The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 17 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.
President Donald Trump is in an absolute fury over his inability to stop MAGA from talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files. He unleashed a furious, manic tirade on Truth Social over it, and then rambled bizarrely about it to reporters for over a minute straight. None of it’s working. Striking new polls—one from Quinnipiac and the other from CNN—show wide public dissatisfaction with the whole Epstein fiasco. Critically, both polls show large chunks of Republicans are also unhappy about it, suggesting his efforts to shut this down aren’t working. But something deeper is going on here. Trump is also revealing a level of contempt for MAGA that’s unusual even for him. His anger seems primarily rooted in his inability to simply command them to think whatever he tells them to think. We’re talking about all this today with Rolling Stone writer Asawin Suebsaeng, who has a great new piece digging into the Trump team’s frantic efforts to close this thing down and why it’s failing. Swin, good to have you back on.
Suebsaeng: Always good to be on the pod, man.
Sargent: To catch people up very quickly, MAGA spent years promoting the idea that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, had been killed to cover up widespread pedophilia by elites, especially Democrats. Among those who promoted this were top MAGA people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who are now in Trump’s government as director and deputy director of the FBI. They went in there and then suddenly announced, Nothing here. Swin, is that about the size of it?
Suebsaeng: Well, isn’t it funny which conspiracy theories they decide could institute as official government policy and doctrine and what they, just out of political convenience or whatever reason, would like the MAGA base to move on from. When it comes to the anti-democratic lies that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden from Donald Trump, all of those authoritarian lies are being cemented right now into government policy across multiple branches and agency. They have no problem with that, even though it’s complete lie and the exact opposite is true.
The Jeffrey Epstein stuff—now that people like Donald Trump are starting to feel a little bit of heat and inconvenience from it, all of a sudden he doesn’t want people talking about it anymore. It’s fake news. Only the Democrats would like to tar and feather him with this. In fact, all those files that you keep hounding me about were written by people like Barack Obama, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton, as if these individuals have anything to do with the way that certain FBI investigative files are written. It’s spectacular. I don’t mean that as a compliment. It is a surprising and unique—even for Trumpland—level of dick-stepping that you oftentimes do not see, even with this cabal.
Sargent: Trump unleashed this furious rant on Truth Social. I’m going read from it, “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson … even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work … I don’t want their support anymore!” So Swin, I think the way to read this is almost like an ultimatum. He’s saying, You don’t get to be my supporters anymore if you keep talking about my own government’s failings here. It’s making me feel uncomfortable. Stop, otherwise you’re out.
Suebsaeng: There’s myriad things wrong with the communications blitz that Trump is going about here where he’s trying to perform this conspiracy theory–land jiu-jitsu of saying, Oh, if you care about the Epstein files, you’re playing into my enemy’s hands and you’re just giving the Democratic Party what it wants. First of all, this is not a product of the left ever since at least 2019. There has been a massive gap that almost immediately opened up between the online left and the online right even though Donald Trump was president when Epstein died in custody where the right wing—even the mainstream of the American right—very aggressively decided that Epstein was murdered to protect enemies of Donald Trump. That has been nurtured and fostered for a bunch of years by the mainstream Republican right. So it’s way too late to try to put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Nevertheless, the president of the United States is trying because he’s trotting out over and over again this completely manufactured talking point that Obama wrote the files, crooked James Comey wrote the files, crooked Hillary Clinton wrote the files, and they did it in part to try to get Trump. This is something that came out of nowhere, and I don’t think anybody except for Donald Trump was saying or is saying right now. And when I talked to various administration officials or people who have known Trump for a long time who were working on the outside of the federal government right now over the weekend, a leading concern among them was they were saying that the way the president is conducting himself right now and the way he’s talking about this publicly is making it very difficult for even some of his biggest supporters to at least not privately suspect that maybe he might be in the Epstein files in some incriminating way.
In other words, look, you and I don’t know what’s actually in the full FBI file. Also, just for the record, not that it matters one way or the other but FBI files are often long and have a lot of things compiled in there—but I digress. If you were someone who was incredibly guilty and implicated in a secret federal file in some way and really, really, really did not want it released and also if you were in charge of the federal apparatus that had the power to release this information, it is hard to imagine that that individual would be acting in any way different than President Donald Trump is—except for the fact that any other individual in that position would probably be acting with more care and more tact than the president is. They would probably think to themselves, I should probably not act in a way that arouses so much suspicion.
Sargent: Right. So Trump unleashed a rant about this to reporters that really underscores your point. Listen to these excerpts from it.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): It’s all been a big hoax. It’s perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net. I call it the Epstein hoax. The sad part is it’s people that are really doing the Democrats work. They’re stupid people.
