The Democratic National Committee used Monday’s National Best Friends Day to celebrate a friendship that President Donald Trump almost certainly wants forgotten.

The organization posted a 1997 photo of Trump with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein:

Happy National Best Friends Day https://t.co/H7CRmnGYDk pic.twitter.com/1pn5HDFDY1

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Epstein would later claim that he was Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years.”

The two had a falling out in 2004, reportedly over a real estate dispute.

Epstein was first arrested two years later and eventually convicted of sex crimes. He was arrested again in 2019, and died in custody in an apparent suicide while awaiting trial on allegations of trafficking underage girls and other charges.

Trump and his allies campaigned in 2024 on releasing Justice Department files related to Epstein. Once in office, however, his administration obstructed that release, with Trump himself calling the files a “Democrat hoax.”

Congress ultimately passed a law forcing the release of those files, something critics say the Trump administration has not fully complied with.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has said a search for Trump’s name in the unredacted files that lawmakers have access to returned “more than a million results.”

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