The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 27 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.
This week, The New York Times confirmed the latest revelations in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, reporting on the missing files that appear to involve charges against Donald Trump himself. The Times is treating this as a blockbuster story and added some more nuance in a harsh turn in the saga for Trump. MAGA is all over the place on this. Fox News has mostly ignored the revelations, and one big MAGA influencer is hyping Hillary Clinton’s supposed role in the scandal—but that’s backfiring. Other MAGA types remain deeply split. This is really a crack-up moment for MAGA that raises questions about the movement’s future. And we’re talking about all this with writer Ana Marie Cox, who has written well for The New Republic about Epstein and right-wing elites. Ana, nice to have you on.
Ana Marie Cox: It’s good to be on.
Sargent: So, The Times confirmed the big story of the week. It’s that the Epstein files—which are the documents related to federal investigations into Epstein’s pedophilia and sex trafficking—are missing many pages that appear to involve charges by a woman who alleged Trump assaulted her as a teenager in the 1980s.
The Times described the assault this woman alleges as a “violent and lurid encounter,” adding: “More than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files.” Ana, that’s rough stuff, and The Times treating this as a big story means the media hunt will really intensify now. What do you think of this?
Cox: Unfortunately, we can’t expect people in “MAGA-world” or Trump supporters to even consume The New York Times, right? They don’t trust it. For some people in MAGA, that will mean it’s proof it’s not true.
However, The Times is still the leader for all American media, for better or worse, one might say. For them to take this—to take it that seriously, to put it on the front page—and they have the goods, right? This was reported before, but The Times has gone very deep on it, and they have treated it with a seriousness that they usually reserve for Hillary Clinton emails and questions about “trans panic.”
Sargent: Absolutely. No, they really went to town. I mean, when The New York Times wants to let you know that something is serious—when there’s something real here—they do that, and they did that here.
Cox: Yeah. And I think what you’re going to see is a trickle-down effect to maybe less prominent media sources, but there will be podcasters discussing this. There will be people seeing bits of it on the evening news. There will be a filter. We already have seen the late-night comedians do it, but I think we’re going to see even more comedy, even more memes. And that is how public opinion shifts.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, as you pointed out, The Times put it on the front page and it was even “above the fold.” And now Trump’s media allies are in a real bind. According to this Media Matters analysis, Fox News has barely mentioned these latest revelations at all.
Now, that’s pretty funny because, at previous junctures—as Media Matters also documented—Fox figures have spent a fair amount of time claiming that Trump has been “totally exonerated” of everything Epstein-related. So, what do you make of that? How does Fox work its way around this one?
Cox: I think the good news is that the MAGA and alternate media has shifted away from Fox as its absolute center. And there are a lot of these “bro podcasts,” which we know move people, right?
And bad news for the true believers is that this is a flashy story. This is a story about a sex trafficking ring. It has automatic interest in it. There is no way that Joe Rogan is not going to talk about this, that Theo Von is not going to talk about this. Any podcast that is consumed by some of these people—who only have a tangential interest in politics, but they talk about the news—they’re going to talk about the Epstein story.
It is a fascinating example of a conspiracy theory that seems to have been proven correct. So this is what I’m talking about in how the most damaging thing about this story for MAGA is not that it splits MAGA—although I know some good examples about the ways that it is—it’s that it chips away at it. It deepens a fault line that I already think existed among the people who voted for Trump.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think it’s an important insight that you bring up: that Fox News really is much more of a propaganda organ for Donald Trump than maybe some of those “bro podcasters” are.
And here’s where it gets pretty crazy as well. Now Hillary Clinton enters the story. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have her testifying behind closed doors today, Thursday. Not exactly clear why. Republicans are apparently grilling her about Epstein’s involvement in the Clinton Global Initiative, but at the time she was a senator and not even involved in the organization. I’m unaware of any evidence that Hillary has even met Epstein.
Ana, this is an amazing reach to haul Hillary in. Like, you’ve been covering this stuff for some time. Hillary is still their go-to target? She lost to Trump ten years ago. That’s a decade. And that was her last big moment in public life and, like Let’s haul in Hillary. It’s like, what?
Cox: It makes no sense to me, and it also points to a generational problem in the GOP. We’re very aware, you and I, about a generational problem among the Democrats, right? That there’s all these people who are stuck in the past and aren’t responsive to what the issues and needs are of their constituents because they’re thinking too much themselves about the Clinton era, right? They’re stuck in the “third way” way of thinking about politics.
The thing is—and the good news is—that the Republicans are trapped in the same place. They’re still obsessed with the Clintons. They’re still obsessed with Obama. The people whom they really need to reach, and the people that they moved in 2024 to their side, barely remember that. Like, this is talking about ghosts. This is talking about World War II. It’s as distant to them as, let’s say, 9/11, right? I mean, they recognize perhaps that it’s something important that happened, but it’s not relevant to them. And they don’t think of the Clintons or Obama as the kind of big bogeymen that the GOP still does. The GOP is still fundraising off of fucking Hillary Clinton.
