Raging Moderates: Trump’s Sparking Culture War Fights to Bury the Epstein Scandal

0:00Why have the ICE operations in Minneapolis struck a nerve unlike anything else in the Trump era? It's really important to understand that this is a radical administration. It is not a conservative administration. I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Atlantic staff writer Ann Applebaum joins me to unpack what's happening in Minneapolis and why she argues this moment reflects a radical governing project, not traditional conservatism. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.

0:37Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarleff. Today, we're going to talk about how Trump stirs culture wars to distract from Epstein, Trump's economic pitch ahead of November elections, and if private school is worth it. If you aren't already, if you like what you hear, please subscribe to our YouTube page to get up-to-date coverage on everything happening, where you'll find hot takes you can only find on our YouTube page. So please, if you think of it, subscribe. All right, let's get into it. Over the weekend, two very different versions of America were on display.

1:10One on stage, Bad Bunny turned a major pop moment into a celebration of joy and unity, naming every country across the Americas and reminding audiences that America is bigger than any one flag or administration. At the same time, Donald Trump was doing what he's done for years, picking cultural fights. He went after an Olympic skier for expressing mixed feelings about representing the U.S., amplified a racist video depicting the Obamas, and once again leaned into grievance and division. And the timing matters. Because as Trump fuels these outrage cycles, Congress is quietly reviewing unredacted Epstein files.

1:41I should put unredacted around in quotes. Jelaine Maxwell is publicly floating clemency for silence, and senior figures tied to Trump, including his Commerce Secretary, are facing bipartisan calls to resign over their Epstein ties. Jess, before we get into Epstein, what stood out to you about the wave of culture war fights Trump picked over the weekend? What really stood out to me is how ineffective I feel like he's become. Like, he's really lost his fastball. You know, I think they call it the weave that he does, right, where he, like, finds a way to get a question that he doesn't like. And then he goes some other path.

2:17And, you know, somehow his base plus the extra 10 percent that voted for him or whatever, like, understands what he really meant and all is forgiven. And it doesn't really feel like that's happening anymore. Or at least when it comes to these culture war things on Epstein, which we'll get into, people actually do care about it, even though he continually tells them not to on the Bad Bunny performance. You don't spend a lot of time on Twitter. I think you spend zero time on Twitter, actually. But it was really interesting to see prominent conservatives coming out and defending Bad Bunny's halftime show, including Alexis Wilkins, who's Kash Patel's girlfriend, the one that he's flying all over the country to see on our dime.

2:59But she said Republicans need to unite and get on better messaging because this branding is fantastic and allows all Dems to get behind it. Also super aesthetic. Chris Rufo, super white wing, defended it. But Nick Fuentes, who does go through many phases, but he said, it's literally fake outrage, self-ghettoizing, being overly political, pretending to like the things. We have become the far left. That's about the obsession with, you know, the Kid Rock show. And he said, that looked like me familia. That's like all my cousins. I think I recognized a few people there. and on the horrible racist video of the Obamas depicting them as apes that came out, Laura Ingram, who hosts the 7 O 'clock show on Fox, had Caroline Levitt on and asked her about it, said, can you really throw a staffer under the bus?

3:47And Levitt tried this, oh, well, this is a leftist media narrative. And she's staring at Laura Ingram, right, saying that this is a leftist media narrative. So it feels like the bullshit is being called a bit more. I'm not predicting some downfall of the Trump administration, but it does feel like he is not hitting his marks in the same way and he's not able to dangle like one trans swimmer in front of people to get them to come over to his side. And the people are actually observing what's going on on the ground and formulating a not so positive view of Trump and co. as a result. What did you think about the outrage over all the culture war stuff that's going on?

4:33Well, first off, I have absolutely no interest in Bad Bunny. I couldn't name a song that he sings. But at the same time, I look at the economics of it. It was a brilliant move by the NFL. The NFL is investing in the future. Now, people under the age of 18, the majority are non-white. And this is the most popular artist in the world. Yep. So, of course, they should have him as their halftime show. And I thought the halftime show was optimistic and well-produced. I watched it the next day. So I think this was a big win for the NFL. And I just, no one on the Republican side has asked me, but for them and their carnival barkers to come out and say he wasn't speaking English, and how's that going to help them with a Latino vote?

5:16And these cultural icons have such a huge followership. And then I think what was even worse, and again, I'm biased here, but Kid Rock's thing looks so sad. It just looked like, okay, this is sort of what if meth had a concert. It just felt really desperate. It felt really not very well produced and kind of weird. I think he picked the wrong culture war. They picked the wrong culture war here. Other observations, the things I found most fascinating about the Super Bowl had nothing to do with Bad Bunny. But by the way, I think the Threads account of Elmo had it perfectly that Elmo just hopes both teams have a really fun time.

