July 18, 2025: Trump, Epstein and ‘another wonderful secret’

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The longtime friendship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein came in for a close-up in a much-anticipated Wall Street Journal report last night that detailed a long-ago “bawdy” birthday greeting the future president sent to the future convicted sex offender. Immediately, Washington was ablaze with chatter — about the reporting, about the White House’s response and about the story’s potential to reunite the deeply fractured MAGA movement that had recently seemed so divided over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly joins Playbook contributing author Adam Wren to walk through what we know and what to watch from here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Presented by BP.
0:08.2	Hello, I'm Adam Wren.
0:10.1	And I'm Megan Messerly.
0:11.9	It's Friday, July 18th.
0:14.4	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:17.2	As you can hear joining us this morning is longtime friend of the pod, Politico White House reporter
0:22.4	Megan Messerly. Welcome back, Megan. So good to be here, Adam. Without further ado, the big story
0:27.9	driving the day continues to be the Jeffrey Epstein saga, which took a big turn last night as the Wall
0:33.9	Street Journal published a long rumored piece about Donald Trump's decades-old friendship with Epstein.
0:39.8	So essentially in this story, we learned that there was a body letter from Donald Trump for Epstein's 50th birthday party album.
0:49.7	There's a leather-bound album. This photo purportedly featured a hand-drawn naked woman and a heavy marker.
0:58.5	And there was a happy birthday inscription.
1:02.2	And the writer of the note who the Wall Street Journal regards as Trump himself said,
1:07.2	happy birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret.
1:12.1	Of course, Trump is denying this vehemently.
1:14.7	He told the Wall Street Journal, in an interview, I never wrote a picture in my life.
1:19.6	I don't draw pictures of women, he said.
1:22.0	It's not my language.
1:23.5	It's not my words.
1:24.6	And this comes out of time when the MAGA coalition was deeply fractured over the Epstein Files investigation.
1:34.5	And in some ways, we're seeing this instantaneously bring back everybody together. We're seeing people like Laura Lumer, Republican members of Congress. everybody's sort of coming together and banning against the Wall Street Journal.
1:48.9	Megan, what do you make of this?
	...

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