Sargent: Swin, Trump’s own people fueled this conspiracy theory. Just a reminder, Patel and Bongino were big-time MAGA influencers. They played a huge role in telling MAGA that once the lid was ripped off the deep state, the cover-up of the Epstein files would be revealed. Now they’re deep in the deep state, and they failed to deliver on their own conspiracy theory. And now to make it even more perfect, Trump is attacking MAGA voters as stupid for believing his own top people on this. Swin, this is a level of abusiveness toward members of the Trump cult that’s almost shocking. Swin, do you think that Trump might be in the Epstein files? What’s your sense of it?
Suebsaeng: OK, if we’re just guessing here.… I want to underscore that you and I are just doing pure educated speculation here. Getting that throat-clearing out of the way, it would not stun me if one potential scenario came to pass that Donald Trump’s name is in a very large, very secret Epstein file. Because if you know anything about how federal agents often put these files together, there’s oftentimes a lot of data points and Wikipedia-style information in there. And one thing that people might have wanted to figure out as they were cataloging at Jeffrey Epstein’s life while they were criminally investigating him was, What did his orbit of very famous, very influential and very powerful people look like?
And it is a matter of public record that multiple American presidents, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, were in and out of his social order and universe over the years. That’s not a controversial thing to state. That’s just a fact. And if that ended up in the notes of an FBI agent or investigator and it were in the file, that actually is a completely innocent explanation of how President Trump’s name could be in there. The problem is we are light years away from finding that out one way or the other because the Trump administration seems very determined right now to be not transparent about these issues.
Sargent: We now have two new polls now on the Epstein fiasco. Quinnipiac finds 63 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files. CNN finds that 50 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the information the federal government has released about the Epstein case. I think what’s crucial in these polls though is that in CNN, 40 percent of Republican respondents are dissatisfied with the info released by the government—and Quinnipiac has 36 percent of Republicans disapproving of Trump’s handling of it. So at the very least, there are sizable chunks of the GOP base who are upset by this despite Trump’s efforts to command Republicans to forget about it. Your thoughts?
Suebsaeng: Isn’t it spectacular in the worst, most “hell world” possible ways that Trump and his top lieutenants are sustaining significantly more political damage and blowback right now for how they’re handling the Epstein files than Trump did last month when he literally bombed Iran? If you know anything about the extremely online parts of the MAGA base or the MAGA influencer community, such a statement actually maybe isn’t that surprising. If you know about how they work and what their priorities are and what their pathological obsessions and fixations are.… However, objectively speaking, it’s, as I mentioned earlier, very much a “hell world” scenario.
Sargent: Absolutely. So tell us what you’re reporting. You dug pretty deeply into what’s going on behind the scenes with Trumpists and top Trump influencers and all those good people. What’d you find?
Suebsaeng: All those amazing, very morally upstanding people as you say, yes. Well look, I think the main takeaway from our reporting at Rolling Stone about how this week from hell, this Epstein-shaped hole in the wall just completely engulfed the highest levels of the Trump administration in really perversely comical ways. The thing that I took away from it the most as we talked to more and more administration officials and other people close to Donald Trump is the degree to which Trump, his senior staff, and other heavy hitters within the federal apparatus threw a gigantic amount of resources, time, and outreach effort to try to contain the fallout within MAGAworld particularly—both within the government and also well outside of it that President Trump and his people incurred immediately starting after the DOJ and FBI release of the now infamous Epstein memo and video that went along with it.
Just to use one data point, the ways in which Trump and his Vice President JD Vance themselves—and not just them, other people, but starting with them since they’re the literal president and vice president of the U.S.—got personally involved in outreach efforts over the past several days, essentially trying to beg the upper ranks of their own federal law enforcement to stop breaking apart [like] in the form of Dan Bongino storming out and threatening to quit in protest over Pam Bondi’s handling of the investigation.… This whole thing also re-erupted and reignited a feud between Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, that had been laying dormant and behind the scenes over the past several months. Something that there actually isn’t that much reporting but that we started to flick at in our work at Rolling Stone in the past few days is that Kash Patel and Pam Bondi really do not like each other. And this whole Epstein debacle has only exacerbated that.
So we have a situation where some of the highest levels of Trump’s government, including the very tippy top of federal law enforcement, are on fire in the past few days because of this. And people don’t even know if the number two at the FBI is going to show up to work anymore. And beyond that, Trump, Vance, and other administration officials have for days been calling heavy hitters in the MAGAsphere on the outside, including top online influential conservative influencers who have been going very hard at the administration over the Epstein affair, essentially begging them—or in some cases implicitly threatening them with a potential loss of access—to lay off and start talking about this stuff. I don’t think we have enough time on this episode to get into every facet of the stuff we’ve been finding out or recording, but I will just.… To put a finer point on it, the way in which the administration has been doing a full court press on this stuff to try to constrain the damage that Trump has done to himself—and that the other parts of the federal government have done to themselves over the past week or so—reminds me of a level of outreach and damage assessment and control that you typically see from White Houses when they’re trying to pass a major piece of legislation, not when they’re trying to convince influencers to leave them alone about the pedophile.
