The mother of all crisis communication stories

Today on the community top stories, the Nasdaq in your all time high, more budget cuts, severe budget cuts coming out of Washington, D.C. affecting things like PBS. Wars continue around the world, many, many issues to talk about. Unfortunately, we don't have time to talk about any of those because there is one issue that is clouding every other issue in at least the United States world right now. And while I try to focus this program on top business stories, technology stories and culture stories, I can't ignore a major cultural story that affects every business and technology story as well. I'm talking about, of course, the Jeffrey Epstein crisis scandal affecting the Trump administration, specifically Donald Trump. Hello and welcome. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. This is the Communiverse. This is the show where we look at the top stories of the day, analyze it through the lens of communication skills, all with the goal of building your personal development, your personal success. I'm TJ Walker. I've been coaching CEOs, political leaders, yes, even presidents of countries, although not any US Presidents on how to communicate effectively and helping them with all aspects of personal development. I look at things through the other side right here on this show on a daily basis in order to help you. I'm coming to you today to live from Central park on vacation. I'm right in the southern tip of Central Park. It's a beautiful area. There's a wonderful lake, ducks floating around. These are all the skyscrapers where some of these penthouses cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Central Park South. But beautiful, beautiful summer morning where it's still in the 60s. So beautiful weather here. Let's dive right in. If you are a student of communication, crisis, of communication skills, of politics, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, more fascinating than what's going on right now in this Jeffrey Epstein case. For those of you who not familiar, Jeffrey Epstein, well known convicted pedophile who is according to official records, to have committed suicide in 2019. He is someone who was on trial, facing charges for running a sex pedophile ring involving hundreds if not thousands of underage girls where he molested them, raped them himself, and also was in a constant swirl of wealthy older men such as himself, a part of his world. Everyone from Prince Andrew was implicated. Numerous luminaries across the political spectrum were known to have associated with him, traveled with him, gone to his island where many of these things happened. Well, the number one person involved that's getting attention is none other than Donald Trump. Donald Trump says he barely knew the guy, didn't like him doesn't know what all the hullabaloo is about. He's telling his supporters that, hey, there's nothing to look at here. I don't want the support of anyone talking about this issue. Now, the great irony is Trump was peddling this story himself for years when he was outside of government. He was really playing up that there was this big conspiracy. His strongest supporters, people like Alex Jones, are demanding that there be a thorough accounting, all files be released. People like Dan Bongino, people like Cash Patel, well known podcasters, right wing influencers, were screaming about this issue for years. Well, now they're actually running the government and they're saying, oh, nothing to see here, folks. So it's one thing for Democrats or liberals to sort of point fingers at Donald Trump. They've tried that before with the whole Access Hollywood tapes, the whole E. Jean Carroll situation where Trump was not just accused but convicted of crimes and sexually assaulting a woman. The allegations of E. Jean Carroll, very credible. All that seemed to be forgiven by his supporters and fans. Not this time. No matter what Trump tries to do, the issue doesn't seem to be going away. And from a crisis communication standpoint, which is how I'm looking at this, it's fascinating to see that a true master of the media, which Donald Trump is, in all fairness, that he's not able to change the subject because Donald Trump is one of the. Not one of it. He's the best in the world at getting the media to follow him. Oh, I don't like what you're talking about here. I'll talk about annexing Greenland. I'll talk about making Canada a 51st state. I'll talk about taking the citizenship away from Rosie o'. Donnell. All the normal tricks he's so good at, at changing the subject of getting people to forget about a particular scandal. They're not working this time. And that's why I find it personally fascinating. Now, the latest is the Wall Street Journal has uncovered a book that was all about letters from famous people to Jeffrey EPSTEIN Celebrating his 50th birthday in 2003. And in this book, there is a drawing from Donald Trump showing women's body parts and talking about a secret that he and Epstein share. Now, this has aroused a lot of suspicion and curiosity from a lot of people. Trump's done his typical thing, saying, I'm going to sue. I'm going to sue for $10 billion. I'm suing the Wall Street Journal. And for those of you unfamiliar with US Politics, the Wall Street Journal is known as a very conservative publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, one of the titans of the conservative establishment who owns Fox News. So frankly, one of Trump's biggest supporters. So it doesn't ring credible that this is a liberal Democratic news mag out to smear Donald Trump. Interestingly, what he's claiming is, oh, I'm not a drawer, I'm not an artist. I've never drawn. Essentially. This is bizarre because there are numerous documented examples of