Trump lands another big win with EU trade deal, but he can’t dodge the Epstein saga
President Donald Trump claimed another win for his campaign to transform the global economy and American life, but he still can’t escape intensifying questions over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy.
The United States clinched a framework dealwith the European Union on Sunday that averted a damaging trade war. Trump believes such moves will revive US manufacturing. But the resulting 15% tariff on EU goods entering the US likely means American consumers will face higher prices in the long term.
This is a significant step. So Trump’s insistence that it was not simply a bid to distract from the Epstein saga is reasonable. “Oh, you have got to be kidding with that,” the angry president told a reporter. But his irritation underscored his failure to shrug off weeks of revelations about the case and his own past friendship with the accused sex trafficker, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial.
The storm back home isn’t abating. Two lawmakers, one Democrat and the other Republican, vowed Sunday to force a vote on the House floor on the release of Epstein case files. Such a vote could embarrass the administration and create a major political showdown.
This came on a typically frenetic weekend that Trump spent in Scotland and that served as a metaphor for his turbulent influence on America and the globe.
He juggled the highest-level diplomacy — talks with the EU’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen — with a trip promoting his business empire, in this case his portfolio of exclusive Scottish golf clubs. His visit was greeted with street protests by caustic Scots and featured outbursts of extreme rhetoric — including his social media call for the prosecution of former Vice President Kamala Harris.
A significant trade deal that comes with many caveats
Much is unknown about the scope of the trade deal with the EU, which will see a 15% tariff imposed on most of the bloc’s exports and billions of dollars in purchases of US energy.
But it extends a winning streak and a record of implementing campaign promises for a president who is imposing personal power and often idiosyncratic beliefs — for instance in the effectiveness of trade tariffs — on the US and the world.
“This was the big one. This is the biggest of them all,” Trump said Sunday after meeting von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.
Trump has recently announced framework deals on trade with Japan and the Philippines — which both include higher tariffs that represent a fracturing of the 21st-century global free-trade arrangements. Trump believes that this system, which helped make the US a dominant global power, is nevertheless unfair on American workers and industries. And he rejects economists’ arguments that raising tariffs increases prices for already-stretched US consumers.
Trump is flexing power everywhere.
He is gutting the federal government, dominating Congress, and exerting unprecedented pressure on law firms and universities to impose his right-wing ideology, all while seeking to intimidate media outlets. These are wins for his populist “Make America Great Again” movement and its program to buckle what supporters see as liberal power.
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Still, markets may welcome the EU trade deal framework, assuming it is fully implemented — hardly a given considering Trump’s volatile history of threats and reversals. An EU-US trade war would have been a far worse outcome.
But the agreement confirms suspicions that Trump’s goal is not fairer trade but higher tariffs.
Although existing tariffs have so far not harmed the economy as much as some experts feared, Americans will pay more for cars, food, luxuries and consumer goods. The inflationary impact on the economy, and Trump’s likely appointment next year of a new Federal Reserve chair who will lower interest rates, could mean greater economic threats to come.
“We still have too much Russian LNG (liquid natural gas) that is coming through the back door again to our European Union, and some Russian gas and oil still in the European Union, which we do not want anymore,” von der Leyen said.
Epstein drama haunts Trump’s Scottish golf trip
Trump’s frustration that a key political achievement has been overshadowed by the Epstein saga is unlikely to dissipate in the coming days.
The controversy started because of conspiracy theories among Trump’s base that claimed the disgraced financier did not take his own life in prison but was murdered, and that he left behind a client list of rich and powerful Americans who’d taken advantage of his alleged sex trafficking.
The political uproar explains why Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell last week caused such consternation.
Maxwell’s lawyer told reporters after her second day of meetings with Blanche in Tallahassee, Florida, that she had answered every question truthfully and honestly. He also noted that the president has the power to pardon those convicted of crimes. “We hope he exercises that power in a right and just way,” the attorney, David Oscar Markus, said Friday.
Blanche has so far not offered a detailed public account of the meetings.
But the Justice Department’s unorthodox approach is raising concerns that it goes beyond a public relations effort to convince MAGA voters the administration is doing something. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison term, has an incentive for providing information that could ease her situation — and Trump has the power to do so.
Questions over the president’s motives became even more important when CNN and other outlets reported last week that Trump’s name was mentioned in the Epstein files, along with those of some other prominent Americans. This does not mean that he or anyone else is guilty of wrongdoing. In fact, Bondi might have made the correct decision legally in refusing to release information that could harm the reputation of people not accused of crimes. But beyond a joint Justice Department and FBI statement on the rationale for not releasing the files, the administration has rarely attempted to justify a policy that has put it at odds with its own supporters in the MAGA movement.
“I’m concerned that the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, is meeting with (Maxwell) supposedly one-on-one,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Look, I agree … that she should testify. But she’s been indicted twice on perjury. This is why we need the files.”
The Trump administration has asked the courts to release grand jury testimony pertinent to the Epstein case. But one federal judge refused last week, in a ruling that may have given the DOJ political cover.
“We want them to release the files. However, we can’t make them release it because of separation of power,” Oklahoma GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
That may be the case. But grand jury testimony is believed to be only a fraction of the evidence against Epstein that the government holds — and hasn’t made public. And the entire controversy has been worsened by the administration’s clumsy approach and unwillingness to confront the anger of the MAGA base.
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