Trump Gives Cryptic Answer to Key Question on Ghislaine Maxwell

Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell is an option that’s apparently still on the table.

Donald Trump refused Monday to shut down speculation that he might legally forgive the convicted associate and longtime girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, telling reporters at his Scottish golf club that no one had formally “approached” him yet about the controversial idea.

“Would you completely rule out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell?” asked a reporter. “Is that something you would ever consider?”

“Well I’m allowed to give her a pardon,” Trump said. “But nobody’s approached me with it, nobody’s asked me about it. It’s in the news, about that. That aspect of it. But right now it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. As president, Trump can dole out pardons for anyone convicted of a federal offense. But why he would choose to extend one to Maxwell prods at a more unsettling possibility.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—met with Maxwell late last week, reportedly peeling 100 names from her in a potential pardon quid pro quo. After her second day with Blanche, Maxwell’s team laid their cards on the table: They wanted a pardon from the president.

The interview followed weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for the release of more documents from the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of the pedophile’s supposed client list.

In a last-ditch effort to quell the bubbling discontent and make the forthcoming Maxwell alliance more palatable, conservatives and Trump allies have attempted to make a martyr out of Maxwell, suggesting that the well-documented sex criminal could have been wrongly convicted and was unduly serving the sentence warranted to a deceased Epstein (Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding in the victimization of hundreds of girls).

“She deserves to be out,” Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer, told Newsmax last week.

Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly disturbed by Trump’s handling of the entire fiasco. A poll published by Emerson College Polling on Friday found that just 16 percent of Americans approved of the way Trump was managing the Epstein scandal, while more than half of polled Americans—51 percent—disapproved.

The spin is particularly humiliating for MAGA Republicans, especially those invested in QAnon. After years of their heralding Trump as a supposed messiah, believing that he would dish the dirt on a secretive, international web of sex traffickers, the administration now seems hell-bent on covering up its own ties to Epstein’s island and the crimes committed there.

Social media users are ridiculing President Donald Trump for appearing to cheat at golf during his trip to Scotland.

Trump’s ongoing trip—which will cost taxpayers nearly $10 million—includes visits to his two Trump resorts, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony to inaugurate a new 18-hole course at his resort in Aberdeenshire.

Just as the trip shows Trump disregarding the line between presidential duties and both pleasure and self-promotion, footage from his trip appears to show Trump flouting the rule that golfers “play it where it lies,” according to critics online. In the video, as the president slows to a stop in a golf cart, two caddies walk out in front of him, one of them discreetly tossing a ball behind him for Trump to play.

Many critics seized on the clip as evidence of Trump’s lack of integrity, on and off the golf course.

Among them was sportswriter Rick Reilly, whose 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump is an indictment of Trump’s golf game.

“Well I’m just personally very disappointed in him,” Reilly wrote on X in response to the video, adding, in another post, “His caddies also tee him up in the rough, toss his ball out of bunkers, and roll back six footers to him. How else is a 79-y-o fat guy supposed to win championships?”

Meanwhile, conservative users on X over the weekend heaped praise on Trump’s golf swing.

President Trump thinks starving Gazans should take time from their ongoing genocide to say thanks to him.

“Getting people fed right now … that’s the number one position. Because you have a lot of starving people, you have people that—you know the United States recently, just a couple weeks ago, we gave $60 million, that’s a lot of money,” Trump said on Monday, taking questions after a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer. “No other nation gave money. I know the prime minister would have if he knew about it. And he really knows about it now ’cus we’re gonna be discussing it. But, we gave $60 million, nobody said even thank you, you know, thanks. Somebody should say ‘thank you.’ But other nations are gonna have to step up.”

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been either bombed, shot, beaten, or starved to death by the Israeli military for the last two years. The IDF is massacring people at aid distribution sites. And the United States has funded the vast majority of that suffering. Meanwhile, Trump wants to turn it into some beachfront resort once Israel is done razing it. No one has anything to thank him for.

Trump’s tone on Monday was reminiscent of the one Vice President JD Vance took with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in February, when Vance admonished the leader like a child when he asked for more U.S. support against Russia’s invasion.

Republicans are losing their grip on Donald Trump’s latest Epstein cover-up.

Speaking with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham tripped up a supposedly “new” development in the Russian collusion investigation, suggesting that more evidence had emerged tying former President Barack Obama to the nearly 10-year-old national security scandal.