Donald Trump drawing, drawing skyscapes, drawing money trees, donating his drawings to charities and raising tens of thousands of dollars for charity. So it's kind of like the whole Access Hollywood tape thing, denying that he ever said anything disparaging against women, and that here it is on tape with him saying he wanted to grab women in the. Well, you may remember that. So it's comical at one level, sad at another, but it just doesn't fly with anyone. Certainly Democrats, liberals, progressives. People who don't like Trump are having a field day laughing at this. But what's different is his own supporters are saying, hey, this is a line too far. We don't mind you getting convicted of felonies. This is essentially what his supporters have said. We don't mind you sexually assaulting and doing what most people consider in average, normal terms, raping someone, like aging Carroll. We don't mind that. An adult woman, maybe it's. We don't mind that. But pedophilia is something different. Elite wealthy men passing around young girls like bowls of fruit and having sexual favors with them just seems too far even for them. And I see Patricia is saying hello and greetings from New York. Well, Patricia, greetings. Glad to be here today. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I'm here in Central park having a beautiful walk on vacation, getting ready to go see and Juliet on Broadway at 2pm today with my family, getting ready to go to the Comedy Cellar to see some of my favorite comedians in the world tonight for a show. So hope you're having a great day as well. And I am on my cell phone today. Just doing this without any wi fi was a little harder for me to see comments, but I appreciate the greetings and well wishes. So, back to this Jeffrey Epstein case. It's so fascinating to me because, as I mentioned, I give dispassionate, unbiased commentary on communication on this channel. Do I have political views? Sure, everybody does. But I'm here primarily to analyze things through the lens of communication skills. And I'm here to tell you, Donald Trump is a master at communicating. He's a master at deflating crisis situations for himself. And his usual bag of tricks are not working here. So it leads many to draw the worst conclusions, especially his supporters. Now, it's an article of faith among the QAnon crowd, the right wing blogosphere, the manosphere, that there is this right, this left wing cabal, this Democratic cabal running the world for nefarious purposes. And when they're not orchestrating things for their own benefit, they are busy molesting children. They're pedophiles. We saw this come to an ugly head a number of years ago with the so called Pizzagate at the Comet Pizza shop in Washington D.C. where a guy actually showed up with a gun asking for the basement where children were kept being molested. Well, there was no basement. He was ready to kill people because he bought into the conspiracy. Here. The theory is that there's this wide ranging network of wealthy people like Bill Gates and Alan Dershowitz and Bill Clinton and all these liberal Democrats who, when they're not busy destroying the world, get together to molest children and it has to be uncovered. That's the conspiracy theory. The odd thing about this theory is that there's absolutely no one in the world who is more directly connected to Jeffrey Epstein than Donald Trump. Jeffrey Epstein himself said, donald Trump's my best friend. Donald Trump has said on many occasions publicly praising Jeffrey Epstein in ways that are highly incriminating. Now, he said things like, it's been said that Jeffrey Epstein likes beautiful women as much as I do and some of them on the younger side. Now even more incriminating evidence coming out this week from the Wall Street Journal where in this letter that was uncovered that Donald Trump is alleged and certainly seems credible. The drawings look like his drawings, the signature looks like his drawings. He alludes to the fact that they have a secret together and that enigmas like those two never age. So what does this mean? Now, I try to run a responsible podcast here. I don't simply say, oh, here's somebody I don't like. So let me just make up allegations and assert them as fact. I'm not going to do that. But what I am going to do is try to use logic to tease this out, to figure out what is actually happening, what's actually going on. What we know for a fact is that Donald Trump was not at all embarrassed by the fact that he was indicted, what, 93 times, convicted of dozens and dozens of felonies. He wore that as a badge of honor. So we know that simply being accused of crimes doesn't bother him. He's proud to show off that mug shot and even merchandising it and selling it. So just crimes involving interfering with other countries, foreign policies, extorting people, misusing government documents, all of those, that doesn't bother him. We also know the credible allegations of rape don't bother him. Credible allegations and even convictions. Attacking a woman, as he did with E. Jean Carroll, that doesn't bother him. So what? It raises the question, what crime could he have committed that he's now bothered by? Where he's saying, let's not talk about it. Where he's saying, well, let's change this up. What possible crime is worse than financial felonies, misuse of government corruption charges, abusing a woman, attacking. What's worse than that? That now all of a sudden he wants to change the subject on, well, what crimes in general? Again, I'm not accusing him of this, but crimes could be worse. Well, murder is worse. I don't really think that Donald Trump is the kind of guy who put a gun to someone or strangled them and killed, so I'm ruling out murder. Cannibalism would be worse. He seems