CNN’s resident numbers wizard says if MAGA had hoped to deflect from the Epstein files furor with talk of invading Greenland, it’s not going as well as they might have hoped.
“If this was the idea, well… it’s a bad idea politically speaking,” network data guru Harry Enten told viewers Wednesday, pointing to numbers that now show President Donald Trump at 38 points underwater on Epstein compared to 40 points below on Greenland.
“There is barely an issue out there that’s worse for Donald Trump than the Epstein Files, but any attempts to buy Greenland or use military force on Greenland, which even polls worse than this, is one of them,” he went on.
Enten added that to “mess with Greenland” is arguably “the most unpopular thing that Trump can try to do.”
Trump, who campaigned on a promise of full transparency on Epstein’s crimes, has faced mounting scrutiny of his own relationship with the late pedophile after his administration determined Epstein’s 2019 death was a suicide and that he kept no “client list” of accomplices.
Conspiracy theories, popular among the MAGA base, maintain Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were members of an international pedophilic cabal, and that Epstein’s death was orchestrated by powerful forces as cover for their wider crimes.
Following a bipartisan legislative push, Trump signed a law in November mandating the release of all remaining files on the case by Dec. 19, subject only to redactions for the purpose of protecting the identity of Epstein’s victims.
The Justice Department has since blown through that deadline, releasing only one percent of the estimated millions of documents in its possession.
It has also missed a second deadline for justifying redactions to the limited number of documents released so far, which critics say have been made to shield Trump rather than Epstein’s survivors.
Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, and expressed frustration that the reputations of people who “innocently” met the disgraced financier years ago could be damaged in the document dumps.
Trump’s threats of invading Greenland, an autonomous Arctic territory of NATO ally Denmark, and his accompanying efforts to spark a trade war with European partners opposed to the move, have increasingly overshadowed developments in the Epstein case.
“So this is the whole idea – the president of the United States didn’t like the focus on the Epstein files,” Enten said Wednesday. “We’re going to change the subject and we’re going to go over to Greenland, and from that perspective, it’s worked.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
