The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 10 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.
House Democrats have now released Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “birthday book,” and it absolutely wrecks the spin that Donald Trump and the White House have been offering up about this whole sordid affair. The much discussed note Trump wrote to Epstein appears to be very real, and there’s even an image of a big check that discusses selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Trump for over $20,000. At the White House briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt struggled to spin away all this damning new information. She seemed pretty ticked, angrily snapping at the media on all kinds of other things. Meanwhile, House Republicans went into full ostrich mode, and MAGA media personalities furiously denounced all of it as a hoax. It’s all an unnerving window into the force of the MAGA disinformation machine when it goes into hyperdrive for Trump. Today we’re talking to MSNBC’s Steve Benen, who has a good piece looking at the more preposterous things Republicans are doing to make this all go away. Hey Steve, good to see you, man.
Steve Benen: Greg, it’s great to be back.
Sargent: So after MAGA spent years hyping the materials gathered in the criminal investigation into Epstein, Trump took power and his people looked at the files and then they went right into cover-up mode. Now we’ve seen the book Epstein’s friends dedicated to him on his fiftieth birthday, and the lewd drawing with all the cryptic suggestive lines from Trump about their shared tendencies is indeed in there. And it sure looks like it was signed by one Donald J. Trump. Steve, can you sum up what we just learned here?
Benen: Well, I can try. I think that we reach a new point in this story in July when The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of this so-called “birthday book,” at which point The White House, Donald Trump, and his allies immediately denounced all of this. In fact, they sued The Wall Street Journal saying that this entire reporting is fake, that there is no such document, that the president doesn’t like to draw, that no one should take any of this seriously. And for a while, that was more or less going to work for them as an official line—because at that point we hadn’t seen any evidence of the contrary. We had the Journal’s reporting and we had the Trump’s claims, and that was it. But things changed this week, obviously. Now we’ve seen the document. Now we’ve seen this letter. Now we’ve seen this information that has been released by congressional Democrats. And so the story has fundamentally changed.
At this point, the White House has a decision to make—had a decision to make, I should say. Do they either acknowledge the existence of this letter, or do they pretend that Donald Trump didn’t sign a letter that he obviously signed? Unfortunately for everyone involved, including reality, the White House chose the latter course and now we’re dealing with the consequences.
Sargent: The White House is claiming Trump’s signature as a forgery. And Steve, in your piece, you pointed out for this to be true, for Trump’s signature to be forged, it would have to have been done many years ago since the birthday book is from 2003. And this would have been done despite the book being in possession of the Epstein estate, which has it. So it turns out Karoline Leavitt was asked about this little problem by reporter Maggie Haberman. Listen to this.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): The president has one of the most famous signatures in the world and he has for many, many years. You know that, Maggie, you’ve covered him for a long time, long before he assumed this office, when he was a businessman in New York. The president did not write that letter. He did not sign those documents. He maintains that position, and that position will be argued in court by his lawyers. The president is very confident he’s going to win this case.
Sargent: So yeah, that doesn’t really add up. The Times looked at a bunch of Trump signatures from around the time of this “birthday book” and they had almost identical features to the ones on the birthday note. And that aside, saying he has a famous signature—the most famous signature in the world, note again ministering to the audience of one’s ego—doesn’t explain why it’s on that note or why someone would have forged it. Your thoughts on that, Steve?
Benen: Yeah, the phrase “literally unbelievable” keeps coming to mind. Here we are. I’m not unsympathetic. If I’m Karoline Leavitt, I don’t know what to say either. This is an unspinable story. It’s an undeniable reality that we are that she’s confronting. And so she’s doing her best with what she has, but what she has is ridiculous. The idea that Donald Trump’s signature was somehow manufactured 20 some years ago being held onto by the Epstein estate in this obvious document that the president obviously signed and that somehow this was all of this elaborate conspiracy that somehow also led to the same signature appearing in all these other documents is preposterous on its face. But let’s not forget the larger context of this, which is they have nothing else.
They have nothing else because the alternative is to acknowledge the fact that Donald Trump sent this cryptic message with this creepy drawing to a convicted pedophile who was his longtime friend. And so rather than acknowledge that reality, they’re stuck spinning this preposterous tale that no one can seriously believe.
