The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The MAGA movement has been in full meltdown ever since President Trump’s Department of Justice concluded they have no evidence that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein kept a client list or was murdered in jail. This contradicted a major MAGA conspiracy theory, and MAGA influencers are screaming cover-up. Tucker Carlson just took this to another level by attacking Trump over it. Tucker faulted Trump’s government for failing to take MAGA’s questions about the situation seriously and even criticized Trump himself, which in the MAGA universe is a rarity. So what is it about the Epstein matter that pushed MAGA to the point of directly taking on Trump and his top officials rather than merely falling into line as they so often do? Nobody decodes right-wing pathologies better than historian Nicole Hemmer, author of several major books about the right and its media sources. So we’re talking to Nicole about all this today. Great to have you on, Nicole.
Nicole Hemmer: Great to be back, Greg.
Sargent: So what makes this story so rich is that senior Trump administration officials are now reaping what they sowed on Epstein in a big way. Back when they were mere MAGA influencers, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, now the director and deputy director of the FBI, were incredibly vocal in questioning the official version of Epstein’s suicide. Remember, the story then in some quarters was that the deep state was covering up the truth about Epstein because elite Democrats just might be in the Epstein files and were part of a pedophilia ring. Now Patel and Bongino are being accused of the cover-up. Nicole, can you give us your overview on all this?
Hemmer: Sure. That’s a pretty good start because Bongino and Patel are plucked from the world of conservative media and had been, as you were saying, these primary attackers against the deep state. And so when they were put in these key positions at the FBI, there really was a sense in MAGAland that they were going to blow the lid off this whole thing. And people were really excited about it. Maybe a month into the administration, conservative influencers go to the White House [and] Attorney General Pam Bondi gives them these big files that [say] on the front, “Part One of the Secret Epstein Files.” And she continued to promise over the following months that she was going to be delivering more soon, especially because those original files turned out to have nothing in them. They were just all the stuff that was publicly available on the internet.
So there had been this real energy around the Epstein files, and this was going to be one of the places where the Trump administration really pushed back against the deep states. And then a couple of weeks ago—three weeks ago, four weeks ago—Kash Patel turned up on Joe Rogan’s show, and one of the things that he talked about was that he could say conclusively that Epstein had not been murdered, that he had committed suicide in prison. Rogan was very skeptical of this claim, but it was the entering moment of what has then been rolled out in recent weeks about Epstein and the administration’s complete dismissal of the conspiracy.
Sargent: Can you bring us up to date on how this all came to be? What are the Epstein files? And how did the right get so interested in it? I guess this goes way back to the Bush years. Can you take us from there to now?
Hemmer: Yes. So this goes all the way back, as you said, to the Bush years. [In] 2006, 2007, the case is opened up against Jeffrey Epstein. There is this sense, especially as he gets rearrested during the first Trump administration, that he is this central player in this world of elite pedophilia rings. And this hits differently in 2018, 2019 than it did in 2007 because it slots in so easily with MAGA conspiracies around Pizzagate and around QAnon, which is about this child pedophilia ring led by Democrats. You get the Epstein case on top of that. And now you have actually somebody who is in prison, who has been associated with all of these leaders. There are pictures of him with Donald Trump, pictures of him with Bill Clinton, pictures of him with Reid Hoffman, with all of these different people who are political and economic elites.
Now they have someone, right? It’s not just these airy conspiracies. This is actually real. This is somebody who’s facing charges. And then he dies in prison. And that just supercharges the conspiracy because then the question is, He clearly didn’t commit suicide. He had all these powerful people he was about to expose, and now he’s dead. And that has become the center of the pedophilia ring conspiracies on the right that have never let up because that is the core conspiracy of MAGAworld.
Sargent: It becomes the way that MAGA attacks the deep state under President Biden, right? It’s added to their indictment of the deep state under Biden.
Hemmer: Right. And they have this broad sprawling conspiracy about the deep state. But the Epstein stuff is so important because it’s so emotionally charged and it’s so deeply connected to all of these other conspiracies. It is the core conspiracy: If this is true then obviously all of the other conspiracies are true. If you have a deep state that is willing to cover up and even facilitate child rape, then they will do anything, and they’re so clearly and purely evil. And that’s why this Epstein conspiracy is just so important to the right, because it is the Rosetta Stone of all of their other conspiracies and ideas about the state.
