Elon Musk is mocking U.S. President Donald Trump‘s claims that legal documents evidencing Jeffrey Epstein‘s crimes are a ruse created by Democrats, as approval ratings over Trump’s handling of the issue plummet, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
“Wow, amazing that Epstein ‘killed himself’ and Ghislaine is in federal prison for a hoax,” the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote on X on Wednesday after a reporter in the Oval Office probed Trump for evidence substantiating his previous claims that his political foes created the Epstein files.
The president told the reporter: “I know it’s a hoax, it’s started by Democrats, it’s been run by the Democrats for four years.”
Musk has made a habit of criticizing Trump since stepping back from his role at DOGE.
At the centre of their ongoing feud is the President’s “big beautiful bill,” which the Tesla owner said was “utterly insane” and “destructive,” and on another occasion called it a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill.”
The legislation, which cuts federal funding for programs such as Medicaid and other social safety nets, was signed into law by the president on July 4.
The latest from Musk and Trump came right before a Reuters/Ipsos poll revealed that the majority of Americans believe Trump is hiding information about the accused sex-trafficker and former financier.
The two-day Ipsos poll, which closed Wednesday, showed 69 per cent of respondents thought the federal government was concealing details about Epstein’s clients, compared with six per cent who disagreed. About one in four who said they weren’t sure.
Epstein was facing federal charges of sex trafficking minors when he died by suicide in jail in 2019. He had pleaded not guilty, and the case was dismissed after his death.
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After Epstein’s death, legal proceedings continued to captivate Trump’s political base, which was expecting lurid details to come out after some of Trump’s top law enforcement officials, including U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, said they would release documents that would lead to major revelations about Epstein and his alleged high-profile clientele.
From left, American real estate developer Donald Trump and his girlfriend (and future wife), former model Melania Knauss, financier (and future convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Fla., Feb. 12, 2000.
Davidoff Studios / Getty Images
Last week, the Trump administration changed course on its pledge, enraging some of the president’s followers and casting doubt over the party’s candour.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, close to two-thirds of Republicans think the administration is hiding details on Epstein’s business, and just 17 per cent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the case.
Among Republicans, 35 per cent approved of his handling, compared with 29 per cent who disapproved and the rest who said they were unsure or abstained.
Meanwhile, 82 per cent of Democrats said they did not approve of Trump’s handling of the issue, while 71 per cent agreed that he was hiding information about Epstein’s death specifically. Additionally, 82 per cent of Democrats believe Trump is hiding Epstein’s so-called “client list,” along with 62 per cent of Republicans.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that Trump and White House officials were weighing a range of options, including unsealing new documents, appointing a special prosecutor and drafting executive actions on issues such as pedophilia.
Trump, however, has been defiant, describing supporters hung up on the issue as “weaklings” who were helping Democrats. “I don’t want their support anymore!” Trump said in a social media post.
Several of his allies, including senior government officials like FBI head Kash Patel and its deputy Daniel Bongino — both longtime proponents of conspiracy theories surrounding the circumstances of Epstein’s death — are now urging the president to release the files.
Patel, Bongino and Bondi had previously cast Epstein’s death as a murder, not suicide, meant to continue a decades-long cover-up of pedophilia by elites.
In a 2023 appearance on right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast, Patel was incensed that House Republicans weren’t trying harder to force the release of an alleged list of high-powered Epstein associates — a document the Patel-led FBI now says doesn’t exist.
“What the hell are the House Republicans doing? They have the majority. You can’t get the list? … Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are,” Patel said in the interview, which Johnson posted to social media on Dec. 19, 2023.
As a podcaster, Bongino called the Epstein story “one of the biggest political scandals of our time” and portrayed it as a wide-ranging conspiracy involving global elites.
“What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” Bongino asked on his show on May 4, 2023. “What do Clinton, Obama officials, big money leftists, a former Prime Minister of Israel — why do they want to make this Jeffrey Epstein story go away so bad?”
Bondi has also continued to fuel conspiracy theories.
The alleged Epstein client list is “sitting on my desk right now to review,” Bondi said in a February interview on Fox News. She later told reporters, “There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”
But last week, in an unprecedented U-turn, Bondi said the FBI had ruled his death a suicide and that there was no “client list.”
Similarly, Patel and Bongino offered assurances that they’d reviewed the evidence and there was no reason to doubt Epstein killed himself.
“I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center,” Patel testified in a Senate hearing on May 8.
On Tuesday, a long-time ally of Trump and Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, called on Trump to release the Epstein files.
“It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it,” Johnson said during an interview with Benny Johnson on Tuesday.
Similarly, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican, said she wanted a private viewing of the Epstein files after advocating for them to be released to the public, according to NBC.
“I’d like to see all the information come out,” she told Johnson, despite voting down an effort by Democrats to create legislation that would require the Trump administration to release the files.
On Wednesday former Vice President Mike Pence called on Trump to release the documents.
In an interview on CBS News’s The Takeout, he said: “ The time has come for the administration to release all of the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s investigation and prosecution.”
— With files from Reuters and The Associated Press