Sargent: Well, it’s certainly mystifying. And here’s the thing. We don’t know what’s really in the Epstein files involving Trump. There’s been some reporting that the FBI has been told to look through the files for mentions of his name and so forth, but nobody really knows what’s in there. And they keep saying that the whole thing’s a hoax, but then you wonder, Well, if it’s a hoax cooked up by Democrats, which is another choice piece of spin that Trump and Leavitt are offering, why not release the files? Wouldn’t releasing the files show that it’s a hoax, as you say? None of it adds up in any sense. And the thing is, you got to wonder why they’re doing it this way in particular. Given that we don’t know what’s in there, it actually increases suspicion that there’s something really dark and disgusting in there involving Trump.
Benen: Yeah. One of the most remarkable things about this controversy over the course of the last several months to me is the fact that they’ve taken a series of steps that have made it much worse for themselves. I know a great many of observers in media and the public and elsewhere who have said that they were skeptical of the entire controversy until they started to watch the Trump White House and its allies engage in this cover-up. At that point, the people who were skeptical of it became less skeptical and more interested in hearing more about the controversy—because ordinarily when we’re dealing with Trump and his allies, when they act like they have something to hide, it’s because they have something to hide.
Sargent: Oh yeah, and there’s another piece of Leavitt’s spin I want to play as well. There’s this picture of a check in the “birthday book,” with a note saying that a “fully depreciated” woman was sold to Trump for $22,500. Here’s what Leavitt said about this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): One of the other documents released by the House Oversight Committee contained a photo of Jeffrey Epstein holding an oversized check that was made out to him from the president for $22,000 for a “fully depreciated” woman. I wondered if the president has any recollection of that, or what do you guys make of that photo that was included in those documents?
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Did you see the signature on that check? It is not Donald Trump’s signature. It is absolutely not. The president did not sign that check.
Sargent: So, Steve, of course she totally dodges there. The issue is not the check signature. It’s the note that was with it. Why is that note there?
Benen: Now we have this additional element of this photograph and the reference to a “fully depreciated” woman, which is obviously disgusting rhetoric and which only compounds the severity of the overall scandal. It adds so much to the overall scandal. I’m not surprised that Leavitt struggled with this line of questioning because there is no defense. There is no argument that’s to be able to just make this go away. There’s no silver bullet of rhetoric that will somehow answer the question because it’s just too overwhelming.
Sargent: I want to move to Republicans because what they’re saying is even crazier if that’s possible. They’ve all been forced to pretend Trump and the White House are making a real argument here. Congressman James Comer, the chair of the Oversight Committee said, “The president says he did not sign it, so I take the president at his word.” And Comer says they won’t investigate the signature piece of this. Steve, it’s really something for the chairman of the oversight committee to say we’re not investigating because the president told us it’s a fake charge.
Benen: Right. Yeah. As if Donald Trump has such a great track record for telling the truth. What could possibly go wrong? I realize that James Comer is a difficult person to take seriously. I realize that he is a knee-jerk partisan. He’s going to obviously do whatever Donald Trump says he wants. He’s effectively playing the role of a White House employee. So none of us, I don’t think, are surprised by this. But at the same time, it’s so shameless. It’s so brazen, so on its face absurd that I think that ultimately in the eyes of anyone who’s taking this process seriously, James Comer comes across as a clown.
Sargent: I want to read a quote from Senate Majority Leader John Thune, which isn’t much better, “There’s a dispute about whether that’s really his signature, so it’s just going to be argued back and forth.” Yeah, it’s just a dispute. We don’t have any role here, says the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, which has all kinds of oversight powers and responsibilities.
Benen: “Responsibilities,” I think, is the key word there. This is not supposed to be optional. Congress has a responsibility under the Constitution to do oversight of the executive branch. Yet here we have a president caught up in a very serious scandal with mounting evidence against him, and John Thune on one side of Capitol Hill and James Comer on another are just simply washing their hands of the whole mess as if they have nothing to do with it. And yet they clearly do. They could get answers for us and for themselves. And yet they seem completely indifferent.
