MAGA Revolts Over Trump Handling of Epstein Files

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0:39Spend less time worrying about your car payment and more time getting to the things you love. Auto loans from Healthcare Associates Credit Union, the healthy way to bank. Learn more at HACU.org. Federally insured by NCUA. APR equals annual percentage rate. See website for requirements and details. Welcome to The Beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melber. The political debacle saddling Donald Trump over the course of this weekend and boiling over tonight is widely viewed on the right as his biggest problem with his base in this young presidency, a, quote, huge risk to his hold on the party, even the coming midterms.

1:12That's from his allies, headlines screaming about a, quote, rebellion or revolt against Trump. A politician who's certainly benefited from loyalty and a type of perception of almost lockstep, unassailable MAGA loyalty is now finding it clearly in danger. The president's broken vow that he would release all this Jeffrey Epstein material and the Trump administration's quite obvious mishandling of aspects of this case and certainly the messaging, something they're usually kind of good at, has boomeranged the false statements, busted claims from the president on down to his attorney general. All of this has become the problem on the right.

1:52It was the controversy at a MAGA gathering just this weekend that had plenty of bold-faced MAGA names. How many of you are not satisfied with the results of the MSA? What I'm getting at is at some point, we want answers at some point. Yeah, answer the questions. That's it. Who went to Epstein Islands? Who specifically went on the plane? Who stayed for more than a night? I don't think they're telling us the truth about Epstein. I will not rest until we go full Jan 6 committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files. I supported Donald Trump in this last election. Yes, he did just actively cover up a giant child rapist ring.

2:33Jeffrey Epstein was working on behalf of Intel services, probably not American. Release all the Epstein files, no matter the consequences. There is no way that we are going to act like the proven harm and abuse that Jeffrey Epstein has caused never happened. And we have every right to ask on whose behalf was he working? If you want the full release of documents, the special prosecutor gets it. And here's why. Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things. It went on and on and on like that. And if you live in that universe of politics or you follow that kind of media, what you saw there is not new.

3:16That's a crescendo over the past week and the past years because the conspiracies in the content that power so many MAGA voices for their audiences, for their online profits and for their political heat, make this particular topic an obvious public betrayal, one that they cannot abide, not in front of their audiences. People have been promised a payoff for many years on this one. So now President Trump and his top aides are engulfed by the very kind of conspiracy theory that they spent so many years promoting, apparently without a lot of forethought about how it would land if they were in charge again.

3:50And we're seeing calls for a so-called accountability for their own leaders who claimed one thing and then did the opposite. If you want to fact check Pam Bondi's claim that she had the Epstein client list on her desk, which is one of those very literal statements. It's not like someday we'll get accountability or we'll learn more. It's I have this well-described client list from this now deceased sex trafficker on my desk, she said. And that wasn't true. And the fact check in this case for that is in the memo her office released on behalf of the entire Justice Department. So you can see how, whether or not you see this as partly a runaway conspiracy theory or content farming debacle, it also involves whether government officials are telling the truth.

4:35And on this one, there appears to be an overlap between the tests that journalists and independent accountability professionals and inspectors general tend to apply and what the MAGA faithful want. What you heard there, answer the question, are you telling the truth and should there be accountability for that? Now, the conference you saw those clips from is from a normally pro-Trump group, Turning Points USA. And you saw the big names, Ingram, Kelly, Tucker Carlson, a lot of Fox veterans, Steve Bannon, who still has a very active relationship inside this administration, warning them that they must change course, that this cannot just be quieted down or covered up, to use the sinister version of how so much of this story on Epstein has played out over the years.

5:19Now, Trump's DOJ famously said, basically said, no, nothing more to see here. No more information or evidence to be given. And the questions they had very loudly pushed were now not going to be answered with the memo I mentioned. And a sign that Trump is concerned over the weekend, he posted a fairly long kind of defense, but also pleading with his followers to just move on. The Times summarized it this way. Back Bondi in dispute over Epstein inquiry. That's the president of the United States telling people, Please just accept my attorney general. I can't have a change there right now. And the MAGA faithful for once said no, partly because of what I just told you about in the clips I showed you from that conference, and partly because this has been years in the making.

6:02They didn't say, okay, yes, sir, we love our leader. He got, in online jargon, ratioed, where there are far more negative comments than likes and shares, and that's not the open internet. That's truth social. You know who uses that. Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security advisor, posted, please understand the Epstein affair is not going away. Or take the Wall Street Journal, Fox News' sister outlet. Now, Trump says, forget Jeffrey Epstein, he urges MAGA to give up the conspiracy tale that they note he promoted, along with allies like Pam Bondi, FBI officials Cash Patel and Jan Bongino, who are now basically all clashing with each other over the handling of this Epstein memo.