Sargent: I think we should clarify here that at the time when MAGA and all the influencers were attacking the deep state this way, they were also attacking the deep state for trying to hold Trump accountable to the law, which in MAGAland is almost as bad as pedophilia. So in steps Tucker Carlson into this maelstrom. He goes after Trump on all this during a speech at Turning Point USA. Listen to this.
Tucker Carlson (audio voiceover): And I think that’s really at the heart of why the Epstein thing is so distressing. The guy was some weird sex freak who was abusing girls. We knew that. But the fact that the U.S. government, the one that I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said, Case closed, shut up, conspiracy theorist, was too much for me. The real question is, Why was he doing this on whose behalf, and where did the money come from? And those are the questions that need to be answered. And I think it’s entirely fair to ask them. And it’s not adequate to say anyone who asked them is somehow desecrating the memory of little girls who died in Texas. [We] are not going to put up with that answer. I don’t care who gives that answer. That is not acceptable.
Sargent: So Tucker doesn’t name Trump there—but he cites the U.S. government that he voted for, which is his way of targeting Trump. And then he cites the fact that Trump brushed off a reporter’s question about all this by saying it was inappropriate to ask about Epstein during Trump’s event involving the Texas flooding. Trump flipped out at a reporter over that. Nicole, that’s pretty direct from Tucker. And the thing is, it’s hard for these people to attack Trump, isn’t it? Because as history has shown, it threatens to cost them their audiences. What do you make of what Tucker did here?
Hemmer: It is reflective of what’s happening across conservative media and conservative influencer spaces right now. There is this sense that suddenly there are two poles to the MAGAworld. One pole is loyalty to Donald Trump, and the other pole is this Epstein conspiracy. And now those are separate. And Trump has exacerbated that by not just being like, We can agree to disagree, [like with] the way that he handles things like the Covid vaccine, which he gets crosswise with the base about. Instead of just live and let live, he has pretty openly attacked his own base as conspiracy theorists, telling them to shut up, stop asking questions. And man, there is no better way to tee up someone like Tucker Carlson or other conservative influencers who see themselves as the outsiders trying to take on the insiders than saying shut up and stop asking questions. It’s just such a softball. And Tucker just swings at it and knocks it out of the park because it’s such a layup.
And it is the weak point for Trump in this particular moment. He has in some ways mishandled the Epstein incident in a way that he hasn’t mishandled anything with his base to this degree before. It has sent conservative media and conservative influencers scrambling to try to figure out, How do I respond to this without getting crosswise with my audience? because their audiences are pretty mad. In fact, Glenn Beck started his show today by just having people call in. And you can see this as giving his audience a chance to vent. And a lot of them were very mad. Some of them were on verge of tears because of how angry they were with the Trump administration. But it’s also him trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. Where does he land on this? Because he doesn’t want to say shut up and stop asking questions because his audience will reject him too. So it has everyone scrambled trying to find a way out, and Tucker Carlson is part of that process.
Sargent: So you’re monitoring this stuff pretty closely. You just listened to Glenn Beck—better you than me. Now you say that the audience is on the verge of tears over the Epstein scandal and the way the Trump administration is covering it up from their point of view. Where are these audiences with regard to Trump? Are they telling themselves that Trump is at the core of this cover-up as well? That’s where it really breaks down for me in trying to understand what’s going on with these people. How do they square that circle with themselves? Trump is infallible, yet his administration is covering up the Epstein scandal, which is the biggest scandal of the last 50 years in their view. How do you make sense of that?
Hemmer: This is where all of the chaos is coming from because people are trying to figure out where to fall on that issue. Some folks have said, Look, Trump has betrayed us. The only way that he could possibly ever win us back is by changing his position on Epstein and releasing everything. And by releasing everything, they mean releasing documents that prove that [they] were right about the Epstein conspiracy. And then they go further and they say, Well, if he’s not willing to do that, then it is because he himself is implicated in these Epstein files. So that’s one group who’s like, We’ve just been betrayed.
