The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 1 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.
On Friday, former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified to lawmakers behind closed doors about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. What Democrats said afterwards strongly suggests that this mess is not going away for Donald Trump and very likely will get worse next year if Democrats take back the House. This comes amid other signs that the Republican lines of defense around Trump are crumbling on many fronts. And Trump himself may be to blame, because it’s his mounting unpopularity that’s driving it all. As one Republican put it, Trump is lame-ducking himself.
We’re talking about all this with historian Nicole Hemmer, who’s one of our go-to people on Epstein and the right wing, a topic she’s written several books about. Nicole, always nice to have you on.
Nicole Hemmer: Lovely to be back, Greg.
Sargent: So Pam Bondi, the former AG, was on Capitol Hill as part of the House’s ongoing investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein files, which are the investigative materials gathered as part of DOJ’s probe of Epstein’s sex trafficking.
One of the big things that happened in her testimony was that she essentially threw acting AG Todd Blanche under the bus. Listen to Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, recounting what Bondi said.
Robert Garcia (voiceover): In that interview and what she’s saying here, in her words and remarks, is that it was Todd Blanche, the current acting AG, that was leading the Epstein investigation. And quite frankly, all of the mistakes that we saw—the redactions, not protecting survivors—she continues to push that back onto the acting AG Todd Blanche, who, by the way, was Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer.
Sargent: So Bondi apparently blamed Blanche for just about everything that’s gone wrong—the lack of transparency, all of it. Nicole, what do you make of that?
Hemmer: It’s an interesting move. Pam Bondi is in such a different position at this point than she was when she was first subpoenaed to give this testimony. She used to be the attorney general. Now she’s been forced out and she is shifting all the blame onto her presumed successor. Blanche is going to have to go through confirmation hearings soon, and she has just made that very difficult for him. Epstein is going to be the focus of conversation when Blanche goes up for confirmation.
What’s interesting about it, and kind of surprising about it, is that Pam Bondi only has herself to blame for being the face of the Epstein scandal within the Trump administration. She is the one who said that she had the files on her desk. She called in all of those right-wing influencers to come parade around with their binders.
And so it’s a little too little too late, but I think that it plays into her hand—and into Democrats’ hands—for her to push the blame on Blanche, who’s not only going up to be attorney general but also is Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. And so she’s making his life difficult, probably because she was forced out of her position.
Sargent: Well, yes. And I think we should remind everybody, just sort of related to what you just said there, that MAGA for many, many years really wanted to know what was in the Epstein files. It was a huge obsession on the far right. It was a huge obsession among all these influencers, to the degree that she actually brought them in to say, hey, we’re going to really blow this thing open for you guys. You put us in charge and now we’re going to make it all right.
And then of course, as soon as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the FBI director, got a look at what was in the Epstein files, they were just like, no, we’re not doing that anymore. Can you just sort of talk about that big history in context?
Hemmer: Well, that history is really important because so many of the people who were put in place in this second Trump administration were put in place not only because they were Trump loyalists, but because they had a lot of support from the MAGA base that they built on this idea that the Epstein files needed to be released. This is huge for Kash Patel, for Dan Bongino, both in the FBI, and for Pam Bondi.
And so I think Bondi thought early on that she could score a lot of points with the Trump base by pushing the Epstein story to the very front of her time as attorney general. This was going to be the thing that she was going to make her name on because it was so important to the base.
And she immediately put herself between a rock and a hard place because the base really cares about these Epstein files. They really care about this scandal. And Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone talking about it. And so Bondi saw herself suddenly serving two masters—the MAGA base and Donald Trump—and there was no way to satisfy both of them. And I have a feeling that Blanche is going to be in the same position.
They’re all crushed by this untenable position, which is you cannot disabuse the MAGA base of the Epstein scandal. They’re not going to drop it. And you cannot force Donald Trump to talk about it because he’s also unwilling to engage with it.
Sargent: Right. So let’s listen to a little bit more of Representative Robert Garcia talking about what Bondi said in this private testimony. Listen.
Robert Garcia (voiceover): I also personally asked the former AG five times—five different questions—about her conversations with President Trump: whether he directed her at any given time on the Epstein files, what he knew, what he asked her to redact or not. And she refused to answer any questions about President Trump. In fact, she said that she would not speak or respond to any questions that had anything to do with President Trump.
Sargent: So clearly, Pam Bondi is trying to insulate Trump a bit here while throwing Todd Blanche under the bus instead. But I think if anything, this is actually damning to Trump, because Bondi could have said, Trump didn’t really try to control what we released, he wanted us to put stuff out. And she didn’t say that.
Remember, Trump himself at one point, when the heat got very intense, tried to look as if he wanted the Epstein files out. He basically said, release them, I’m all for transparency. But now what Bondi said will only whet the appetite of Democrats more to find out about how Trump conspired to cover them up. Right?
Hemmer: Well, that’s what’s so interesting about what Democrats are reporting that she said, because on the one hand, it looks on its face like she’s trying to protect Trump, but actually she’s putting a target on him. I can’t talk about it. And the thing is, she was not under oath. She was supposed to be under oath for this conversation, but instead of being a deposition, it turned out to be a transcribed interview. And so she could have said anything in that moment.