6:42Now, take this together and you might say, is this still the top story in America? Is there a lot of other really important stuff going on? And the answer is yes. Indeed, many nights we're talking about ice raids and foreign policy and the trade war. And yet the political reaction, which could imperil the leadership of the FBI or the DOJ, which is always a big story, matters to a lot of people, regardless of the reason, political reaction is part of it. The other part is the MAGA faithful are going through a kind of truth-based process that they sometimes have not done for other real-world broken Trump promises.

7:21So what you saw there, that template, hey, you lied. Was this all just a way to trick us or get our votes or get our money in the case of these media merchants? And how do we feel about that? And should someone pay for the lie? Something you often hear Trump critics say. We're now hearing that from the MAGA faithful, but just on the Epstein issue, which has been so thoroughly programmed. So I will mention to the MAGA faithful watching and people kind of making sense of all this, there are other very real world policies where Trump also made vows. He said he would release the Epstein files and his AG said she would and they didn't.

7:55He also said he'd build the wall. He'd get 90 trade deals in 90 days. That deadline we reached last week, they have about two. He did say he'd end inflation and the Ukraine war, Mideast peace, lower grocery prices. These are things that affect real people that have not been done. And yet politics is usually fluid, not static. Comes at you fast. And if they don't contain this, it is possible that having popped a bubble, one out of 20 or one out of 10, or even one out of five, according to some of these MAGA leaders who are concerned, one out of five people who voted for Trump might start saying, wait a minute, if he lied about this, and to them it's a big government conspiracy and it does involve an underlying case of a horrific sex trafficker, If he lied about this, what else is he lying about?

8:43And what in this democracy do we do about it? We take those questions to New York Times Magazine writer Emily Bazelon, a legal reporter, and there's a lot of law in the handling and mishandling of this. And on the media side, Michael Gringbaum, a media correspondent for the New York Times. Full disclosure, he writes about media, including television networks. His new book is about print, though. It's Empire of the Elite Inside Condé Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America. And as we say in the biz, it drops tomorrow. Congrats on the book. Thanks so much. Emily, I'm going to start with you as someone who's followed this closely and been a hometown expert and analyst for us.

9:20There are serious legal questions here. And yet some of the freak out is about things that are unknown or unproven, but that Trump and Bondi said they would reveal. Right. They're supposed to be this client list, as you said. Bondi claimed that to have it on her desk. And this was really built up during the campaign, this idea that the Biden administration was hiding something. And, you know, you can understand why people think there could be a conspiracy here. Even if you're not conspiracy minded, you have this super wealthy guy. He is accused of sexually abusing many, many girls and women. He knows a lot of famous people.

9:57There have been allegations of other celebrities who've been involved with him and including Donald Trump, a former friend of Epstein's. So this became a kind of article of faith with a lot of Trump supporters that the Biden administration was hiding something. And as soon as their people got into the Justice Department, they would learn the truth. It would all be revealed. And now the rug has been pulled out from under them. And they're super unhappy about that. Yeah, they're upset. And a lot of people might normally on the MAGA right media space deal with Trump and give him a pass on a lot of things.

10:30But this almost seems, Michael, like they can't. Megyn Kelly, of course, has that Fox history, but she does her own digital work, and this was how she sounded this weekend. Who have you seen? Pam Bondi. She has never missed an opportunity to go on television and dangle sweet nothings that might be coming your way, try to lead you to believe that she's got it, it's on her desk, it's coming tomorrow, you're going to see something on Epstein. And it was a tease. So you either believe that Pam Bondi was telling the truth then or that she's telling the truth now. But both cannot be true. She was either lying when she went on Fox News all those times saying, I've got it.

11:11I've got it. We're looking at it. Wait until you see it. It's horrible. Or she's lying in her two-page memo that they released on a Sunday night. Well, I think we should think about just how rare it is for this level of dissent to infiltrate the information silos that MAGA faithful follow. I mean, you're seeing, in fact, that turning point, the fact that the Manosphere podcasts that are so central to a lot of listeners in the MAGA universe are hearing people like Megyn Kelly being so harsh on this administration. I mean, it's the first time it's happened, certainly since Trump was inaugurated for the second time.

