When Trump lies about Epstein, the greater scandal is the press’s silence.
Donald Trump calls the Epstein case a “hoax.” He repeats it loudly, confidently, as though saying it often enough will make it true.
But it is not a hoax. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted. The record is public. Survivors live with the scars. Testimony, photographs, and court documents—they exist in abundance. To deny them is not spin; it is a lie in its rawest form.
And yet, the sharper scandal is not that Trump says it. The sharper scandal is that the press does not immediately challenge him. No anchor leans forward to say, “Mr. Trump, that is not accurate. The Epstein case was real. The survivors are real. The conviction was real.”
Instead, the claim is treated as just another brick in the wall of noise. It becomes one more “remark,” to quote, not a lie to be challenged. This is the real abdication: journalism abandoning its vocation to truth.
Journalism, at its best, is not entertainment or balance. It is the craft of coherence: words aligned with reality, reporting tethered to evidence. When it fails to speak, incoherence gains legitimacy. A lie unchallenged hardens into background truth.
The question is not why Trump lies—only he knows that. The sharper scandal is this: why do journalists not fulfill their duty to call the lie what it is? Why do they permit incoherence to stand unchallenged?
When the guardians of truth become stenographers of lies, public life fractures. People lose their sense of what is real, and coherence itself slips from the common world.
This is where we are now—not merely in a crisis of politics, but in a crisis of vocation. Journalism has forgotten its sacred calling. Until it remembers, liars will never need to fear the truth.