And she chose to highlight that she just couldn’t say anything about Donald Trump. And I think that puts Trump in a tough position, but also it puts Blanche as Trump’s lawyer in a particularly tough position, because he goes into his confirmation hearings looking like someone who’s covering for Trump.
Sargent: So, Nicole, we should probably clarify. We don’t know exactly what’s in the files about Donald Trump still. We do know that Trump appears thousands of times in the files based on what’s been released. There have been a bunch of salacious but not verified claims that have floated around.
It seems like the key thing that people still don’t really know yet is what Donald Trump knew about Epstein and when, which seems critical. Can you talk a little bit about what we still need to know? What do we know? What’s outstanding?
Hemmer: So we do know that Donald Trump had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that he knew about Epstein’s preference for underage girls. I mean, this is something that the birthday drawing poem that Trump sent to Epstein revealed.
So there are things that we do know, but a lot that we still don’t know. First of all, we don’t know how many mentions of Trump still haven’t been released. There are still files that are unreleased. We can’t know what they say yet. And that’s why there’s still a push to continue to release the rest of the files.
We don’t know whether or not Donald Trump is implicated in any criminal activity. At the moment, we have no evidence that he was involved in criminal activity with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that Trump and Epstein talked a lot about their personal sexual predilections. We know that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in the trafficking of underage girls.
We don’t know what Donald Trump knew and when he knew it, as you were saying. And that, I think, goes to the extent that Trump was covering up for Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s what people want to know.
And honestly, Greg, I think it’s something we never will know the full extent of. And it is because of all of the stonewalling that came from the Trump administration early on. Even if they were to release every single piece of paper that they have, unredact everything, I think people would still think that something else is hidden, something else is being covered up. This has become an unfalsifiable sort of conspiracy about Trump because of the stonewalling.
Sargent: Right, and we’re going to get more because Democrats are now saying that they’re going to push for Todd Blanche’s testimony under oath. They’ve been armed with this new set of claims by Pam Bondi, throwing him under the bus, basically saying he ran the cover-up. She didn’t use those words, but that’s basically what she said. Todd Blanche ran the cover-up, I didn’t.
So I don’t know how far this effort to get Blanche to testify is going to get with Republican control of the House. But guess what? In like eight, nine, 10 months, Democrats might control the House. Then you’re going to really see an effort to subpoena Blanche. And also I think FBI Director Kash Patel, if he’s still there.
What do you think will happen then? Democrats are going to really try to pin down precisely what Trump ordered his underlings to do in terms of the cover-up, as well as trying to ferret out whatever else is in there about him, right?
Hemmer: That’s right. I think if and when Democrats are in control of this investigation, they are going to turn much more of their focus to this question of a cover-up. What did Pam Bondi know? When did she know it? What did Blanche know? When did he know it? Patel, Trump—what did all of these people know and when did they know it?
And what lengths did they go to to ensure that the American people never saw these documents? To what extent did they fail to follow the law that was passed forcing the Trump administration to disclose the files related to the Epstein investigation? Those kind of cover-up questions, I think, are going to be much more the driver of the investigation under Democrats.
Sargent: And Pam Bondi basically laid out the breadcrumbs. Just to go a little broader here, it seems like Republican defenses of Trump are crumbling across the board. We just saw a judge put Trump’s corrupt slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists on hold. Republicans have turned on him over that. They’re also not willing, as of this recording, to support taxpayer funding for Trump’s ballroom.
Both those things have badly alienated Republicans. Now you’ve got whatever effort they were making to protect Trump from further inquiry on Epstein—that doesn’t seem to really be working, especially if Democrats take back the House. The Republican defenses are going to more or less vanish.
What do you make of the moment we’re in right here? It sort of seems like there’s a split screen of sorts. On the one hand, Trump still has this iron grip on the Republican primary electorate in the sense that he can just sort of snap his Twitter fingers—or Truth Social thumbs, or whatever—and just have someone get knocked off in a primary for crossing him.
So he’s got that. He’s able to control Republicans to that degree. But on the other, more and more, you’re seeing the party as a whole, as the elections approach, start to worry more about voters outside the MAGA bubble. And so all that control he wields over Republican primary voters isn’t translating into control over the party. I wonder what you think of this moment.
Hemmer: It’s a fascinating moment because of all of the cross-pressures—cross-pressures that we didn’t necessarily see in the first Trump administration. On the one hand, you have the cross-pressures of the base.
Donald Trump has not been serving the interests of the base in a number of ways. The Iran war, his relationship with Israel, the Epstein files—these have caused a real split in the MAGA base. It has led to a number of right-wing personalities to openly question and criticize Donald Trump more than they had in the past.
And then you have this pressure on members of the party, at least members of the party who are from purple districts. There are plenty of Republicans who are going to be running in deep-red districts. They’re completely safe. Once they win their primary with Trump’s backing, there’s just not a scenario in which they’re going to lose that seat.
But you are going to have purple-district Republicans suddenly, again, cross-pressured, because as Trump’s popularity goes down, they’re going to need to win centrists and Democrats in order to win their election. That is going to lead them to criticize—and in an ideal world, maybe even vote against—Trump on a couple of different bills.