Sargent: Right. This is what I just fundamentally don’t understand about this. When Trump and JD Vance and top people in the administration go out to MAGA influencers and beg and plead with them to not talk about this, how does that not pique MAGA’s suspicion even more? In other words, if I’m MAGA and I’m on the receiving end of this full court press that you’re talking about, I’m going to ask myself, Why don’t they want me to talk about this? I thought this was supposed to reveal all sorts of perfidy by Democratic elites. Why are they trying to shut me up? Is that happening in MAGA? Are they saying that to themselves about this?
Suebsaeng: To a certain degree, yes. And also to a certain degree, they’re trying to politely say publicly, like Charlie Kirk, who is obviously close to multiple senior members of the Trump administration and has a relationship with President Trump and Vice President Vance themselves.… He got the bat signal to please lay off because his constant framing of this issue, including during a fairly high-profile TP USA conference over the weekend. Trump saw that and caught wind of it and it did piss off the president of the U.S. that Charlie Kirk and his people were going so hard at this issue. So Charlie Kirk gets the word. So on Monday he goes on his show and tells his followers, For now, I’m going to lay off this issue. For now. And then he gets enough backlash from grassroots people or whatever the hell you want to call them that I think it doesn’t take much longer than 24 hours for him to come out and say, Actually, no, I can’t let this go.
So there is an incentive structure beyond the demands of the dear leader that are going to keep this alive among the MAGA grassroots. [And] not only the MAGA grassroots, though, because the Republicans on Capitol Hill, literal GOP elected officials who have publicly said they are not letting this go—to the point that House Speaker Mike Johnson has had to also essentially say it is not time to let this thing go. This is what happens when an entire movement nurtures these kinds of rabid far-right conspiracy theories for years and years and years to a point that within MAGA and within the conservative movement, it becomes essentially wholly writ. It becomes a piece of basically religious doctrine that these conspiracy theories are true. And then Trump and Kash Patel and others want to turn around and tell them, Oh, there’s not nothing to see here. You can trust us. Just let go of it. I’m sorry. It doesn’t work this way. Trump should try to tell his evangelical advisers and his prominent supporters in the American evangelical movement next that, Oh, by the way, adultery isn’t a sin. That doesn’t exist in the Bible. You got that wrong.
Sargent: I think maybe what we’re looking at here, Swin, is a war in MAGA between two impulses. One is the one you’re talking about there, which is the unchecked conspiracism, the really crazed desire to believe that there are these really dastardly things that Democratic elites have done, such as pedophilia. So that’s one force. But the other force is everything needs to always help Trump at all costs. And so when Trump and Vance go to the influencers and say to them, Look, guys, this is not helpful, they’re really saying prioritize the second one of those over the first one. Both of them are extremely unhealthy to the point of deep derangement. And they’re at odds with each other, which makes the whole thing even more combustible. Does that make sense?
Suebsaeng: No, totally. And look, as shambolically organized and demoralized as so much of the Democratic Party’s power bases are right now at the start of a second Trump presidency, even they are able to figure out that, OK, we need to make hay out of this. We got to keep exploiting these MAGAworld fissures as aggressively as we can. That’s why you see Hakeem Jeffries and other prominent Democratic elected officials talking about this and going hard at it and even trying to force a vote to have the Epstein files released or whatever. Obviously, Republicans on Capitol Hill ended up voting that down. I don’t think anybody here is going to take the guess that Republican lawmakers doing that is going to allay any concerns or suspicions among factors of MAGAland, that Republicans are doing this not to serve the base but to protect the dear leader Donald Trump.
Sargent: Swin, where does this all end up? Just play this out and let us know how much longer we’re going to have to endure this craziness and where it leads.
Suebsaeng: Well, no end in sight right now—but as all things with Trumpworld, no end in sight can mean stretches on for years or millennia or maybe in a couple of days something else ends up taking over. But for the time being, there is no end in sight. And one of the major reasons why there isn’t is because if Donald Trump wanted to do a better, more appropriately manicured brand management right now, you’d think that maybe he would just stop talking about for five fucking seconds. But a major reason why this keeps driving news cycles is because the literal most powerful man in the world with the American nuclear launch coats won’t shut the fuck up about this.
He keeps going before the cameras, taking the bait when reporters ask him questions, including when he’s meeting earlier on Wednesday with the leader of Bahrain. And he keeps, without anybody making him, posting to Truth Social over and over again things that make him look especially to a very conspiracy minded individual very, very guilty of something. So again, Mr. Trump, if you’re listening, you keep telling everybody to stop talking about Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, heal thyself dear leader.
Sargent: Asawin Suebsaeng, thanks for that decoding, man. We really appreciate it. It’s always great to talk to you.
Suebsaeng: I would also like to remind your listeners that I am definitely not in the Epstein files.