Sargent: Well, Steve, you’ve been covering politics a long time. There was a time at which you would have expected senior leaders of a party whose president is in such a pickle, in such a deep scandal, to go to the White House and say, Mr. President, this isn’t working. We really have to do something else here. We’re going to have to be a little more transparent. We know that you’re in a difficult position, Mr. President, but this isn’t working for us. We’re getting absolutely slaughtered out there. By the way, Republicans are getting absolutely slaughtered out there. The polls are killing them on the Epstein stuff. And so why isn’t that happening here? If you step back, it really feels to me like something different is happening here from what you’d ordinarily expect. There’s a level of cultish devotion to the guy at the top that’s just deeply unnerving and very different from what we’ve seen in the past.
Benen: Yeah, I agree with you. I think that there’s two elements here. I think for some Republicans, there’s genuine fear. From the perspective of some Republicans who are watching these events unfold, they realize that they’d like to do more but they’re afraid of the MAGA base; they’re afraid of conservative media; they’re afraid of what the White House might do in terms of primary rivals and investments in primary rivals and super PACs and so forth. And so they toe the line because they feel like it’s necessary for the advancement of their career. I think that is a risky bet. Given the way the polls are unfolding right now and the prevailing political winds and historical trends as it relates to the midterms, I think that is a risky bet for them. But nevertheless, I understand that that helps explain the motivation for some.
That’s first part. The second part, though, I think is something that you just said a moment ago. It’s cultish behavior. I do think that the Republican Party, to a very real degree, became a cult of personality. I think that Donald Trump, of course, is the strongman at the head of this cult. And for most Republicans, it’s a question of just this blind loyalty, this knee-jerk reaction to every scandal, to every controversy, to every question. So Donald Trump says that he didn’t sign this document that he obviously signed—as far as they’re concerned, that’s just good enough.
Sargent: One thing that’s so bizarre about what you just said there is Republicans are afraid of the MAGA base on this. But literally a few months ago, all of MAGA wanted to know what was in the files.
Benen: Yeah, it’s funny how quickly they can change their minds once Donald Trump has told them everything’s fine. Don’t worry about what’s in the documents. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. And then a lot of that crowd just moved right on.
Sargent: Yeah. And Media Matters’s Matt Gertz actually did a really good job of showing how all these major MAGA opinion-makers turned 180 degrees the second Trump told them to stop talking about it, which is just extraordinary. You’d think they’d have a scintilla of independence or curiosity about what they’re seeing.
Benen: One might assume, and yet here we are.
Sargent: I find the whole thing highly unsettling that the entire machine can go into hyperdrive in such a deceptive way. What do you think of it?
Benen: Yeah, I think the use of the word “machine” there is important. What we’ve seen in this instance and in every instance as far as I’m concerned over the last decade or so is that no one person can drive disinformation by himself or herself. It requires a coordinated, comprehensive approach. And so there’s Donald Trump. There’s Karoline Leavitt. There’s the White House communications operation just writing the script. As absurd and preposterous as it is on its face, they write this script and they send it out. And then what happens? We see congressional Republicans reading it. We see conservative media personalities reading it. We see MAGA activists promoting it on social media. It is a comprehensive approach. And they do this because they have a track record of success with it.
If you look back over the last several months, for example, how many Republicans right now believe that job numbers aren’t real? Well, they are real, but because they’re discouraging and because they reflect the failure of Trump’s economic agenda, the MAGA base and the Republicans in general have convinced themselves, Well, the job numbers aren’t real because the White House told us that they’re not real. And the same is true on crime statistics and the same is true on climate data, and so on and so on. Even on vaccines, the White House writes the script and then it goes. There’s this pipeline of information—and I should say disinformation—and we see this machine kick into gear, to borrow your term, and it’s extremely effective. And what’s discouraging for the rest of us is that we know our weird uncle who watches Fox all day is going to believe it because they’ve been conditioned to discount independent information. And so here we have the same feedback loop that we’ve seen so many times over the course of several years play out again and again. And here we are, watching it happen once more.