So you see all of that, but I do think we have to reckon with still the reality that he does have this hold on the base and even on his critics. You will listen to Megyn Kelly say—and Tucker Carlson say—the worst possible things about Donald Trump and then end with, I mean, I’d still vote for him if the option is a Democrat. And so I think we have to take that grain of salt when we think about the kinds of fractures and criticisms that we’re hearing from the Trump base.
Sargent: Yeah. And you sort of see that schism inside Pam Bondi in the sense that he absolutely screwed her royally. She got tossed out as soon as she was no longer useful. And we should recall that Donald Trump basically commanded her to do something impossible, which was run the Epstein cover-up. And that just was never going to really succeed in any major way. But then when she failed to be corrupt enough for Donald Trump, he just tossed her out.
I want to switch to something a Republican Senate advisor said to The Atlantic because it’s quite a quote. It’s about Republicans generally. He said this: “The problem is Trump has nobody around him who’s willing to tell him, ‘Sir, the stuff you are talking about is not possible and you are shooting yourself in the foot every time.’ He essentially has lame-ducked himself in pursuit of retribution.”
Nicole, I kind of think that’s a striking quote. On the one hand, yeah, right? Like he is asking for the impossible. But on the other, you knew that about him.
Hemmer: None of this is new information.
Sargent: For years he was telling them to do the impossible for him and throwing people out when they failed the despot in some way. And now they’re essentially fed up.
But I do think it’s a real thing. On the other hand, how fed up are they? He really has lame-ducked himself. And I think in some sense, there has been a threshold crossed where Republicans are just somewhat—maybe not enough—but somewhat less likely to just fall on the sword for him. Do you feel that way?
Hemmer: I do to a certain extent. Certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans and even within parts of the base when it comes to Donald Trump. To the extent that he has lame-ducked himself—fantastic term—to the extent to which he’s lame-ducked himself, it is by his own making. It’s not just that he goes off and says crazy things.
He started the war in Iran, which sent gas prices and inflation through the roof. It was a deeply unpopular war. He never tried to garner any public support for it. And he knew it was an issue that would fracture his base because he was supposed to be the no-new-wars president. So you have all of that and you’re like, OK, this is a man who has shot himself in the foot. He’s thrown away the final few years of his presidency.
So all of that, I think we have to take in and to a certain extent celebrate because it’s a weakening of Donald Trump. And here’s my caveat. My caveat is Donald Trump is not somebody who’s ever believed in majorities.
He’s not somebody who believes in democracy. He’s not somebody who believes that Congress has to give him the say-so for what he does. He’s not somebody who respects courts or congressional investigations or impeachment hearings. And so in a certain sense, he is still quite dangerous as somebody who holds the presidency and has a diminished base of power, because it invites him, in his mind, to use executive power to the hilt and to break laws, damn the consequences.
Sargent: Well, you’ve been observing the right for a long time. And I think what all this adds up to is the following: we all know that the real story here, the thread running through everything, is that Trump is on his way out.
What we’re looking at is a MAGA movement that knows that it’s losing the one unifying force that held it together, the one thing that brought it into existence, the one thing that has sustained it. Every other effort to create a new MAGA Republican leader has failed miserably. Look at Ron DeSantis. Look at JD Vance—he’s struggling mightily with this.
Can you just reflect a little on the future direction of MAGA, now that Trump has, number one, essentially screwed the movement in every which way, betrayed the movement in every which way, and number two, is going to be gone soon. Where does this all go?
Hemmer: Right. I mean, even though Trump is sort of positioning himself as a competitive authoritarian leader, he still has an actuarial clock. Even if he tries not to leave the office, the man is approaching his eighties and there’s a finite amount of time that he’s still going to be with us. So Trump will leave the stage at a certain point. He might still make his feelings about politics known, but there isn’t a charismatic leader to pick up his torch.
But he has helped to continue the commitment of the Republican Party to minoritarian politics. He didn’t invent this, but it has accelerated rapidly under Trump. We’ve seen this with the Supreme Court rulings on gerrymandering, the attempts to purge voter rolls, the attempts to strip people of their citizenship.
There are all of these different ways in which the Republican Party under Donald Trump has become recommitted to minoritarian politics. And that actually kind of works in the favor of this very unpopular Republican Party. They are going to lose the focal power of Trump and his ability to pull together his particular coalition. But he is also leaving behind a politics that doesn’t require them to win majorities.
And I think we should be happy that there is not a charismatic authoritarian leader poised to take Donald Trump’s place. And we should be worried about the minoritarian politics that he leaves behind, because even the Republican Party that’s not entirely bought into Donald Trump at this moment is 100 percent bought into ruling as a minority. And that’s something that I think we should be keeping our eye on.
Sargent: Yep. It’s sure alarming when you think of it that way, that those tendencies are going to be with us for a long, long time. And as I’ve said a million times on here, I think after Trump’s gone, our politics gets even crazier. Nicole Hemmer, it’s always an enormous pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Hemmer: Thanks for having me, Greg.