Others are like, I know I should trust Donald Trump, but he has let somebody like Pam Bondi, the attorney general, make all of these mistakes and hide all of this material from us. And he’s not stopping it. And in fact, he’s going on Truth Social and defending her. I don’t know what to do with this. And this is, in fact, where people like Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly are with their audiences. They’re like, Look, we’re not attacking Donald Trump, but how do we make sense of this? And then you have people like Charlie Kirk, like Scott Adams—the Dilbert-cartoonist-turned-influencer—who say, Look, this is the way government works. We voted for Donald Trump. We have put our trust in him. He has earned our trust. He took a bullet for us. How dare you question him? That’s the range of reactions. And the person who is able to reconcile those different groups is the person who is going to come out of this stronger.
Sargent: So you mentioned that Trump is out there defending Bondi. You’re referring to a tweet that Trump unleashed over the weekend. It was this long rant in which he tried to tell MAGA, Forget about this Epstein stuff already. And Trump blamed Dems for it, saying “they created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.” Nicole, what’s amazing about this is this bottomless contempt Trump has for MAGA. MAGA spent years claiming something nefarious had happened with Epstein’s suicide. That was how the Epstein files came to be. They created it. MAGA created it, right? And now Trump is just essentially saying, Forget what you’ve said for years. Just blame it on Democrats. Hah.
Hemmer: It is a response that shows that Trump is in an unusual position, that his back is against the wall [with] his base and he’s throwing everything he can, trying every trick in the book in order to try to redirect them. And one of the reasons it’s not working is precisely what you were saying, which is there are a significant percentage of MAGA voters who are deep into the Epstein conspiracy. Because again, it’s like the legitimate edge of the QAnon conspiracies and the Pizzagate conspiracies. They know what the documents look like. They’ve charted where the different planes go and who they think is on the client list and all of these different things. They’re parsing every single word Pam Bondi has ever said about Epstein. They are parsing every single word that Trump has said about Epstein and about his partner, Maxwell. They are so closely following this that that kind of reflexive, I don’t know, Obama made up the Epstein files, is something that just doesn’t fly within these conspiracy circles.
I think, over time, that will be a path for some people back to Trump after this kerfuffle blows over. They’ll say, Oh yeah, right, but.… In fact, there’s even a conspiracy theory right now that, Well, there had been all of this evidence about Epstein, but the Obama administration and the Biden administration messed with the files so much that now it would be pointless to release it because all of the evidence has been messed with. So what you’re going to see, I think, is just a cavalcade of conspiracies that come rushing out to try to reconcile the irreconcilable, which is that the Epstein files were a big component of what the base wanted to see when Trump was back in power. They saw Bongino and Patel be put in these high positions. They saw that as a promise that they would see these files. They’re not going to see these files. And now they have to figure out, Does that mean that we’re off the Trump train, or are we going to figure out a bigger conspiracy that we can nest ourselves in so that we can continue to feel good about supporting Donald Trump?
Sargent: I’m going to guess it’s mostly going to be the latter. Just to sum this up, you have been following right-wing media for many years. You wrote a great book about it, Messengers of the Right. And nobody knows better than you that for the last 50 years or so, what the right has done is fed its own masses lies and conspiracy theories of the most ludicrous nature. Where does this fit into that 50-year story? It strikes me that there’s something qualitatively different happening here with the absolute contempt that Trump is showing to these audiences on this stuff and the challenge that this poses for right-wing media who had spent years telling their masses to take this seriously.
Hemmer: It is a big challenge, and I do think you’re right that it is qualitatively different in the sense that it would have been very difficult 50 years ago to sustain conspiracy theories at this level and to have a leader like Donald Trump who just is so divorced from reality, who can create his own reality in a way. And that is down to an entirely different media system in which people are operating and this kind of cult of personality around Donald Trump. Those two things are related. But what’s fascinating right now is that people’s loyalties have been divided on this issue—and somebody like Tucker Carlson comes in and he says, This is an opportunity.