Sargent: Well, where’s this going, Steve? You’ve got this pressure building. Recently, the Epstein survivors all spoke out and it was incredibly powerful stuff. We’re at the point where it looks like a discharge petition really may well pass that would supposedly compel release of the Epstein files, although there’s some doubt about whether it actually would or not and there’s some doubt about how the Justice Department would handle it. I have trouble understanding how the status quo continues forever. And I’m looking for some help here, really, in understanding where this could go. Does there come a point where Republicans finally relent and in some sense maybe allow or call for a larger release of the Epstein files than the one we’re seeing right now that House Republicans are engineering, which is all bullshit? Maybe a limited release that looks more like a release than what they’re doing now? Does this change?
Benen: I am not optimistic. I want to say—I want to be able to reassure you and your listeners that that there is a light at the end of this tunnel and it is the light of transparency. I want to be able to do that. But I’ve also grown cynical in a way after seeing what happened after January 6, after Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, after the rewriting of the story of Covid. And there have been so many instances over the last several years in which Republicans have waged a war against the recent past and they’ve succeeded. They’ve won because they’ve managed to convince just enough people to survive just long enough to win the new cycle and to win the argument such as it is.
So do we come to a point in the near future in which Republicans will relent, or at least just enough Republicans relent? I am skeptical. I think that we will soon see what’s going on in terms of the House discharge petition, whether there could be just a small handful of GOP House members to come around. But yet they’ve had plenty of time to do that. They’ve had plenty of opportunities. They’ve seen plenty of the polls and yet they don’t do it, which is why I’m so discouraged, which is why I find it hard to believe that in the coming weeks and months that there will be this turnaround. They haven’t done it yet. And given their track record and their slavish devotion to Donald Trump, it is difficult for me to see a point in which they come around.
Sargent: So if that’s the case, we just continue like this with more and more dribs and drabs coming out that look worse and worse and worse? And somehow they just keep the lid on the pressure cooker?
Benen: Yes, that is what I think is going to happen.
Sargent: And it never blows up?
Benen: Well, if we’re waiting for a smoking gun, there will probably will not be one. There’s not going to be a document in which Donald Trump makes some unbelievably felonious admission to his former friend and that comes to public light and then all of a sudden the sky falls. It’s unrealistic to think that he ever signed such a document or there is such a piece of evidence like that. But I think that in all likelihood, this will simmer for the next several months. The White House will continue to go with equally preposterous denials and the MAGA base and conservative media and their allies will just continue to play along.
Sargent: Well, that’s really a remarkable thing to contemplate. You got to keep coming back to this underlying question that won’t go away, which is: Why won’t they release the files? What’s in there involving Donald Trump? Because you know if there were any other person that this would implicated while not implicating Trump, they would just throw that person under the bus instantly.
Benen: Instantly, of course. Yes. That is one of the foundational problems here is that we are all aware of that dynamic and yet the administration can’t overcome it and Republicans aren’t prepared to ask questions about it.
Sargent: Just to end this, because let’s put it out of its misery. It’s just all so awful. You’ve been around a long time, Steve. For the longest time, living through the Bush years, the Obama years, the right-wing media and disinformation machine was really something to be feared and, frankly, something to be impressed by if you’re in politics. They were so good at certain points throughout that long history I’m talking about at controlling the media environment, at controlling the narrative and so forth. It’s so strange to see it devolve into something so pathetically ridiculous like this. I don’t know what to make of it.
Benen: Yeah, the point you raised a couple minutes ago, Greg, was resonating with me and I think is especially salient, which is we saw so many Fox hosts and others in conservative media who were really taking a relatively principled stake, were taking a relatively principled line as it relates to the Epstein scandal—and then all of a sudden they did that 180. And I think that really speaks to the fact that we’re no longer really dealing with media professionals, even conservative professionals. We’re dealing with hacks. We’re dealing with people who will simply go along with what they’re told to go along with. There are people who are willing to take direction and read script as it’s been handed to them. And that’s fundamentally different from what we saw, say, five, 10, 15 years ago in conservative media where they were a force to be reckoned with instead of a joke.
Sargent: Well, Steve Benen, you wrote a book about what happened to the right wing and the disinformation machine. It’s called Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans War on the Recent Past. Folks, check it out. Steve Benen, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Benen: Thank you. See you soon.