Yesterday, the US Justice Department published the full transcript of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s two-day interview with Ghislaine Maxwell from last month. The timing is no accident. Maxwell, serving 20 years for sex trafficking, was asked about “potentially 100 different people” during questioning in Tallahassee, Florida. Days later, she was moved to a lower-security prison in Texas. Now we may know why.

Maxwell’s testimony about Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein reads like she’s taking one for the team. Asked if she ever saw the President receive a massage, she responded: “Never.” What about inappropriate behaviour? He was “a gentleman in all respects”. Did anyone ever suggest Trump did anything wrong with masseuses or anybody else? “Absolutely never, in any context.”

But Maxwell didn’t stop at denials. She volunteered that Trump was “always very cordial and very kind to me” and added: “I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him.” She even offered, without being asked, to provide materials showing how “the President got swept into some of this unnecessarily” by people trying to harm him.

As is so often the case in MAGA world, everyone who comes around to working with Trump ends up praising him in weirdly specific ways. Ahead of his first term, his personal physician Harold Bornstein literally let Trump dictate his own medical letter, which highlighted his “extraordinary” health and declared that he’d be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”. Bornstein admitted in 2018 that Trump wrote the whole thing himself.

Mitt Romney learnt this lesson the hard way. After calling Trump a “phoney” and a “fraud” during the 2016 campaign, Romney met with him multiple times about the secretary of state position, gushing about their “wonderful evening” over dinner because, as he revealed in Romney: A Reckoning, he still wanted the role but refused to apologise in the manner Trump would have liked. Trump later claimed he never intended to give his rival the job, and that he just wanted to “prove a point, that Mitt Romney is, and always has been, a lightweight joke”.

Maxwell has clearly got the memo. During her interview, she claimed she didn’t recall recruiting masseuses from Mar-a-Lago, while acknowledging that it was “possible”. This conveniently matches Trump’s recent claim that Epstein “poached” young women from his property. She only saw Trump in “social settings”, never at Epstein’s houses. Every answer fits perfectly with the defence Trump has been building.

The timing couldn’t be better for the President’s broader strategy of turning defence into attack.  Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declared that Barack Obama “manufactured and politicised intelligence” to create a “years-long coup” against Trump. The President himself has accused Obama of treason for allegedly pushing the false theory of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Yesterday, in another escalation, the FBI raided former national security advisor John Bolton’s home searching for classified documents.

With Maxwell’s help, the MAGA coalition can speed past Epstein and focus on its real enemies, including Obama and Bolton. Her testimony, fawning and fulsome though it might be, gives otherwise conflicted supporters permission to stop thinking about the Epstein scandal. Will she convince the conspiracy theorists, doubters, fence-sitters, and partisan Democrats? Of course not. But Trump doesn’t need to convince everyone: he just needs enough cover to move on.

It doesn’t matter whether Maxwell is angling for a pardon, or looking for a better place to serve out a reduced prison sentence, or genuinely believes what she’s saying. The effect is the same. Over the course of two days in July, she gave Trump what money can’t buy and investigations can’t provide: a convicted co-conspirator insisting, apparently against all her own interests, that he’s a gentleman who did nothing wrong.

In contemporary American politics, that’s enough to close one chapter and open another — from defending against the Epstein allegations to investigating old foes such as Bolton. The circus continues, just with different performers in the ring.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

MoustacheClubUS

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