Donald Trump was in Scotland today visiting his gold courses and had the press in to witness his big meeting with Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister. Their topic of discussion, reporters were told, would be trade and the situation in Gaza.

Not.

Headlines followed: Trump dogged by Epstein questions overseas. Three thousand miles from the D.C. swamp, where for the past two weeks his feet have been stuck in the mud of his relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Trump couldn’t escape him.

The questions came at him. He dodged. It’s a hoax. The files “were run by the worst scum on earth.” He blamed his usual suspects: Biden, Comey, Hillary, Garland. He isn’t in the Big Birthday Book for Jeffrey. “I don’t do drawings. I’m not a drawing person. I don’t do drawings.”

It's not working. He can’t escape the echo from the gigantic thud when the unsigned DOJ-FBI memo hit the table, dismissing the Epstein story with a few blasé paragraphs: He wasn’t murdered, there was no “client list.” The story is stuck to him, and nothing he has tried has freed him from it.

Last week, he dispatched his personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, now his own personal deputy attorney general, to meet with convicted pedophile sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell at the federal prison in Tallahassee Florida where she is four years into a 20-year sentence. He got the “Are you going to pardon Ghislaine?” question on the White House lawn before he departed for Scotland, and he got it again today in the presence of a grim-faced Starmer. Both times, he began his answer with, “Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon.”

Whatever the Blanche-Maxwell meeting was supposed to accomplish, it didn’t work, either.

Now it’s all over MSNBC and the internet that Trump has lost Joe Rogan, who has had a couple of guests on his mega-popular podcast to discuss the Epstein matter. Today, Rogan made the cogent point that Trump’s failure to make good on his promise to drain the Epstein swamp and let the whole thing out is echoing his other broken promises – to end the war in Ukraine, to lower inflation, to fix the trade deficit. It’s all of a piece, Rogan implied.

So, you’re trying make all these phony trade deals with the EU and Japan and Singapore and every other country in the whole damn world, you’re cutting your pal Netanyahu loose by telling him you want to get food to the starving children in Gaza, you’re so pissed at Putin that you cut his deadline to come around on Ukraine, or you’re going to hammer him with new sanctions…you’re trying, in other words, to be presidential.

And what’s dominating the news? Your base is in an uproar, the Congress is voting to subpoena the DOJ Epstein files, the guy you thought was a pal, Bongino at the FBI, is setting what Yahoo News called a “MAGA thirst trap” with an X post that says darkly, “I’ll never be the same after learning what I’ve learned.”

It’s all falling apart. What’s a conspiracy-mongering lying liar supposed to do?

I don’t know what genius advised him to open the Ghislaine Maxwell Pandora’s box, but he’s going to have to do something with her now. There’s already a leak that Todd Blanche talked to Maxwell about “a hundred names.” Coming on top of a statement from her lawyer that Maxwell truthfully answered every question put to her by Blanche, Ghislaine now has a fuse sticking out of the top of her head. She is a bomb that’s so ready to explode, Trump is going to have to do something about her.

But what? We know how completely Trump is in love with his pardon power. It’s really the only power he’s got that is absolute. Nobody can get in the way of his power to pardon, not even the Supreme Court gets a say.

He could just give Maxwell a pardon or commutation and sit back and, in effect, say fuck you to anybody who questions his pardon of her. That’s what they tried with the DOJ-FBI memo a month ago. Nothing to see here, folks. Go away. But it didn’t work. Rogan’s guest talking about Epstein was a former CIA officer named Mike Baker who put it succinctly: “The mob wants to eat,” Baker thundered. “And they’ve been throwing red meat to the mob about ‘Epstein files’ now for years.”

Rogan agreed: “It’s part of how they got elected.”

Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell with a big fuck you to his base and everybody else won’t work, either.

The “one hundred names” thing is another ticking time bomb. Blanche and his newly-hired loyalist puppies at the DOJ are probably burning the midnight oil trying to come up with a theory about how Maxwell was framed by the Deep State. They’ve got Deep Staters a-plenty to work with. The Epstein jet manifests alone are a gold mine for conspiracy theory mavens, with lots of Democrats they could throw into the grinder to produce new red meat for the base. In answer to a question in Scotland, Trump made the point that he had never “had the privilege” of visiting Epstein’s island. But Clinton did, Trump said. And so did Larry Summers. “He was president of Harvard,” Trump proudly reminded everyone.

Boom. An Epstein co-conspirator and Harvard in one swoop.

Can’t you already hear his justification for pardoning Maxwell? She was treated so unfairly. It’s one of Trump’s favorite charges, that powerful people – absenting himself, of course – victimized someone who he has suddenly found favor with. The Marine sergeant who executed Afghan prisoners of war. His entire mob of violent maniacs in the Capitol on January 6. So unfairly treated. The torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville: The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.

Himself, of course. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,” Trump told Coast Guard graduates way back in 2017, when he was just getting the unfairly bandwagon started.

So, it will probably be Ghislaine, too, so unfairly treated that he will have to make it right with a pardon, and for a cherry on top of his double-reverse triple salchow DOJ definition of justice as retribution, he’ll throw some juicy conspiracy charges at Bill and Hillary and Biden and you-name-‘em.

He'll be counting on a MAGA memory hole the size of the fucking Grand Canyon to open up and swallow his load of bullshit, if he tries to get away with pardoning a convicted pedophile sex trafficker like Ghislaine.

Silly us. We thought the Washington Post’s lie-o-meter would matter when it hit 35,000, or whatever it was. Now he’s paving the Rose Garden and raiding Fort Knox for more gold leaf to slap on White House filigree. A pardon for Ghislaine will just be more gild for the lily in the Trump White House.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Nesletter.