He’s accepted a $400 million plane from Qatar as a gift, launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and suffered dozens of defeats in court. But the biggest controversy of Donald Trump’s presidency, so far, has turned out to be his decade-and-a-half relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Mr Trump’s friendship with Epstein is well known, but it didn’t prove a real issue until his administration declined to release any more of the documents it holds on the paedophile financier.

Now the US president is being questioned by reporters on his former friend at every opportunity, while the justice department is being consumed by the story and the infighting of senior figures looking to shift the blame.

It has even threatened to peel away Mr Trump’s ever-loyal Maga base, when nothing else would.

At the same time, other figures have been sucked into the scandal, including Bill Clinton, the former president who rode on Epstein’s private jet, and Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to the US who holidayed with him.

Here, The Telegraph rounds up everything you need to know about the Epstein scandal – and why Mr Trump can’t escape it.

Maga

Prominent voices in Mr Trump’s Maga movement have spent years playing into conspiracy theories that Epstein did not kill himself in 2019, and was silenced by “clients” who feared he would expose their part in sex trafficking.

Kash Patel, director of the FBI, and Dan Bongino, his deputy, have appeared on several podcasts suggesting the paedophile was silenced by a “deep state” of shadowy government figures.

And Pam Bondi, the attorney general, claimed in February she had Epstein’s client list “sitting on my desk right now to review”.

So when the justice department and FBI concluded this month that Epstein did not maintain a client list, killed himself in prison, and that there was no compelling reason to produce more documents, the Maga movement erupted.