Trump Fails to Stem MAGA Fury Over Epstein

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0:36Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Hi, Nicole. I want to hold you over, and I'll tell everyone we're going into the news tonight. Epstein fallout. I got all that stuff going on. There's always a lot going on, but I've been listening to your podcast. you had Jimmy Jam on and you had this great convo, both. I loved hearing his thoughts about working with Prince, everything he's done, but also hearing another side of you, honestly, because you were talking about how music transports you to a room and just what you want to learn from him, how cool you think he is as a person.

1:14Tell us about that because we put some of this up to plug it because I really enjoyed the convo. Well, so I sent it to you because I feel like I sit there on the big nights and I'm just in awe and I mostly try to not get called on when you go into these spaces with all your expertise about music. But Jimmy Jam is someone that I felt like I had a winning lottery ticket when a mutual friend gave me his number and suggested I call him. You were always supportive of this effort too. I was trying to raise money for Ukraine and we put on an hour of music. And the first time I talked to Jimmy Jam, I remember where I was sitting.

1:51It was one of those conversations that just imprints on your brain, he started talking about the power of music. And it was sort of coming out of COVID, going into the war in Ukraine, there was so much suffering at home. There were so many places that art and music could sort of turn its healing powers. But Jimmy Jam didn't look at it as we could do this or that. It was about sort of the magic of art and music to bring us together and lift us up. And he's so cool that it didn't sound as cheesy as I just made it sound, which is why I have to listen to the whole podcast. He's just the real deal.

2:26And then, you know, oh, by the way, he's the person that everyone calls when they want to make, you know, some of their best and most iconic records and music. And he has stories like the one I just played of Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson that you just sit there with your, you know, you depict your job off the desk because he's just amazing. So thank you for listening to it. And thanks for letting me talk about it. And I'll jump in a sec, but what What did you think of the way he described competitive creativity? Because you've come out of politics. What's more competitive than than jostling inside a White House in journalism?

2:59We deal with that. And it was so interesting to hear here that way. You two discussed that. Well, what I love was his story about how Janet, you know, kind of got out of it. You know, so she said, oh, you know, I need to rest my voice. And she got herself into a space where she felt like she could be and do her best. And so what I thought, you know, I'm always looking at true artists and creatives to see if there's anything I can pull into my own life and try to apply. And what's amazing and what Jimmy is to Janet is this safe, beautiful partner and collaborator. And I think it just it speaks to where we do our best work, I think, is when we're all together.

3:41And it's that same thesis, right? You create a safe space and everyone feels confident enough to be their most honest, to sort of cut to the bone of the truth. And if there's any sort of tortured parallel between what he creates, which is beautiful, and what we do, which is not always beautiful, it's that the truth, the truth sort of undergirds all of it. That makes a lot of sense. I had it in my earphones. I know your voice. I would say decently well, like a lot of MSNBC viewers. So I have your voice. I have his voice. I was going about my day listening to that. Enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening.

4:13Thank you. Of course. Thanks, Nicole Wallace. We have it up on the screen. You can check out the best people now. Turning to the news, we begin with the ongoing MAGA meltdown. And Donald Trump truly having the problem with his base that some said he would never have over anything. Well, here it is. And Trump is failing, flailing and failing, really, to quiet the Epstein story. MAGA, pundits, influencers, Fox, veterans, people with large followings are revolting. They are not going along with Trump's demands that something he and his allies pumped and fed forever should suddenly go away because it's inconvenient for them.

4:47Now both Trump and Mike Johnson are throwing this hot potato, though, and trying to get it back on the desk of the attorney general. It's going to be up to her. Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release. I'm for transparency. We should put everything out there and let the people decide. She needs to come forward and explain that to everybody. You can see the talking point forming as if this is all only up to an attorney general. And she did stoke interest in this. But Donald Trump himself long claimed that he would release this. And given the other controversial ways he's reached into the DOJ to get things done, obviously he could order more evidence out right now.

5:26He's not doing that. He's blaming his own employee. She now has been forced to speak out. Today, our memo speaks for itself, and we'll get back to you on anything else. We'll get back to you. That may not do it for the MAGA fury. House Republicans, meanwhile, have been dragged into looking like they're defending the lack of transparency because Democrats did jump on this issue and push forward an idea where Congress would try to get involved in having more released, and Republicans blocked that. the amendment is not agreed to. And I think most of us believe what's appropriate will be released when it is time for the president to release it.

