In defending how his administration is handling supposed files on Jeffrey Epstein, he said "some stupid Republicans" fell for a hoax.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is shocking some colleagues by fully embracing efforts to exploit divisions between President Trump and his MAGA base over the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Prong No. 1 of Trump’s crisis-PR strategy on this front has been to call his voters idiots, as he did Wednesday morning with another very long post about the matter on his Truth Social site, in which he claimed that the Epstein story was a Democratic hoax:

Trump’s problem is the nothing-to-see-here approach doesn’t work for those who’ve learned from him they must not give up until the government’s secrets are exposed.

Democrats are slamming former President Biden’s response to a series of investigations of him by Republicans on Capitol Hill and the Trump administration, arguing he is again taking the GOP bait

Trump dismisses the Epstein case as old news: “He’s dead for a long time.” Well, Jeffrey Epstein hasn’t been dead for that long a time. He died less than six years ago, during the first Trump administration, in a federal prison, and not of natural causes. The cause of death was officially determined to be suicide.

Now the persisting furor over files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has forced Trump into an unfamiliar role: trying to shut a conspiracy theory down. Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender,

The rhetoric marks a dramatic escalation for the Republican president, who has broken with some of his most loyal backers on issues in the past, but never with such fervor.