too fastidious to be involved in cannibalism. And I'm not in any way accusing Donald Trump of being a cannibal. Necrophilia would be worse than these other crimes. I'm not accusing Donald Trump of being a necrophiliac. But what about having sex with children? What about pedophilia? Well, is Donald Trump gonna have sex with a nine year old child? I don't think that's credible. But what about sex with a 17 year old, a 16 year old, which in the jurisdiction of whether it's Florida, whether it is the Virgin Islands where Epstein's island was. The legal age of consent is 18 there. Is it possible? Ask yourself, can you imagine, can you imagine Donald Trump having sex with a six foot tall, gorgeous, fully developed 17 and a half year old when he didn't necessarily know her age? Bingo. That's something I can easily, easily, easily imagine. Do I have proof? No. But ask yourself, why else does he seem so upset over this issue? Why else does he seem so defensive? Why else does he seem so wildly, desperately in need of changing the subject, getting this to go away, getting people to drop the subject. We've never seen him like this with anything, any other conspiracy he loved to talk about. He loves talking about the conspiracy. Hiding the fact that Barack Obama allegedly wasn't a US citizen, even though it's false. So we know he loves talking about conspiracies. He loves being a part of them at some level. But does he know that this is a bridge too far even for his supporters? And I'm sure he'll have some excuse and say, well, I didn't know how old she was, if evidence is to come out. And I'm sure he'll say things like, well, she came on to me. I was sound asleep. The next thing I know, she was on top of me. I don't have evidence for this. I'm simply trying to connect dots in a logical, rational way that would in any way explain the behavior from Donald Trump that is inconsistent with how he has behaved on the public stage. Not just this term, not just since he ran for president in the last nine years for the first time, but his entire public career. He's never behaved this way. So it leads me and a lot of other observers to suggest this time he's really nervous that if the world found out, they would not simply say, oh, that's locker room talk. The way they did with Access Hollywood. The way they did with, well, Eugene Carroll is just trying to make money selling a book. She was a big girl. She knew what she was. This appears to be something that he fears cannot be written off by his supporters. That's what's fascinating. It's just bizarre to me to see people who've been screaming bloody murder everyone on his team for years and years and years. The government's covering up the Epstein files. Give us the list. Give us the list. Famously, his attorney General earlier in the year said, the list is on my desk and I'm reviewing it. We'll be releasing it. And then all of a sudden, it's no list. Now, to be clear, I don't know if there is any such thing as an actual client list of Epstein other than his financial clients, including the guy who owned Victoria's secrets, who apparently loved Jeffrey Epstein so much he ended up giving him hundreds of millions, if not a billion dollars in fees. It's possible Epstein ran his business, one part of his business, and the rest was just a hobby. And none of these men were clients. It's also possible he was blackmailing them. That's the allegations. Again, I have no proof whatsoever. It is again. The other odd thing about this is, for a long time now, anytime the name of Ghislaine Maxwell comes up, Trump is all of a sudden Mr. Polite and thought, oh, I wish her well. So here's someone, an immigrant from another country, who not only is accused of committing felonies but convicted of felonies. And what do we know about Trump from certainly the last year in the last 90 years is that when foreigners come to our country and commit felonies, he considers them scum. They deserve to be imprisoned or deported or both. He said that time and time and time again. So why is it that here's a foreigner, here's a felon? You would think he would say, oh, Julianne Maxwell, foreigner, felon, she's the worst thing ever. Let's lock her up and throw away the key or let's deport her. That's not what he says. He said, oh, I wish her well. Wish her well. So it arouses suspicions that many people think, okay, she was there in the room when this happened, she's got dirt on him. I don't have proof of that. But what else is the rational explanation for a guy whose whole public Persona is foreigners are bad, felons are bad, foreign felonies are bad. But this one, this one here is both of those things. Oh, I wish her really well. It doesn't add up in any way that's credible other than she possibly has dirt on him and he's trying to keep her happy and trying to keep her quiet. So does this just blow over, over tuck? Now the well known commentator Scott Galloway points out that Trump is so desperate it's like he does nothing but get together with his team every day. He's a comms team and, and chatgpt and say help us come up with an idea that will get the media to talk about something else. And chatgpt will say something like, well, let's say we're going to turn the Middle east into a fancy resort. I've already done that. Let's say we're going to an ex Panama Canal. We already did that. Let's say we're going to take over Greenland. Well, we've already done that. Let's make Canada another We've already done that. Now there are an infinite number of ridiculous, absurd things that Trump could say is the top priority of the day. We've seen a taste of that in the last week of I'm going to take the citizenship away from Rosie o'. Donnell, I'll take the citizenship away from the guy who may become the next mayor of New