6:09You'll notice even the Republicans in Congress are aware it's up to President Trump to make this call, not just his AG. But his AG is overseeing this effort, which is poorly timed, at least for the Fuhrer facing the White House, because this is, of course, one of the key co-conspirators, Jeffrey Epstein confidant, Ghislaine Maxwell She's already been convicted, she's in prison But the DOJ is trying to get the Supreme Court To reject hearing an appeal of her case Which of course could involve other information or disclosures So again, the DOJ, while it's common for them to defend their convictions And not want another layer of review This also runs right into Trump's big problem The MAGA anger is only getting louder We're all on stage demanding the release of the Epstein-Clinalist.

6:58Either Pam Bondi is royally screwed up. I mean, she's deaf. She has. That's not in dispute. She's royally screwed up. And the president is just forgiving her. Pam Bondi needs to go at a minimum. It is Trump. It is his advisers that have gone with this narrative of them just saying, forget about it. Move along. She's lying either way. This is the number one motivating issue for the base. There is something there. And it's being covered up. And the president blessed it. If that base feels like you're betraying them or not telling them the truth, then they're not going to like that. We are not falling to Jedi mind tricks and gaslighting.

7:37That's just a sampling of a heck of a lot of people who've suddenly decided that while they've long supported Donald Trump and defended almost everything he's said and done in public, suddenly now they're concerned that Donald Trump is lying. They don't like that the government doesn't seem accountable, and they certainly don't appreciate and aren't responding to Trump telling them to just be quiet. Now, that is part of where this anger is going. We're also seeing how bothered Trump is because we've talked before about his approach to PR and reaching out online and digitally because the world of politics has continued to change as the world's communication structure changes.

8:12Well, there's reports that he personally reached out to Charlie Kirk trying to quiet the criticism. Now this podcaster says he's done talking about Epstein because of the call. Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being. As conservative influencers, we're eating their own about Epstein. Even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein, it is, in fact, time to move on. I'm going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done, solve it, balls in their hands. Just trust the government, even when they tell you the conspiracy theory that they were long going to crack and solve, is now something they're just going to defend and tell you to look the other way on.

8:57So you can see just somehow this is playing out in real time. As for the quieting of the story, Fox News is changing gears. You can see the comparison here playing up outdated old sort of Biden references rather than the current Epstein controversy or the new Trump DOJ memo. And the larger culture, the story has stuck. Take a look. You can't take this away from your base. That is MAGA's favorite conspiracy. What are we going to find out next that immigrants aren't eating cats? Trump brings up Hunter Biden's laptop as a reminder for all of us not to dwell on old conspiracy theories. Also, are we really to believe anyone in the world could have the Epstein file on their desk and not immediately take a peek?

9:45I mean, who has that kind of restraint? Here's the list of everyone who went to Epstein Island. Well, sadly, it's 5 p.m. So. The jokes land because everyone's heard about this. The hypocrisy sticks because even your favorite MAGA friend or uncle or old colleague who's pure MAGA has heard what I just mentioned. There is the view of the broken vow. We can play it for you coming up tonight. Donald Trump saying he would do exactly the opposite of what he's now doing. There's the concern that he's lying, which we've seen on many issues. But on this one, MAGA seems to care. And there's the larger question of what happens if you pop the bubble and realize there is an external reality and that there are broken vows and that the government, even if you are very conservative and like some other parts of this administration's agenda, the government is to be held to account in this country.

10:36for we are a democracy with accountability, a nation of laws and a free press. Shout out to all the podcasters speaking their mind under the protection and power of the First Amendment, something this administration has also challenged when it finds disagreement. So is there a larger breakthrough here? We have Maya Wiley and Molly Jong-Fast with us on this big story when we're back in 90 seconds. Most ice cream is good, but not Jenny's. Jenny's ice cream is more like an obsession. What you get from over two decades of tasting and tweaking and throwing it out and starting over, chasing flavors until they feel alive.

11:17That might sound crazy, and that's because it is. Jenny's. Often imitated, never duplicated, always splendid. How do you want to split it? Actually, dinner's on me. Okay, big money. Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend with my Venmo debit MasterCard, so. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kind of on me, actually. Yeah, you send it, I spend it. Did my money get, like, reincarnated? Yeah, it was chicken shawarma. Want it back? I can't believe you, like, ate my Venmo. Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance.

11:53The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Normally in these ads, you'd expect someone like me to ask you to buy something. But I want to ask you to do something different. I'm Dave Farenthold, and I'm a reporter for The New York Times. I'm an investigative reporter, which means that I follow the money, inside of government and outside of government. The point of my job is to find things people are trying to hide. It involves talking to lots of people. It involves looking through lots and lots of documents. And if there weren't folks like me to go beyond the surface to understand who was really shaping what the government does, the public will be left in the dark about what the government's doing with your tax money, what the government's doing to you through regulations and spending.

