standing at a lectern in the Grand Foyer of the White House, the first lady labeled as “lies” unspecified allegations linking her to Epstein, and said they “need to end today.”
“The false smears about me from mean-spirited and politically motivated individuals and entities looking to cause damage to my good name to gain financially and climb politically must stop.”
But who’s even been thinking about Melania and her potential relationship with Epstein or Maxwell in the midst of Melania’s husband’s threat to obliterate 90 million Iranians? Who cares about Melania and Maxwell when the price of gas is through the roof? Why would anyone be interested in such “unspecified allegations” when Iran still possesses 970 pounds of highly-enriched uranium and now has more motive than ever to turn it into nuclear weapons?
Besides, there hasn’t been the faintest whiff of scandal about the relationship between Melania and Maxwell, let alone Epstein.
Back in January (which seems years ago), the Justice Department released an email Melania sent to Maxwell. But the email got little attention. It was part of millions of pages of correspondence released about the Department’s investigation into the disgraced financier. Also, the correspondence took place in 2002, more than two years before Melania became Trump’s third wife.
There’s not even a smoking gun in her email. Melania merely expressed friendliness toward Maxwell and says she can’t wait to visit her in Palm Beach.
Melania also refers to a “nice story about JE” in New York magazine — presumably the 2002 story in which Donald Trump indicated he knew about his former pal’s penchant for young girls. It was in that story that Trump boasted:
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. 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.”
Granted, this quote suggests Trump was on to Epstein’s proclivities and may have even shared them. But the quote is old news. It’s been circulating ever since Trump was first discovered to be cavorting with Epstein.
Why, then, did Melania hold this news conference?
I can think of three possible reasons:
1. She was urged to do it as a way to revive interest in the Epstein scandal. You heard me right. The White House figures that Epstein is easier to handle right now than the fallout from the catastrophe of Trump’s war in Iran. Plus, Pam Bondi is gone and won’t be testifying, and the emerging regime at the Justice Department — Todd Blanche and Harmeet Dhillon — can more reliably be counted on to bury anything in the Epstein files that might incriminate Trump. In other words, a great way to change the subject.
2. Amazon is now in negotiations over streaming rights to Melania’s 2026 documentary Melania, which has been a box office bomb, grossing only $16.6 million worldwide against a massive $40 million production budget and $35 million in marketing, and leaving Amazon with a significant financial loss. Amazon and Bezos urged Melania to stir up publicity for herself, and what better way to get attention than to deny any relationship with Epstein?
3. Melania is pissed off at Trump for any number of things, and the news conference was a way of letting him know she’s capable of making his life miserable.
What do you think?
Source: Why did Melania hold a news conference, denying any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?
Trump needs to go. If we can’t use the 25th amendment, I have another idea
The US constitution should make it possible to remove a president who’s not fit for office. But we’re going to need another way out, writes Arwa Mahdawi
For the past few months, I have been waging a cold war with a neighbour who constantly puts out their rubbish on the wrong day. And by “cold war” I mean complaining incessantly to my longsuffering wife while the neighbour goes about their business blissfully unaware that we are mortal enemies. But enough is enough. Last week I decided to end this situation via a strongly worded letter. “Tuesday will be Explosions Day in your house, neighbour!” I wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Put out your Fuckin’ Rubbish properly, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
I am sorry to drag Allah into this obviously imaginary exchange, but I’m just channelling the US president. I’m sure you’ve already seen Donald Trump’s profanity-laden Easter Sunday warning to Iran, where he threatened to carry out the mass bombing of civilian infrastructure – but if you haven’t, then go read it and weep. The days where Trump’s outbursts were amusing (remember “covfefe”?) are long gone. There is nothing funny about endless stream-of-consciousness screeds from a man who is not just destroying the US, but dragging the whole world down with it. If a civilian acted like the president routinely does, they’d find themselves fired very quickly.
Many people are asking what exactly it would take to get Trump fired from the most powerful job in the US. Various politicians have called for the 25th amendment to be invoked, which is one route for getting rid of an unfit president. Following Trump’s “crazy bastards” social media post, Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X: “If I were in Trump’s cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
Let’s be honest: at this rate Trump could wipe out half of the Middle East and I’m not sure anyone in his orbit would lift a finger to try to get him removed. Hell, they’d probably be cheering on the slaughter and crying happy tears at the idea that the end times are nigh. Even if they weren’t all drinking the Trump Kool-Aid, the US system makes it incredibly difficult to remove a president. Ultimately, there are only two ways Trump is leaving office before the end of his term. The first is in a casket. The second is if his shenanigans end up losing his billionaire pals money. Which seems unlikely, considering all the well-timed stock market trades that seem to be going on amid the Iran war.