11:47And, you know, to Emily's point, you know, Steve Bannon said Epstein is the key to everything. I mean, think about the aspects of this story. The fundamental core of Trump's appeal is that he's going to take on the establishment for you. He's going in there. He's digging up the deep states. You're finally back in power. And what is Epstein, if not a story about an establishment protecting one of their own, the power elite engaging in these perverted, disgusting acts? And here's Trump saying not just, you know, there's no file list, but, hey, let's move on. He said at the cabinet meeting last week, are people still talking about this?

12:22And he's discovering that that's not a good way to get your supporters to move off a topic by saying there's nothing to see here. Yeah. And here he was during the campaign on Fox. This is 2024. Take a look.

12:38It's just very strange for a lot of people. Would you declassify the 9-11 files? Yeah. Would you declassify the Epstein files? Yeah. Yeah, I would. All right. Yes, I would. I think that less so because, you know, you don't know. You don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there because there's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would or at least. Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust? I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It would be interesting to find out what happened there because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn't happen to be working, etc., etc.

13:12But I'd go a long way toward that one. The other stuff I would. I would definitely do the January 6th. you get a classic Trump dance there, but he's reacting to media where this was huge to them. He makes an odd distinction between the in custody death, which is suspicious. We've asked questions about that from the start. And then the history of the alleged crime, some of them convicted. But what do you see there in this interplay between the media pushing is him benefiting from the storyline, but now wanting it to go away now that he's in charge? Well, it's a bit of the dog that caught the car, right?

13:47And we're absolutely seeing this with Dan Bongino. I mean, this is so striking to me. I mean, here's someone who rises to fame as a right wing podcaster and a Fox News host for a while by, you know, trying to sell these conspiracy theories out to the public. Now he's the deputy director of the FBI. He was on Fox and Friends whining about the fact that he essentially saying, I have to work so hard. I'm stuck in a windowless room all day. Now he's got all his fans revolting against him. I mean, it turns out that it's a lot easier to commentate on and kind of be the armchair quarterback as it is to actually be in the room and, you know, be in charge of these federal agencies.

14:26And I think we're seeing this across a lot of this administration. This is kind of what happens when you get media stars. You know, we've got about 20 Fox, ex-Fox personalities in the administration. Suddenly they have real responsibility and they're discovering it's not that easy. Yeah. And they lived in a content machine, right, that had a storyline that was separate from or ahead of whatever the facts may be or what the government has. And it's interesting, Megyn Kelly seems very knowledgeable about the process of what she called dangling information to get views. So wherever she learned about that, she was on that point, but accusing Pam Bondi of doing it the wrong way.

15:10And so you're kind of in this, as you said, it's like you've got all these folks looking back and forth at each other through this media chasm. That is how they govern. It's the reality show governance taken to the extreme. Both of you are going to stay. We have our shortest break, 90 seconds. Emily, I want to ask you about the law of this. And I want to show also Trump in the potosphere, again, where he really sealed his fate, agreeing with everyone that this was a big deal. We'll be right back.

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17:09A huge PR disaster for the Trump administration. Many people in the manga movement who say they feel betrayed. Taking time bomb. This story won't die. And that's just how we're hearing about it on Fox. We're back with Emily and Michael. I want to play another podcast that's quite popular, not just on the right. I think with young people, business people, but also in MAGA, and that's Lex Friedman. This was also, height of the campaign general election, how Trump was hitting this. It's just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.

17:44Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? Probably will be. I'd certainly take a look at it. I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it. Emily, just remind everyone how this works legally. Typically in complex, large criminal investigations, while material does come to light sometimes at trial, there is not a randomized release of unverified material. Right, because you want to usually be careful about who you're implicating in criminal activity. And also, if you're building a case against actual criminals, then you want to make sure that you're not opening it up to public scrutiny too early in a way that could, for example, pollute the jury pool.

18:25And so prosecutors normally marshal their evidence. They, if they're following the rules, turn it over to the defense before trial, and then it gets fully aired at the trial. So this idea that you're just going to release all of this if it does have serious implications for other people's guilt or innocence is pretty, let's use the word, unusual. Yeah. And legally, do you do you believe the DOJ memo now? I mean, it kind of just restates what the prior findings were. It doesn't prove or show some great query. They could have done a bigger probe. What do you think of it? I mean, it just seemed like they were not making a compelling case that they had gone through this big investigation trying to kind of get rid of this.