5:59And he said, Bad Bunny isn't a bad bunny. He's a good bunny. Both of those made me laugh. But the thing I noticed was that a quarter of the ads were AI. So it was sort of the AI bowl. And the last time tech dominated was in 2022. It was called the crypto bowl because a quarter of the ads were crypto, things like FTX and Binance. We know what happened there. And then the time before that where you breached 25 % of the Super Bowl ads being from tech companies was in 2000. And we know what happened there. So if economic history repeats itself, we're about to see a major drawdown in AI. And the other thing that the Super Bowl kind of connoted for me was I think there's been enormous transfer in power and value from the betting sites.

6:44Remember the big ad a few years ago with Salma Hayek as Cleopatra and I forget the guy's name from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David. Not Larry David. His sidekick, the guy who lives with him, talented, funny guy. He played Caesar or whatever. Oh, yeah. J.B. Smooth. There you go. It was bet MGM. And companies like Flutter have been on a roll. flutter shit the bed and missed its earnings i think everyone's basically moving from wagering to the speculation markets and i think you saw that in the super bowl but i i think they're on and again i'm biased here i think they're on the wrong end of the i think it would have been genius for them to say love the super bowl was great bad bunny was was great no i don't i just think they can't being associated with kid rock you just look lame yeah but they like there is an inability to ever be graceful about absolutely anything.

7:35I mean, they couldn't even—I'm talking about the administration, not the examples that I read out, but they couldn't even deal with reality that, like, a straight couple got married at the Super Bowl show, right? Like, there's nothing more pro-family, and a lot of people are pointing that out. Like, this is your, quote-unquote, conservative values. And, you know, I've seen the translations of the lyrics. Like, yeah, Bad Bunny says some dirty things like Kid Rock saying one of his original hits, which is completely profane. I know it was supposed to be his redemptive arc for when he found Jesus or whatever.

8:07But like, it's just fucking entertainment. You like some shows. You don't like other ones. I certainly thought it was less politically hostile or whatever you want to call it than Kendrick Lamar's was. I mean, his message was together. We are America. God bless America. Led with the American flag. It seemed lovely. Yeah. It reminded me of Ronald Reagan's great speech where he said, you can be an Italian and move to Switzerland, but you'll never be Swiss. You can be Japanese and move to Mexico, but you'll never be Mexican. But all of these people can move to America and be Americans. And I just, I love that.

8:43And it's true, right? And seeing all those flags, our strength is essentially we're the operating system for every other country that aspires to be democratic and prosperous. The U.S. used to be the operating system legally, morally, economically for the entire West and people who aspire to be like the West. And when I saw those flags, I just thought of it as their different cultures mostly operating or aspiring to our operating system. Let's move on. Trump's Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is under bipartisan pressure over alleged lies about his relationship with Epstein. I don't know if you've seen here in the UK, Kalshi thinks there's a 70 % chance that Keir Starmer is going down.

9:26Not because he's in the Epstein files, but because he recommended a cabinet post for someone who's in the Epstein files. I mean, that's the bar here versus our president, who, by the way, this is just some fun facts. Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files more than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible or the term meth is mentioned in all eight seasons of Breaking Bad. That's my fun fact for the day. Has the main character energy. Any thoughts on what's going to happen with Secretary Lutnick here? Well, we're recording this mid-testimony, so I don't know what else will come out. But people are going to be looking into whether he perjured himself, whether he said in any sort of official forum that he didn't associate with Jeffrey Epstein past 2005.

10:11I think it was in his confirmation hearing, but he went to the island to have lunch, brought all his kids there in 2012. And I really think that, you know, it needs to be a far bigger part of the discourse on this, that so much of this is happening after Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender. He is a registered sex offender in 2009. And business continued as usual in many respects. So, you know, I think Lutnick would be an easy person to push out. He seems dug in about Kristi Noem, but Lutnik doesn't really bring a lot of positivity or glow to the administration. And remember early on, we were talking about how he was giving the worst interviews of anybody, and they actually had to take him off of TV because he was doing such a crap job.

11:02So I could see that happening. But it's all part of just this overwhelming narrative that's taking shape. And, you know, three million documents is going to take months and months to be able to sift through and then also to be able to connect dots between things because sometimes, you know, you see an email and you don't know what it's a response to, right, or where it fits into the whole story. But I was watching, Ro Khanna has done a couple long-form podcast interviews with Sean Ryan. Have you ever watched the Sean Ryan show? I haven't. He's really interesting. He's a former Navy SEAL, was a Blackwater contractor with the CIA.

11:39He has a podcast that they have like 5.5 million subscribers on YouTube. Very conservative guy. And he is part of this new cadre of traditional Trump supporters that are losing their minds over the Epstein files. And not looking at this at all through a partisan lens, but just saying, how is it possible that people in positions of power are not interested in getting to the roots of all of this, to understanding what went on here, especially when it has to do with the abuse of children in many cases? Jamie Raskin came out of the viewing room and said that the youngest victim that they saw was nine years old.

