‘The president is saying it’s artificial intelligence’: Republicans flail on Trump/Epstein bombshell, insist 2003 message is somehow A.I.

For years, there’s been an easy playbook for a public figure on what to do if visual evidence surfaces of your wrongdoing. For most of the century, you could stammer out that this was clearly the work of Photoshop. That soon evolved into “It’s a deepfake!”, but nowadays the frantic cry of denial is that whatever you’re pictured doing must be the work of A.I.

To be fair, generative artificial intelligence is extremely good at creating ever-more-convincing fake videos that will poison the increasingly murky well of what we can and can’t trust. But, if you have a modicum of intelligence, you can still spot A.I. output a mile away.

Now, Washington is in shock after The Wall Street Journal‘s bombshell exposé of Donald Trump‘s chummy birthday message to Epstein, teasing “we have certain things in common”, that “enigmas never age”, and ending with that “may every day be another wonderful secret”. What “wonderful secret” do Epstein and Trump share? Let’s face it, it’s not going to be anything good!

Their response? This is (somehow) sinister and manipulative artificial intelligence at work! Rep. Ralph Norman laid out the Trump position last night with a frantic dismissal, saying:

“As the chair brought up, this is really kinda hypocritical for y’all at this point. You’ve had four years to bring it up. Where was your inquiry then? Where were the facts? The public’s not letting this die. This is coming out. The president is saying it’s artificial intelligence. That will be proven in due time.”

Scanlon: There’s a WSJ article titled Epstein’s friends sent letters for his birthday album, one was from Donald Trump

Norman: As that article— The president is saying it’s artificial intelligence. That will be proven in due time. pic.twitter.com/xENp2jdPcc

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 18, 2025

A.I.? In 2003?

As many of you will have spotted, there’s quite a big fly in this ointment of an argument. The Wall Street Journal‘s article is based on a physical document from 2003, roughly two decades before generative A.I. would make producing anything like this possible. Back in 2003, AI could certainly put up a decent fight in Quake III Arena, but it’s not doing anything like this!

Now, you might say that Epstein’s birthday book isn’t actually from 2003 and that The Wall Street Journal/the Democrats/the Deep State (pick one!) have cooked it up in secret to bring down Trump. Well, Trump has predictably already unleashed his lawyers on Rupert Murdoch and screamed that this is defamatory, meaning its veracity will be tested in court.

Those journalists will have seen this coming a mile away, and there’s no way on Earth they’d have gone ahead with publication without being completely certain of its provenance. But maybe that’s not the point – the real reason for this illogical bleating is to give Trump’s supporters a liferaft to cling to, some vain hope that their messiah wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein’s best bud and wrapped up in his secrets.

But, to quote Ronald Reagan: “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”