19:08Right. I mean, Trump seems to want to move on. And that memo seems like a classic. Let's just move on from this and pretend it wasn't the big deal that we said it was earlier. Yeah. It's really striking. I mean, there's a way without revealing secrets to show some work. if you look at the redacted sections of Mueller Report, and they talk about we did this many interviews and whatnot. And you redact things. Yeah, this didn't feel like that to me. I want to get to your book. I want to keep talking about mine. Look at him smiling. Empire of the Elite. A lot of people, if they don't know your face, they know your byline because you've written these great pieces for the New York Times about media, new media, about politics.

19:47You had a great piece about sort of the weird Trump era of the White House Correspondents' Dinner. So I bet a lot of our MSNBC viewers have at least read your prose. But this is a full book length look at a kind of a golden and bygone era. Explain. Yeah, it's a history of Condé Nast, which is the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and GQ and all these glossy magazines that kind of guided American aspirations for over 50 years. It's also about the moment of media gatekeepers and kind of how they have collapsed. There once was a time when everyone looked to print magazines. That was kind of how you got the culture.

20:22It landed in your living room every month and beautifully packaged, tell you what movie to see, what books to read. And now we have thousands of social media channels and even some linear TV channels that keep telling us, giving us guides to all that. So it's about kind of a glamorous era, the 80s, 90s, New York City, when Graydon Carter and Anna Wintour were at the height of their powers and why it was that that world is slowly fading away. Yeah, I got to read the review copy. That's not really a flex, but we get copies sometimes a couple weeks early. If you're a big enough nerd, you're like, I got it early.

20:56But I thought even apart from being interested in journalism, you captured both that era, the culture, and how magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue were once, as you say, taking New York or Paris and distributing that to those in the rest of the world in a very bespoke fashion. And now some of them have been reduced to just keeping up with the Kardashians. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's a fun history. There's a lot of stories about editors taking the Concord to Europe in the way expense accounts were something that us in the media today can't even imagine. But it is also, Cunning House is a great way to look at American culture.

21:30I mean, these magazines really reflected what elites were interested in, how the WASP establishment yielded to a new class in the 80s and 90s. And so I've tried to make it a cultural history. And I think it's a good, it can be some good counter-programming to today's news. Yeah, it's a different vibe. Congratulations. You say the Concord. You know what Jay-Z said. I'm international now on the Concord. Numbers don't lie. Check the scoreboard. A dated reference because there is no Concord. Alas, Michael, Emily, thanks to both of you. The book Empire, the Elite Inside Condé Nast, the media dynasty that reshaped America, drops at midnight.

22:04You can get it now online. Still ahead, Trump officials facing these questions about what happens when you gut emergency services. The New York Times is reporting that thousands of calls from flood victims to FEMA call centers went unanswered in the middle of this ongoing disaster. Why did it take so long to extend those contracts? It's just false. And Trump's borders are under fire for seeming to admit what could be unlawful stops. And Stacey Abrams joins me coming up. We'll be right back.

22:44ICE officers and border patrol, they don't need probable calls to walk up somebody briefly detained and question them. Get articulable facts based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions. So-called border czar Tom Homan with a kind of admission saying that he thinks agents can target people without the legally required probable cause. and he mentions appearance. And while there can be a holistic or total way that investigators, detectives, and federal agents review what could be a suspect, if you're targeting only physical appearance, it sounds like racial profiling.

23:19And there are accusations wider than just that interview about not only that problem, but whether this also will impact U.S. citizens. Look how you got my hands, you're switching up, you're American, bro. What a hospital right here. I don't know, dog. They're literally based off of skin color. He's telling me, bro, I can show you. I don't have a real idea. Hey, yo, yo, what the fuck? Hold on to the car. Hold on to the car. These are illegal citizens, you piece of shit. You.

23:51If that doesn't look like the way to peacefully deal with American citizens, you can see why scenes like this have many questioning whether this is the beginning, the start of efforts to use federal agents like a police state. This scene shows the tear gassing of protesters and others during the controversy around an attempted immigration raid at a farm that turned out was just doing legal work, meaning it's not clear whether this was the right use of force or who they were going after if it was a legal farm. Then you have other face-offs in our militarized scenes where a tank and other armory is being used again inside American Siddery.

24:33A Border Patrol helicopter also landing in the middle of fields. Reports say paramedics requested to treat the injuries. Some of the people running away included children who were in that field. Now, again, the fact that the federal government has broad powers to land and do things doesn't mean this is good use to these powers. Inside a California medical clinic, there were staff in scrubs that clashed with agents that pursued an individual that they said was undocumented. And so the question is, are we seeing overstepping, even errors, which is a part of policing? And we cover that sometimes.