York City, but none of it seems to be working. Now we already know that simple criticism from Democrats, liberals, mainstream media only empowers Trump among his base. But now is his base so angry by this are they Going to keep clamoring for all of the files, all the data. Now, we've already had credible people like Alan Dershowitz saying, I've seen the files, there's every kind of wildly famous person's name in there. But I can't talk about it because I'm under court order not to talk about it. You can't simply discount that. We already know that Trump is in the official files about Jeffrey Epstein because he's in the flight files and all of his flight records are a part of government files. He has been on Jeffrey Epstein's plane seven times. That doesn't mean criminality, doesn't mean he's guilty of pedophilia. But we already know he's in the fights. So are we going to see everything? Trump's latest move is he's saying, well, you know, if a, if a judge orders a release, that will be okay. Well, Trump so often gets to pick the judges and he's often relied on the tactic of find a friendly judge who will do my bidding. Is that going to work this time? Are we going to see a full release? That's that mentions lots of celebrity names by name, saying they were at this party and there was nobody there but these 10 guys and these 20 girls ages 15 to 17 and everybody was naked. And here's the name of the first celebrity, here's the name of the second celebrity and here's the name of all the others. And here's one name redacted and that name is Donald Blank, blank, ump. Are we going to see something like that where, oh, he can say, oh, my name was never in it. And yet it all points in that direction. I don't have any evidence that that's what's coming out. But he's positioning himself to be able to again have another out and say, well, hey, the judge released only things that were permissible. The other odd thing that just doesn't add up is now suddenly Trump is saying, well, we can't release everything because that might harm good people, that might harm innocent people. When has Donald Trump ever shown compassionate for anyone other than himself? So that's yet another. Doesn't prove he's guilty. But it's another thing for any fair minded person who looks at this and, and says what's adding up here? Now let's take, let's take a look at some comments here. And forgive me, I am on my cell phone today so it's hard for me to see comments. And Patricia, forgive me, I am trying to see the Comments here. I'm on my cell phone today here in Central park just because you asked. Perhaps it's reverse engineering. Mind thought so it's possible. Again, I don't have proof. I'm looking for plausible rationales for this behavior for how someone who's normally great at communicating in a crisis and getting himself out of a sticky wicket is failing this time. Let's look at more comments that have come in clean. Cathcart says Dershowitz isn't credible. So, Cleon, I do think that there are a lot of things in the last decade Alan Dershowitz have said that do make me think he's lost a step or two. There's no doubt about it. But again, what he's saying is he's seen files and there's a lot of big names in it. That doesn't help him. You know, one of the things you have to look at when someone is saying things and you're wondering about their credibility, does this help them? Alan Dershowitz has already been a part of this. He's already suffered reputational damage. There was a woman who claimed that she was underage and forced to have sex with Alan Dershowitz. He fought it, he fought it quite strenuously in courts and he did get her to back down. So he's all. But he's already suffered a lot of reputational damage for associating with Jeffrey Epstein for so long. So this doesn't help him, reminding everyone again that he's been a part of this whole sock intimately involved with Jeffrey Epstein. So I always look at someone's motive for lying and there's no motive there for Dershowitz to do so because A, he's been supporting Trump in so many instances where the legal establishment has been coming after him, B, this makes Dershowitz look bad. But C, there's just so many other players involved with this. Who claims, well, first of all, there's a file on almost everyone. And we know that the FBI and the government investigated Epstein because he had numerous investigations and trials and convictions. So we know there's investigations. What we don't know is does it specifically say this particular person, this particular famous politician, had sex with a 17 year old, a 16 year old, 13. We don't know that. And I am not simply going to make an allegation, but what I am trying to do is connect the dots and look for rational plausibility for the messages that are coming out from various players. And as of right now, I'm simply not seeing rational, coherent arguments coming out of Trump himself. And I'm not seeing how what he's saying or doing is making the MAGA base happy or feel satisfied because they're very angry about this because it's so much a part of their worldview. Okay, I gotta stop for today. I've got Broadway shows and comedy shows to go to and more beautiful things in Central park to look at today. I hope to get back to talking about what major tech leaders are saying in their speeches, new developments with artificial intelligence, top business and technology stories, and to not have to talk about this continuously. But it's something that touches upon everything else as I mentioned. So thanks for watching. I'm TJ Walker, this is the Communiverse. Please join me every day where we look at top stories, analyze them through a communications lens, all with the goal of building your personal success. Thanks so much. See you tomorrow.