12:30If you're like me and you think this kind of journalism is important, seek out a news source that does firsthand, fact-based reporting. If that's the New York Times, thank you. If that's your local paper, that's great too. Because where you get your information matters.

12:52There needs to be more transparency on this. And I think that that will happen. I believe that there will probably be more coming on this. The sound you hear is a Trump criticizing Trump in public. That is Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, of course, has her own career and is a media voice. And she is saying this cannot hold. Rarely do you see the Jeffrey Epstein story and Donald Trump and Chinoe Achebe combined. But sometimes things do fall apart and may need to be put back together. With that in mind, we come to our wise panel, Maya Wiley, who's softly shaking her head, former SDNY civil prosecutor, a human rights civil rights leader.

13:34Molly Jong-Fast from Vanity Fair, MSNBC contributor. Her new piece is Trump loses his grip on the base over this story. Molly, why and why does it matter even for people who are less fixated on this old case? So I think it's interesting that clip you just played about Lara Trump because Lara Trump, there's a lot of talk that she wants to run for the Senate in North Carolina. Remember, Donald Trump isn't running for reelection yet, but Lara Trump is. So you see the way she's dealing with this story, saying more will be revealed. You know, we would there'll definitely be more. And what we see is this is her way of trying to spin this.

14:12I mean, look, I would say it's this. Trump said, you know, if you elect me, I will bring down the deep state. Right. That was there was a lot of the MAGA universe kept saying, you know, we will we will show all of the mysteries that the deep state is hiding from you. Remember, it's going to put out the JFK, you know, the JFK assassination. So there was a lot of buildup to sort of. And now they are the deep state. Right. They are in control of all of the levers. They caught the car. They criticized the man, quote unquote, and they are the man. Right. And now they're saying there's nothing to see here.

14:50It's very hard for me to see how the baselets go of this when they have worked so hard to stoke these very same things now that they're saying they should forget about. Yeah. And Maya, just to remind folks, I'm going to show some of the times Trump made these type of vows last year. Would you declassify the Epstein files? Yeah. Yeah, I would. All right. I guess 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. So if you're able to, you'll be.

15:26I'd certainly take a look at it. I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it. Well, look, we have a current sitting president who ran on conspiracy theories, appointed people who spent all their time creating and stoking conspiracy theories, including Cash Patel, including Bondi, including lying about the 2020 election. And now their conspiracy theories are coming home to roost. They're paying the price for lying to folks, for making claims for Donald Trump. I think what we saw him doing there, we saw him do throughout the election cycle, which says, I will tell you what I think you want to hear.

16:08I will not stop lying. I will not stop saying whatever serves my viewpoints. And then I will shift if it benefits me to shift. And look, this is the non-transparency administration. This is the administration says, don't believe your lying eyes. And we're not going to actually tell you the truth. We're pulling data off our websites. We're actually making sure we can spin whatever story we want and never be accountable to you. By the way, we will flood the zone with federal agents, ICE. We will put them in masks and we will have them refuse to even identify who they are. But no, we're the Transparency Administration.

16:48We're going to get the deep state. No, Molly is right. This is the deep state. They've shown it in so many ways. And their refusal to be transparent is exactly what is coming home to roost. Yeah. And there's a psychology to this. Listen, we don't want to do the thing of taking millions of people and saying they all have the same motivation. But political scientists study this. Paranoid style in American politics, free Internet emphasis on the political potency of conspiracy theories, particularly when they dovetail with a wider kind of extreme, rabid or messianic view of things. The problem for a lot of Trump followers is they've had to spend a lot of time minimizing everything from him saying on tape that he would grab people without consent.

17:31to other allegations that you can debate because they were litigated, but were not easy to swallow when you look at how much evidence there was. How do you square that? And I want to read from a New York Times essay by Michelle Goldberg, brand new. And she notes that the fantasy of Trump for them as this warrior against sex trafficking, which is part of the deep state idea that you guys mentioned, is a way for followers to manage cognitive dissonance about his personal degeneracy, is how Michelle Goldberg puts it, to believe that they are on the side of light. While championing a man of such low character, Trump's acolytes have had to conjure an enemy of vast, titanic evil.

18:11This is the conspiracy that goes beyond, of course, Epstein's proven horrors, but the idea that there's entire governments and secret cabals behind it. She continues, quote, among those on the right who believe there's an Epstein cover-up, few seem to be entertaining the idea that Trump is protecting himself. That would require a reevaluation of his integrity and their own judgment. But they still take for granted that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful men and then blackmailing those men, that he was killed so he couldn't talk. That hasn't been proven. There's just questions about that.