Anyway, I hope all the new graduates navigating a grim job market are paying attention to this. If you want a career path that allows unparalleled job stability, no matter how you badly you behave, US politics is the way to go. It’s not just difficult to get rid of a president; the system makes it almost impossible to beat an incumbent congressperson or senator. Which means that once someone gets into power, they often stay in power for far longer than is good for anyone. In 2024, for example, a reporter discovered that a Republican congresswoman from Texas, who hadn’t cast a vote for months, was in an assisted living facility dealing with “dementia issues”. The late Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, meanwhile, died in office in 2023, at the age of 90. By the end she had serious health issues that caused her to miss nearly 100 votes, and questions were swirling about her mental acuity. Republican senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has suffered a number of strange “freezing” incidents in public but has decided to leave with his dignity somewhat intact and retire this year. And I obviously don’t need to tell you about Joe Biden.
But look, enough hand-wringing. I think I have a way out of this mess. Since we can’t rely on the usual checks and balances to get Trump out of office, we have to get creative. The Trump administration loves technology; why not convince the dear leader he can make history by spending his days golfing while his work is done by the world’s first AI president? Sure, AI is problematic, but if we’re going from zero intelligence to artificial intelligence, that’s an upgrade, right? And if AI-Trump starts acting up, we can always try turning it off and then turning it on again. Shame you can’t do that for democracy.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
“Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing.”
Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
April 6, 2026
“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”
Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.
Today was another surreal day in the second Trump administration.
At the traditional White House Easter Egg roll this morning, Trump, whose right hand was swollen and covered with makeup after his weekend away from the cameras, stood with First Lady Melania Trump on a White House balcony, accompanied by a human-sized Easter Bunny. The columns of the White House stood festooned in soft red, white, and blue plaid over the crowd of young children and their parents in festive pastel clothes excited for the day’s events. The band played “Hail to the Chief.” After a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Trump told the audience that “it’s a day where we celebrate Jesus, it’s a day where we celebrate religion, and it’s an honor to be the president of the United States.” Then things veered off course. He continued: “Our country is doing so well like it has never done before. You’ll see that very shortly, and things that we’ve done have not been done before. We’ve broken every record on the stock market, we’ve broken every record on our military.”
And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”
While the children were rolling their eggs along the ground with spoons, Trump spoke to reporters, telling them about Iran, “If it were up to me, I’d like to keep the oil. I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand.” He suggested that attacking Iran’s infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime because “they killed 45,000 people in the last month. More than that. It could be as much as sixty. They killed protesters. They’re animals, and we have to stop them, and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
He claimed again that former presidents are telling him they wish they had done what he did in attacking Iran; all four living ex-presidents have denied speaking to him. Sitting with children drawing pictures, he told them they could sell his autograph on eBay for $25,000. He signed their pictures, and while he signed, he told the children that former President Joe Biden was “incapable of signing his name” so he had aides follow him around with an autopen machine.
A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”
The celebratory speeches about the war compared a rescued airman to Jesus Christ and gave a great deal of detail about the rescue operation, but they didn’t deliver much information to the journalists packed into the room about negotiations or goals or the president’s ultimatum that Iran must agree to his demands by 8:00 tomorrow night or face “obliteration.”
Trump reiterated: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.” He said that while the regime governing the country has changed—meaning its leadership, because the actual regime is still in power—that his reason for undertaking the war was not regime change, but rather to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
He assured the journalists that he has had a plan all along. “I saw somebody said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have a plan.’ I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, Here’s my plan, we’re going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we’re going to do this, and then we’re gonna, and if you don’t do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is…. Every single thing has been thought out by all of us. But I can’t reveal the plan to the media. So, you know, but we’re just thrilled by the success of this operation.”
Trump has said Iranians are upset when the strikes stop, and a reporter challenged him to explain “Why would they want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power?” He answered: “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. The Iranians have, and we’ve had numerous intercepts—’Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing! Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding, and when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, “Please come back, come back, come back!’”
After noting he was responsible for the killing of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, he added: “I did one other but this one was not picked up. Osama bin Laden—If you read my book, I said you’ve got to take him out one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book. To be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.”
A special operations team located and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. Trump’s frequent claim that his book called for a raid against Osama bin Laden has been just as frequently debunked as a lie.
Today was an exhausting day as Americans seem to have little choice but to pay attention to a man who is bizarrely threatening what appear to be war crimes against Iranians while spinning wild tales. The members of both chambers of Congress are away for another week and Republican leaders are showing no sign of calling them back, leaving the American people to face whatever Trump has in mind for tomorrow on our own.
In contrast to Trump’s vision of government according to the whims of a single man, no matter how bonkers those whims might be, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—who, as a naturalized citizen, is not eligible for the presidency—is illustrating what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Mamdani’s videos about governing New York City inform New Yorkers about what their government does. At the same time, though, they lift up and honor the workers who make the wheels of government turn. During his campaign, Mamdani promised his administration would see to it that potholes got filled, and as the road maintenance workers made the trip to fill the 100,000th pothole of the year, he tagged along. The video humanized the process and dignified work that often doesn’t get attention.
Another video today about the 311 call center in New York City that helps residents find resources to help solve everything from where to recycle a mirror to how to get an apartment repaired featured Tangie Williams putting a face to the people in the center as she coached Mamdani himself through a call. Williams told Mamdani that the calls that “tug at my heart” are elderly people who have no family and need both to be heard and to access help, which she provides with evident joy.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American