Sargent: It’s amazing. I think you’re talking about this kind of “young man” demographic that sort of haunts the Joe Rogan spaces and all that. These people were teenagers when Hillary lost to Trump.
Cox: That’s right. They were teenagers when Bill Clinton was another butt of late-night jokes, right? Like, they don’t know really who he is besides some figure from the distant pop-culture past, right?
And I think that that speaks to an important way that Democrats and leftists could interject themselves into this conversation. I worry that we’re missing that opportunity because, on the left, there are people still obsessed with the Clintons and Obama, too.
Sargent: Yeah, well, that is certainly true. I just want to point out—just to make it even more ludicrous—like, when Bill Clinton was president in the second term from 1996 to 2000, a lot of these young people hadn’t even been born yet. And any of them that were born were, you know, around five, six, three, four.
Cox: This is as relevant to them as the Macarena.
Sargent: There’s this weird twist here, too, with the Hillary thing. Hillary had wanted to testify publicly, but Republicans said no. And now MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson just posted a photo on social of her in the hearing, and MAGA Congresswoman Lauren Boebert elevated it. But that just served to undermine the case for keeping the hearing concealed in the first place.
So for these MAGA figures, a picture of Hillary getting grilled is enough to excite them, I guess. How on earth is this going to actually work in distracting attention from these Trump revelations—these latest ones, which have so much force?
Cox: I don’t think it can. It really does speak to a kind of Streisand effect, right? Like, as soon as you start trying to cover something up, people are going to get interested.
And to me, one of the things that this tips its hand to is Benny Johnson is getting his orders from someplace else besides his own interests and the people who are listening. This is something that I don’t think someone who is truly savvy about the people who are coming up—and the people who really need to be excited—is going to do. Like, someone said, You need to post this, and he did. And I don’t see how it forwards their argument at all. The idea that this is secret, and we’re going to keep it secret, really belies, like, everything they’ve ever tried to argue about the Epstein files.
Sargent: Yeah, and what’s funny is that Hillary Clinton just jumped on this. She said, If you’re going to post pictures of me, then let the reporters in to watch the hearing. It’s just like they’re in total chaos, it seems to me—MAGA is.
Marie Cox: Yeah, and I think they’re in chaos and not seeing something I want people to really understand, which is that the fracture exists below the top level. This is a group of people who moved into the Republican column in the last election. There are myriad reasons, but a lot of it, I think, had to do with “upset”—resistance to things continuing in the same direction, upset about a sense of disconnection, and an idea that there was some kind of unaccountability among the elites.
What the Epstein story does is plug directly into that narrative, even outside the specific, horrific scandal that he represents. I think the number of Trump administration officials and Trump-world people who are in these documents is proof that Trump is part of the problem—that these elites have no accountability.
I want to be very clear about something: That does not mean everyone there was a pedophile. Participation and knowledge of who Epstein was matters, of course; but even if they didn’t know and didn’t participate, it is a black mark against them that they were even in this circle. It represents a level of power and unaccountability that I do think Americans are really mad about.
Sargent: Well, I want to point out to your point there that MAGA—including the podcaster world and even the people around Trump—is quite split. MAGA elites are split over this whole thing right now, precisely because of what you’re getting at: It’s actually blowing up the myth that Trump and his people are somehow not part of the elite.
MAGA personality Shawn Ryan, for instance, has directly and quite angrily accused the DOJ of covering up for pedophiles. Even Ben Shapiro pointed out that Steve Bannon is deeply implicated in the files. Several others have said that, too, because Bannon, it turns out, advised Epstein. So it really wrecks a major MAGA storyline for Steve Bannon—who is the keeper of the MAGA flame, the originator of the “MAGA voodoo” in a way. For him to be advising Epstein, I think, really blows the whole idea of Trump and MAGA elites as being somehow different from these other elites. It really wrecks that story, don’t you think?
Cox: Yes, I agree. And I think it points to something that should be heartening for those of us pinning our hopes on the midterms, which is that the MAGA coalition—while it is tough to crack in one way because it is a cult and resistant to logic—was never actually that sturdy based on interests.
Sargent: Meaning...
Cox: There are a lot of people who came into Trump-world just because Trump seemed to be the winner and the kingmaker, right? As soon as he weakens, I believe people are going to peel off—and he has been weaker and weaker and weaker.
To get down for a second: I do believe the only tool he really has left is violence and threats. But that is a brittle form of authority. And we’ve seen in Minnesota—like, it is not something that can [last]; it is something that can be resisted and something that is incredibly unpopular and can crumble.
Sargent: You know, just to support your point there, nobody is more aware of that aspect of Trump’s mystique than Trump himself. He absolutely knows that winning is the thing that attracts people to him. And so you will note that when he loses—like when he lost before the Supreme Court—he immediately tried to flip it around by saying something like, “We’re going to investigate them.”
