The Epstein Birthday Letter Response: MAGAReport 9/9/25

The MAGAs say it's a fake

House Democrats released a copy of Trump’s birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein yesterday, after it was provided to them by Epstein’s estate.

When the Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of this letter back in July, Trump and all his spokespeople flatly denied this existed. Now that the letter has been made public, they are sticking by that lie and claiming this is a fake. The MAGA faithful are going along with it.

Here’s the letter:

The argument that this is a fake is centered around the signature looking “nothing like” Trump’s real signature. CNN did an excellent job finding examples of Trump’s signature from the time of the letter. I’ve put those all together for you here so you can look for yourself:

The MAGA faithful do not accept that Trump wrote this. They say they cannot believe that Democrats would do such a poor job forging his signature on this document. They claimed he never signs just “Donald”. They claim it is AI-generated. They claim this looks nothing like his actual signature. Some say maybe he did sign it, but he didn’t write the “poem” which must have been added later. The thread goes on for 241 comments that are basically united in agreeing that this is a fake but disjointed as to why. It goes a bit like the classic defense lawyer argument: That doesn’t match his signature but if it does, it was forged. And if it wasn’t forged, it was photoshopped from some other document. And if it wasn’t, then maybe he signed the paper, but he didn’t write the poem. And if he did write the poem, it doesn’t suggest anything about pedophilia. And if it does, that’s because he was working for the FBI as an asset to catch Epstein.

There were a few comments that believed this was real. One read, “It is clearly a match anyone pretending otherwise is deluding themselves. Now the bigger question is whether this is forged or photoshopped. The original source document would need to be forensically analyzed to determine when it was signed.”

This was immediately called out by half a dozen commenters as being “concern trolling” (where a person from one side pretends to be on the other side while raising concerns).

Another commenter said it looked like an existing signature, “The Donald in the signature looks a lot like the Donald on the right [in an attached image]. Just missing the rest of it.” One person replied, “You sound like a traitorous faggot.”

Their discussion also overlooks that this letter came from Epstein’s estate; it’s not something Democrats or the media just produced out of thin air. That means they need to explain how the letter made it into the 2003 birthday card collection. Did someone fake the letter back in 2003 for Epstein’s birthday? Was it swapped in later? Is everyone lying about it being there in the first place?

In this discussion, we see a very common MAGA behavior. When something comes out that makes Trump look bad, they generally cast it as part of an anti-Trump conspiracy. Psychologically, this achieves two goals. First, it allows them to continue to feel like a victim, which is a hallmark of the MAGA movement. Second, it resolves the cognitive dissonance that comes up when one’s identity is tied to another person and that other person fails. If Trump does something very bad, it would mean all that personal investment in him was also wrong. It is psychotically easier to believe in a wild conspiracy than to admit the thing your identity has become rooted in is rotten.