President Donald Trump can’t keep accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein off his mind.

During a press conference on Friday, Trump whiffed a softball question about a Fox News report that FBI Director Kash Patel recovered secret documents related to the probe of Trump’s connections to Russia during the 2016 election. Instead of addressing the question directly, Trump ranted vaguely about his own administration’s inability to release its files on Epstein.

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable, I think it will be shown. And it should be shown. And I think [Patel] feels that way. And I think [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] feels that way,” Trump said, seemingly mishearing or misunderstanding the question.

“The whole thing is a scam. It’s a scam set up by the Democrats, and they love talking about it,” Trump added. “You know, if they had anything, they would’ve done it the week before the election. … They controlled the file. The Democrats controlled it. [Former FBI Director James] Comey and all the, you know, sleazebags, every one of them that you read about all the time. And I guess they got some problems now having to do with yet a different scandal.”

In order to distract from his ongoing failure to deliver the long-promised Epstein files, Trump’s cronies have scrambled to concoct an embarrassingly baseless conspiracy theory involving Russia and former President Barack Obama. 

But new polling suggests that the American public is not buying what the White House is selling about the Epstein files. And each seedy new revelation linking Trump to the convicted sex offender seems to only deepen public doubt.

Trump, whose mind has long been a fantasy land of made-up facts, seems increasingly fixated on one thing these days: Epstein.