The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump spent July 28 revisiting one of the oldest and messiest parts of his public past. Speaking to reporters in Scotland, he repeated his own explanation for why he broke with Jeffrey Epstein: Epstein had hired people who worked for him, and Trump said he threw Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago. That is Trump’s account of the breakup, not an independently verified finding, but it was the version he chose to put back on the record.

The remark mattered because Trump was not trying to reopen the history so much as control it. He framed the split as a business-and-staffing dispute and again distanced himself from Epstein’s later notoriety. The interview did not settle the underlying questions about the relationship, but it did show Trump still willing to answer them in public rather than let them sit untouched.

The same day, Trump’s lawyers filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida in Trump v. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. seeking to compel an expedited deposition of Rupert Murdoch. The filing, dated July 28, 2025, asks the court to move quickly on Murdoch’s testimony in Trump’s defamation suit over Wall Street Journal reporting tied to Epstein. The motion says Murdoch is 94 and argues for taking his deposition sooner rather than later.

Taken together, the two developments kept Epstein at the center of Trump’s day in two different settings: a public explanation from the president and a court filing from his lawyers. One was Trump’s own account of an old rupture. The other was a procedural push in a separate case built around Epstein-related coverage. Neither put the subject away.