What did Donald Trump do today?

He went a quarter-mile from the White House to prove how safe he'd made Washington, and then things got embarrassing.

Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab is an upscale restaurant in the nation's capital. Trump made a surprise appearance there tonight—the first time he's ever eaten at a restaurant he doesn't own in the city while President—to trumpet how his military occupation of the city has made it "safe." National Guard forces have been mulling around Metro turnstiles and spreading mulch for weeks now, causing unrest and anger but not actually "fighting crime" as Trump has claimed.

Joe's is also less than 500 feet outside the White House grounds, literally in Trump's backyard, which is already the about the safest place imaginable where street crime is concerned—even before Trump's own security is factored. Trump travels farther on a single hole of golf than he did for this event.

 

"Joe's" in relation to the White House. 
Traveling by motorcade—which Trump did—the distance is a little over 0.2 miles.

The event appears to have been carefully staged: Trump was a no-show for the scheduled signing of a "proclamation," and White House reporters were kept in the dark until being driven around the corner for Trump's appearance at the restaurant. But in spite of what was obviously an attempt to grab a "candid" photo of Trump mixing easily with Washingtonians, Trump and his entourage of Cabinet secretaries were greeted with protests and chants.

There was another downside to the stunt: it provided reporters with an opportunity to ask Trump questions direct about his contribution to Jeffrey Epstein's "birthday book," which featured Trump's line drawing of a naked girl and references to shared "secrets" that "never age." He repeated the line his PR staff had settled on yesterday, which was a carefully worded denial that the signature, specifically, was fake.

There are two issues with this. One is that there are innumerable examples of Trump signing his first name exactly like this in casual correspondence.

 

The second is that the actual book itself, which is now in the custody of a Congressional subcommittee, was made in 2003. It features contributions by dozens of Epstein's friends, none of whom other than Trump have denied involvement. [PDF of the book. Warning: extremely disturbing content.]

In other words, Trump's theory of the case appears to be that 22 years ago, at a time in his life when he still openly celebrated his friendship with Epstein, someone created a fake document bearing Trump's name filled with coy references to Epstein's sexual predation on underage girls and snuck it into a collection so that decades later Trump's then-nonexistent political career could be hurt by it.

Why does this matter?

• There's more to making Americans safe than cosplaying as a tourist and declaring mission accomplished. 

• The most innocent possible explanation for Trump's relationship with Epstein at this point is that he was fully aware of the sex trafficking and statutory rape and simply didn't care. 

• Trying to make people scared of their everyday lives and then claiming you're their savior is the oldest dictator trick in the book.