Trump’s Epstein friendship is haunting him in the final hours of the election. TOM LEONARD asks: Will it matter?

Of all the scandals that have embroiled Donald Trump over his treatment of women, certainly none can boast sheer tastelessness in the new accusation that he once made a bet with Jeffrey Epstein over which of them could seduce Princess Diana.

There is no indication that either man came close to winning the bet (although Diana is believed to have had considerably better taste) or that such a conversation ever took place.

After all, the story’s reported source, Epstein — a pedophile financier who committed suicide in a New York jail cell while awaiting a child sex trafficking trial — was a notorious con man who spent his life exaggerating his connections to the rich and powerful.

The man he allegedly told this story to was journalist Michael Wolff, the veteran Trump White House chronicler whose opinion of the ex-president is hardly flattering and who, it must be said, has been dismissed by the Trump campaign as a ‘a disgraced writer who routinely makes up lies to sell fiction books’.

Still, it’s no secret that Trump and Epstein, who both had a home in Palm Beach, were friends. And the Diana bet certainly sounds like the kind of tasteless, macho talk two such smooth egotists might have had as they tried to impress each other over cocktails at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s grandiose Florida resort.

As Wolff notes, the pair were “two playboys who referred to themselves very much as playboys in it [Hugh] Hefner Sense, which was around for the better part of 15 years.

It is also clear, because he has released short excerpts from it, that Wolff was able to interview Epstein in 2017 (about 100 hours, he says) while he was researching his first Trump exposé, the book ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White’ from 2018. House’.

Wolff also claims — though without evidence — that Epstein would repeatedly show off a half-dozen photos of Trump with “topless young women” sitting on his lap around the pool of the financier’s Palm Beach home in the late 1990s.

In one of the photos, which Epstein reportedly kept in a safe, some girls are said to point to a stain on the front of Trump’s pants and laugh.

According to Wolff, Epstein also told him that Trump liked to “fuck his best friends’ wives.”

Trump, who has repeatedly denied accusations of infidelity (as he has denied any impropriety toward Epstein) allegedly seduced his friends’ wives by allowing them to listen in on his phone conversations with their husbands — using the would encourage men to be unfaithful. beauty pageant contestants that Trump could provide.

Wolff also says Epstein claimed he and Trump would join forces to pick up women after separating them from their male companions.

“We used to go to Atlantic City to find girls in the casino,” he allegedly told Wolff.

“And if there was a man, I’d say, ‘I’m here to invite him to dinner.’

‘And [Trump] would say, [to the woman]”I’ll show you the casino.” And as he walked out, he put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, and the bodyguard came up and Donald, whoosh, [would] take the girl with you.’

Democrats will find it all too easy to believe all these sordid stories about their political nemesis – a man who was recorded in 2005 bragging that, as a star, he could grab them by the p***y – you can do anything doing. .’

But that is certainly a calculation that the lying Epstein – also a Democrat – is said to have made when he agreed to inform Wolff.

As for the timing of Wolff’s revelations, which come just days before the election, it is hard to believe that this is not primarily intended to damage Trump’s election chances at the eleventh hour.

Wolff insists he only revealed what he was told after former Sports Illustrated model Stacey Williams came forward less than two weeks ago to claim that Epstein – her then-boyfriend – took her to Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse in 1993 where their host touched her. what she described as a “twisted game” played by the two men.

Williams, now 56, said that as soon as she was introduced to Trump, he pulled her toward him, putting his hands “all over my breasts,” waist and buttocks — apparently egged on by Epstein who, she said, exchanged a grin with Trump .

Williams said Epstein and Trump were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together.”

Her story is undoubtedly similar to the stories of some of the more than two dozen other women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct in recent decades.

But why did Williams – who campaigned for Kamala Harris in her home state of Pennsylvania this weekend – emerge now?

And why, in the same way, has the 6-foot-2 ex-beauty queen Beatrice Keul come out of the closet now? Her claims emerged just a few days later (although she first made them before the Williams scandal broke).

Keul exclusively told DailyMail.com that Trump paid for her to visit the US after she competed in a Miss Switzerland pageant in her home country.

Keul claimed he “jumped” her and groped her – again in 1993 – after inviting her for a “private chat” in a suite at his New York hotel, but that she pushed him away.

“I think my size saved me,” said Keul, now 53. “He tried to lift my dress. He grabbed and touched my body wherever he could.”

She insisted she only reported now because she discovered all the paperwork for her trip while she was packing to move home.

With or without these perfectly timed reminders, it was inevitable that Trump’s supposedly toxic private life and his sordid treatment of women would resurface in an election in which he must win back female voters.

But while any other politician’s campaign would be halted by the claims of one of these new accusers, they have barely caused a stir among Team Trump, which has dismissed them as false and designed to help Kamala Harris.

The reality is that Trump supporters, even those who consider themselves highly moral people, have long ago made peace with their husbands’ sexual proclivities.

As one wealthy evangelical Christian woman told me at a Trump rally in Tennessee in 2018, “I would never have Trump as my pastor, but I am happy to have him as my president.”

Even the suggestion of sordid new connections to Epstein, a man now considered one of the most prolific pedophiles of modern times, has failed to move the needle.

Admittedly, Epstein is hardly the most reliable source: Some of what he told Wolff as evidence that he and Trump were close is hardly news — such as his claim that Trump had scalp reduction surgery to hide his baldness. In fact, that story (denied by Trump) first surfaced in 1990.

After Epstein was arrested in New York in 2019, Trump distanced himself, saying he was “not a fan of him.” He said that after hearing about the sex trafficking allegations, he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago.

Once upon a time, things had been quite different.

The two men were often photographed together at social events in the 1990s and 2000s. And in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Great guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. In fact, it is said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Two years later they had a falling out when they both tried to buy the same estate in Palm Beach.

Indeed, they might have been best friends in the worst possible sense: swaggering rich men who loved to humiliate women (although there is no evidence that Trump ever pursued underage girls) and treat them, as Stacey Williams put it, like “a piece of meat’.

But as for the idea that any of this could — even remotely — keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House, that ship sailed long ago.