A new piece of data might just bother publicity-hungry President Donald Trump more than any other revelation from the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
Data from Google Trends shows that search interest in Epstein is rivaling that of the president.
After the latest twist in the story—a Wall Street Journal report alleging that Trump gave Epstein a drawing of a naked woman for his 50th birthday—searches related to the disgraced financier surged.
For the first time in the resurgence of the Epstein story over the last three weeks, search interest in the sex offender approached the level that had been Trump’s baseline for the period.
Relative to the peak popularity of either figure during the last 30 days, Trump has sat around the 22nd to 26th percentile for search interest—with occasional surges. Now, interest in Epstein is up to the 23rd percentile.
Evidently, the public is fascinated by Trump’s Epstein crisis, with data showing top related searches like “The Epstein Files,” “Trump and Epstein,” and even a misspelling of the financier’s name: “Epstien.”
But because the bombshell birthday report also sent search interest in Trump upward, the president is still currently beating out Epstein in terms of absolute popularity.
But for a man whose presidency is set up as a reality TV show with himself as the star, facing a challenge to his spotlight—even from a dead pedophile—might still sting.
Trump hasn’t been short on rage during the Epstein debacle, which began when his administration closed its investigation into the government’s files on Epstein, announcing there is no evidence of a “client list” or that Epstein was murdered.
Shutting down two popular conspiracies enraged much of the MAGA world. The president tried to quell the outcry by disavowing his own supporters and painting the Epstein files as a Democratic “hoax.”
When the Journal on Thursday revealed Trump’s alleged birthday gift to Epstein—the naked drawing and a note reading “may every day be another wonderful secret”—Trump aggressively denied the story and vowed to sue.
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he told the Journal. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Trump was an acquaintance of Epstein, who died in what was ruled a prison cell suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
While Trump has tried to distance himself from Epstein, the Daily Beast in 2024 exclusively published audio tapes recorded in 2017 that feature Epstein saying that he was once Trump’s “closest friend.”