18:44And she continues, quote, now they have to figure out why Trump won't give them the information they long for. Maya? Well, 26 women, 26 women who had credible claims against Donald Trump. I say that because this will be the big test is will this translate into if we are actually concerned about what is in whatever information exists? What will they say about Donald Trump or will they only stick to Kash Patel or Pam Bondi or whoever the the the people are who are at the front of the administration calling for her resignation as if by replacing her, someone who Donald Trump put in place because of her willingness to do as she was told by Donald Trump.

19:41Replacing her does not suggest that they will get something different necessarily because the buck will stop with Donald Trump. That's bad for democracy. That's bad for transparency. That's bad for everyone. And by the way, you're speaking to something we see in politics. I'm not making a false equivalency, but there are people who are hardcore New Jersey Democrats. And when they first heard bad things about Bob Menendez, they said, well, they didn't want to believe it. We had a process. We had evidence. He was convicted by a jury of his peers. and then was punished for it. And eventually, reality has to take hold.

20:12Do you have any sliver of hope that at least for some people, this process might open their eyes back up to the things we've all been talking about, that democracy has to have truth as a baseline, whether that's because you want a higher immigration or lower immigration, we need a factual democracy community. We need a fact-based democracy because you can't make decisions without facts. the only way we get to where we think we can be as a country, which is one based on truth, facts and transparency of government and its accountability to us, is if we do that. We are not going to get that from Donald Trump.

20:47We are not going to get that just from influencers. There are more bots on the Internet than humans. We have to start back with this very basic point. If we allow anybody in public office to not be accountable to us, we will not have a democracy. But we are the ones who have to show up and have this discussion and say, doesn't matter who you voted for. What matters is you have a person in office who promised you transparency and did not give it to you. Pam Bondi herself said, the files are on my desk. They're coming. had influencers. Donald Trump had influencers come and say, we're going to do this.

21:33So yes, accountability means that we have to understand anybody has to be accountable. I would just add, I think the biggest problem for Trump has been how he's dealt with this, right? He usually has a sort of incredible ability to see what his base wants and deliver it. And he really was sort of caught flat-footed. Now we're seeing them sort of try to shift the blame on Bondi. And Bondi did put out these binders that were labeled phase one, which makes a person think there might be a phase two, phase three. Binders filled with easily Google-able information. I have to fit in more stuff. So I want to say both of you have really enlightened us because you've also broadened this out to the stakes, even again, separate from the underlying case.

22:18I want to thank our experts, Maya and Molly. I want to tell folks coming up, you will hear directly why Stephen Colbert took a big risk to go after his own employer last night over what he calls this corporate bribe to Trump. Backlash to those ice raids we were just discussing. We have more on that. And how much are grocery prices, I should say, going up under Donald Trump? We have the data later in the hour.

22:46Most ice cream is good, but not Jenny's. Jenny's ice cream is more like an obsession. What you get from over two decades of tasting and tweaking and throwing it out and starting over, chasing flavors until they feel alive. That might sound crazy, and that's because it is. Jenny's. Often imitated, never duplicated, always splendid. How do you want to split it? Actually, dinner's on me. Okay, big money. Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend with my Venmo debit MasterCard, so. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kind of on me, actually. Yeah, you send it, I spend it. Did my money get, like, reincarnated?

23:26Yeah, it was chicken shawarma. Want it back? I can't believe you, like, ate my Venmo. Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Normally in these ads, you'd expect someone like me to ask you to buy something. But I want to ask you to do something different. I'm Dave Ferenthal, and I'm a reporter for The New York Times. I'm an investigative reporter, which means that I follow the money, inside of government and outside of government.

23:55The point of my job is to find things people are trying to hide. It involves talking to lots of people. It involves looking through lots and lots of documents. And if there weren't folks like me to go beyond the surface to understand who was really shaping what the government does, the public will be left in the dark about what the government's doing with your tax money, what the government's doing to you through regulations and spending. If you're like me and you think this kind of journalism is important, seek out a news source that does firsthand, fact-based reporting. If that's the New York Times, thank you.

24:25If that's your local paper, that's great too. Because where you get your information matters.

24:36There are a lot of stories right now. I mentioned that in our lead with Nicole Wallace. How do you talk about this if not that? Well, we're still keeping an eye on Donald Trump's trade war. He blew past that self-imposed deadline for 90 deals. He has about two. Now we're seeing more impacts. And as you know, if you remember all the old inflation, this stuff takes time because it's a mass, like large global economy. Massive different shifts. But inflation and prices are up, accelerating over two points. The reports are clear. Trump's tariff pushing up prices. A top economist says there's ample evidence tariffs, that's from Trump, are being passed on to consumers.