Amid rising intraparty tensions over Trump’s apparent ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the president wildly suggested last week that Obama had interfered with the results of the Trump-Russia investigation, claiming that it was actually Hillary Clinton who received aid from the foreign power. But Graham carried the torch over the weekend, reiterating the president’s theory on air while claiming that National Security Director Tulsi Gabbard recently found that Obama had forced investigators to “keep looking” after initial findings had pointed to no collusion.

“I think somebody needs to look at what we found,” Graham said. “So what we’re looking at is what role did Obama play in 2016 that changed the narrative that resulted in 2017? I’m not alleging he committed treason, but I am saying that it bothers me, it’s disturbing.”

But then host Kristen Welker played back a montage of Graham’s previous comments, proving that Graham originally agreed with the findings of the intelligence community—long before Trump tried to opportunistically rewrite history.

“Senator, are you now saying that you don’t believe Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election?” Welker pressed.

Apparently getting frustrated, Graham again stressed that new evidence had emerged that changed his opinion.

“Hold on, Senator, as you know, former President Obama has weighed in through a spokesperson,” Welker interrupted. “He says that’s just patently false. I actually spoke to Susan Miller, who’s a former senior CIA officer who helped oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian interference. She says it’s completely false that Obama or anyone else asked them to change or sway their investigation. She says, and she’s a Republican, that they all would have quit if that happened.”

And then Welker asked the million-dollar question: “Senator, are you trying to rewrite history to distract from the Epstein matter, Senator?”

“I’m trying to let you know, and the media know, that we found something we didn’t know before,” Graham insisted, continuing to defend Trump. “At the end of the day, I’m not calling for a prosecution against President Obama for treason, but I am calling for an investigation.

“The only people colluding with the Russians were the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Graham continued.

But Welker wasn’t having it.

“Senator, you’re saying there’s something new,” Welker replied. “This report goes back to 2020. It’s five years old. There’s actually nothing new in this report and nothing that changes any conclusion.”

“Whatever,” Graham responded.

The Mueller report was published in 2019. The 22-month investigation found that Russia did interfere with the 2016 election, but did not find sufficient evidence to prove that the 2016 Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to undermine the election results. The report did not take a clear stance on whether Trump had obstructed justice.

Donald Trump is once again claiming that windmills are making whales go crazy.

Trump’s long-awaited EU trade deal announcement went off the rails Sunday as the president detoured into yet another lengthy and far-fetched diatribe against wind energy.

“And the other thing I say to Europe: We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Trump said. “They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery. Our valleys. Our beautiful plains—and I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains.”

Before he started ranting about wind energy, European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen had been attempting to discuss immigration. But after briefly lying about his massive, inhumane deportation scheme, saying, “We have nobody coming in, and we have hundreds of thousands of people being taken out—and the bad ones first,” Trump changed the subject to wind turbines.

“When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn ’em off, you can’t bury ’em,” Trump claimed. “They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them, because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land.”

Windmill blades, which are made of fiberglass and plastic, can be buried in landfills at the end of their 20-year life cycle. To counter the growth of these wind turbine graveyards, scientists have even developed recyclable blades. But Trump doesn’t actually care about any of that—moments after deferring to environmentalists in his argument, he called them “political hacks” who wanted to hurt the United States.

Trump was far from done. The president went on to complain that wind energy was more expensive than other alternatives. In reality, wind energy has emerged as a competitively priced energy alternative.

“You need subsidy for wind, and energy should not need subsidy. With energy you make money, you don’t lose money,” Trump claimed.

The president then immediately admitted that he didn’t actually care about the cost.

“But more important than that, it ruins the landscape, it kills the birds, they’re noisy,” Trump continued. “You know you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore, and over the last short period of time, they had 18. Because it’s driving them loco. It’s driving them crazy. No, windmills will not happen in the United States.”

Trump had previously claimed that offshore windmills were driving whales “crazy” and causing them to wash up on shore, dead, in 2023. However, there “is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Three years later, and the president still can’t stop spreading absurd misinformation about wind energy. “People oughta know, these windmills are very destructive, they’re environmentally unsound,” he claimed.

After seeing some windmills during his Lynchian golfing expedition in Scotland, it seems that the president just can’t get wind energy off of his mind. During a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer Monday, Trump continued to rave about windmills claiming that they kill birds, which they do, but no more than fossil fuel operations—or house cats.