Now, to some ears, that’ll sound like “just Trump being crazy Trump,” but there’s a method there: He always has to have his enemies on the run. He can never be the person who’s being delivered a loss; he metes the losses out to others. And so this Epstein stuff, I think, is real trouble as well. That’s why you see him going out and saying, “I’m totally exonerated, totally,” right? The Trump mystique just deflates very rapidly when he loses.
Cox: Yes. And he is losing more and more. All of these special elections we’re seeing, all of this resistance to data centers and ICE detention centers—this is a multi-pronged attack. Epstein just represents one really important wing of this method.
And it needs to be exploited in part because—and I won’t get tired of repeating it—it represents a lot of other stuff. Embedded in the Epstein files—and this is the piece that I wrote most recently—are a lot of other ideas that are really corrosive. If you look at the people Epstein wanted to surround himself with, they’re AI bros, crypto bros, “wellness” people, anti-vaxxers, and eugenicists.
If we can use the “Epstein class” to puncture Trump’s power—if we can make him seem a part of that—I think it contributes to this overall disintegration of his popularity. His popularity is all he has. He has to appear to keep winning and winning. As soon as he starts to lose, he will lose people more and more. I believe there are going to be Republicans in Congress who try to save their own skin—and thank God they do.
Sargent: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I want to bring in this really big-picture question. MAGA spent years screaming that there was a major cover-up going on with regard to Epstein back when they thought the Epstein files contained dastardly secrets about elite liberals and Democrats.
And now, incredibly, we have amazingly damning revelations about exactly that—a new dimension to the cover-up in which dozens of pages from the files are literally missing. And they involve a very, very powerful member of the elite: Donald Trump himself.
And so I want to ask you about this going forward: How does MAGA manage this? Because this doesn’t go away. If Democrats take the House this fall and they’re in power in 2027, big-time subpoenas start flying on this stuff. They will try to get those missing files. By then, we may know of other revelations that are missing. The investigations suddenly take a big turn. It’s no longer James Comer sitting in a dark room with Hillary Clinton and leaking photos of her—you know what I mean? How does MAGA deal with this over time? This was big to them. What do they do with it?
Cox: I genuinely believe they’re falling apart. I don’t know if they have a way to deal with it. The interesting thing about cults—are you aware that this whole When Prophecy Fails study that people have recited for years about how a failure of prophecy really unites cultists, that that’s turned out to be disproven and falsifiable?
We’re not necessarily going to see people strengthening their beliefs in order to be able to continue to believe a thing that’s been disproven or hasn’t happened. I think that most people are not MAGA cultists. Most people who vote for Donald Trump are not MAGA cultists. And when they see the shit that’s going to come out—that you and I know is going to come out—they are going to be, not even disillusioned, they’re going to be disgusted.
I don’t know if all of those votes are up for grabs for Democrats, but it means that the solidity is no longer there. I think that there is a possibility that there’s going to be other folks that come in and try to sweep up those votes to the right. But who’s that going to be? It can’t be JD Vance. I don’t know who on the right has the ability to come in and try to capitalize on the people who are disappointed with Trump, but still don’t want to vote for people on the more Democratic side of things. They might be just lost; they might just go back to not participating, which is something that a lot of Trump voters used to just be outside of the political sphere.
Sargent: Totally. Just to wrap this up: You could sort of see a twofold effect. One is more stuff about Trump related to Epstein, or more covering up, or some combination of that. Then on the other, the fact that Trump is leaving public life and it’s JD Vance, right? Those two things, I think, actually make the prospects for a major MAGA crackup much, much more likely.
Vance can’t really—he doesn’t have the charisma to keep it all together. Some of these MAGA figures are going to be staking their own claims and saying, “Okay, I’m going to say that I was one of the first to warn you about Trump way back when and Epstein,” and this will be ways for them to build their followings in the post-Trump era. I think it falls apart potentially at that point. Where do you see it going?
Cox: I agree, and the only bad news is pretty bad news, which is that it is likely to get worse before it gets better. There are going to be desperate grabs for power. There are going to be attempts at violent repression. I’m sure you saw the news today about an attempt to perhaps declare an emergency over voting.
But overall, we can look on the far horizon and it’s good news, because that stuff is extremely unpopular. It will only hasten the peeling away of people and the growth of the movement on the left. And what I want to say to people is: The way to get through the tough stuff is to do the activism that you can now; to band together as you can now. I think Minnesota proved that it can be resisted and you can grow community in the face of it.
And so that’s how we might get through the toughest times that are still ahead of us—just to know that there are ways through it, that it doesn’t have to be. We aren’t going to be beaten by it. You can resist until it’s over.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly right, and I think that’s what’s going to happen. Ana Marie Cox, really good to talk to you. Folks, if you want to check out Ana’s work, you can check it out up at tnr.com. She writes for us regularly. Ana, really nice to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Cox: Really good to catch up. Thank you, Greg.