President Donald Trump on Monday took a break from his $10 million taxpayer-funded golf vacation in Scotland to announce new import tax increases on Americans and also to put forward a new explanation of why he broke from Jeffrey Epstein: because the child sex abuser was hiring away the help from Mar-a-Lago.
Previously, the story being pushed by White House staff about Trump’s supposed falling-out with Epstein some 20 years ago was that he was “a creep” — a seeming reference to a story Trump had told associates that he was angry about Epstein’s conduct toward a daughter of one of the members at his Palm Beach, Florida, country club.
But in an hour-long question-and-answer session with reporters at his golf resort in Turnberry, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer seated beside him, Trump gave a brand-new reason for why he ended his long friendship with Epstein, who was found hanged in his jail cell a month after his arrest in 2019.
“He did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump told reporters. “He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata.”