This is an opportunity for Tucker Carlson. Now I’m not one of those people who think that Carlson is going to run for president or anything, but I do think that he is positioning himself to be the leader to the right of Donald Trump. He looks a lot in this sense like Pat Buchanan, who looked at the Reagan administration and said, The biggest vacuum in American politics right now is to the right of Ronald Reagan. Tucker Carlson looks at contemporary politics and he says, Ah, the opening for me is to the right of Donald Trump. And he leans in much more heavily to the antisemitic parts of these conspiracy theories. He leans in even more heavily into some of the racist aspects of Trump’s policies. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there is more room to the right on that, but there is more room to the right on that. He is reconstituting in many ways what we called the alt-right back in the 2010s, which is this more overtly, virulently racist and antisemitic and conspiratorial right. And he is positioning himself as the leader of that part of the MAGA movement and is claiming ownership of it.
So I think one of the interesting things about this moment is how it replicates those previous moments in right-wing history where there has been division in the ranks and there are people who have seen that as, OK, that’s a political opportunity to move the right even further to the right. And that is the story of the last 50 years of American conservatism: a right that has been drawn and has eagerly run further to the right and has radicalized more and more. And Tucker Carlson is positioning himself as one of those radicalizers.
Sargent: Just to go over that 50 years of history; it’s longer than 50 now, I guess. We’re talking about going back to the 1960s and the Birchers and to the ’50s and McCarthy. There’s always this constituency on the right that’s available for these people who want to take the conspiracy theories to the next level. Can you just quickly walk us through those different iterations over the years right up to the present?
Hemmer: Yes, conspiracism has been a big part of the right in its earliest Cold War iterations. McCarthyism and the Birchers were a big part of this: that idea that it wasn’t just that communist represented a threat to the United States but that they were, in fact, plotting to overthrow the U.S. and that U.S. leaders like Dwight Eisenhower were in on it. There was this real sense that Americans weren’t just locked in this existential battle but they were being betrayed by elites—elites in the universities, elites in politics. And that is a through line through all of these conspiracies. They would continue through into the ’60s and ’70s—that the civil rights movement was a communist conspiracy, that white people were being betrayed in order to elevate black people and to enrich elites in the U.S. And then in the ’90s, the target turns to immigrants to the U.S., particularly Latinos to the U.S. And those were put forward as, This is the reason why your schools are overcrowded and why your government’s going bankrupt and why the economy is not doing well. And that they are in fact being brought into the U.S. by political elites who are trying to betray you, the real American.
Sargent: And of course, Nicole, if I could just jump in and point out that those are the same people who said that the Clintons were killing people.
Hemmer: Oh, absolutely. Yes. The edgier, far-out-there conspiracies have also been there the entire time. There was a book written about Lyndon Johnson in 1964 that suggested that he and his wife had killed like a dozen people, which was a forerunner to the Clinton Chronicles in the ’90s, which is a forerunner to the Clinton Chronicles of the 2010s—this idea that the Democrats are not just corrupt and they’re not just political opponents, but they’re actively evil and they’re responsible for murders and pedophilia and all of these different things.
Sargent: Right. So just to wrap this up, very deeply embedded in the structure of these conspiracy theories at their most virulent is this idea that there’s this massive enemy within that’s corroded its way through all the ranks all the way to the very top. That was what was behind the Eisenhower stuff, behind the Bircher stuff, all the way up through the Clintons as you mentioned. And so in a way, the Epstein matter is so potent for the right for precisely that reason. This was the moment when the conspiracy theorists had their own people in the government to finally reveal all this to be the real truth. And that’s what’s being betrayed. Isn’t that what’s happening here?
Hemmer: This is the moment that makes it something that is a difference of not just degree but of kind. Because this really was, even more so than the first Trump administration, the very first time that the conspiracists were in the building, that the conspiracy theorists had their hands on the files. And the conspiracy theorists go into the government, and they come back out and they say, Nothing to see here. There could not be a bigger betrayal, and that is why the heads are exploding all over the right right now.
Sargent: That really sums it up so perfectly. My God, it’s hard to see how this resolves itself, but maybe Trump will just keep telling people what to think and they’ll fall into line. Nicole Hemmer, it’s an enormous pleasure to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for coming on.
Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me back.