12:18Right. We're talking a nine-year-old. And I was thinking back, remember, Megyn Kelly a few months ago made that crazy comment like, well, we're not talking about five-year-olds. We're talking about 14-year-olds. And she said, I'm not justifying it. But well, now you're talking about a nine-year-old. So a nine-year-old is more like a five-year-old than is like a 14-year-old. They haven't gone through puberty. You're talking about a kid. and Ro Khanna was talking about how he and Thomas Massey want like a truth and reconciliation committee to be enacted to get to the bottom of this Epstein web which I think would be interesting it doesn't get people any solutions right off the bat but it feels like it's very necessary because the questions you're getting more questions than answers from all of this like who is Jeffrey Epstein?

13:07Sean Ryan thinks he is a Mossad agent. I mean, the connectivity to other nations. Russia. Oh, my God. And the difference also in his business pre and post conviction is fascinating, too, how he shifted to older girls, a lot of Russians and Eastern Europeans and was working in that part of the world, the kind of business deals that he was doing with heads of major financial institutions, his relationship with the Rothschilds, for instance, these titans of tech. I mean, Ro Khanna said he's I represent a lot of these guys, right? He's the Silicon Valley congressman and their splatter Elon Musk, Peter Thiel all over it.

13:44So, you know, questions. Was he a foreign intelligence asset? Was he a U.S. intelligence asset? He had access to the CIA, for God's sakes. Like he was in skiffs. So, like, who is this guy? And I've also shifted. And I don't know if you have as well. Like we were talking about pedophile last week. And now I guess my tinfoil hat is on a bit more. And you're looking at all of the stuff that's coming out in the emails and thinking, was this guy also just like a straight up murderer, like ordering 330 gallons of sulfuric acid? Do you know that he had a trap door in his house that went to the sea, which is like the perfect place to dump bodies?

14:23We now know that the FBI never searched his New Mexico ranch, where it's rumored that he has bodies buried there, that the FBI wiped the footage from his prison cell and that they might have taken a dummy body and put it in the cell and that they slipped him out so no one would notice. these quarterly payments to the head of Ohio State's gynecology department that he was paying him thousands of dollars. Like, what the fuck is going on here? And also, this is very QAnon, but like all of the code words that they're using, things like white tuna potentially meaning a dead white woman, jerky, like, I feel a little Claire Danes in Homeland.

15:06Yeah, I think this is such an erosion and degradation of our institutions because my understanding is the FBI files or the Epstein files were compiled and aggregated by a law enforcement agency. And my sense is when a law enforcement agency aggregates a file, the output is supposed to be indictments, not a 1 % sclerotic release, non-release redaction. We didn't redact things we did such that millions of bloggers with a ring light could interpret it to their political advantage and find outrage where there shouldn't be any or excuse child rape as being mixed in with other outrage. And having Silicon Valley tech bros say, oh, well, you were there more times than me.

15:59And this is an unpopular opinion, but I think a criminal file should speak to the public. I think it's their job to use all their tools and go through and say, okay, what warrants public disclosure and what doesn't? Because I think what we've ended up doing is diluting all the crime. Now, whether or not information on Howard Letnick, a cabinet secretary who lied about his involvement, and it was clearly more than that, whether that should be released, I can see justification for releasing that. But did he commit a crime? And if he didn't commit a crime and it's a criminal investigation, then it's fun to shame these people.

16:34And it's great fodder for interpreting it. It makes for great media and great clicks. And it's great for the Trump administration because it's diluted, you know, the fear here that the president was involved in potentially enabling a pedophile ring. but this has just eroded these institutions where it's like okay who can we trust to parse through this and figure out who is criminally liable here and get a subpoena from a grand or indictment from a grand jury and who is on the wrong invite list i think this whole thing has just been handled so poorly and will be looked back on as something that absolutely molested and dented and just perverted the reputation of our institutions because we don't even know how to conduct an investigation and then parse it out and what the outcome should be.

17:26And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about. Derek Thompson, who I had on Prof G Conversation, said, we've only been skirting along the surface of the atmosphere at seven-tenths the speed of sound for about 30 or 40 years. 95 % of the public was not taking subsonic travel. Jet lag, and I know jet I lag really well. Our species just doesn't know how to react to the sun coming up five hours before it's supposed to. So our bodies get whacked, which I lag. Eventually over, I don't know, 100, 200, 500 years, we'll adapt. Is our species ready for all of us to be broadcasters and for files like this to be released to all these people who think of themselves as people who can parse through the stuff and then broadcast it in a thoughtful way?

18:09They can't. And so this just seems like a melee where who gets caught in the scrum is our institutions. And I think the FBI under a competent president with distinct branches of government charged with fidelity to their oath and what they're supposed to do would have come out with a sub-report saying, okay, today we are announcing 24 criminal indictments against the following people and this is the evidence against them. I think so much of this is just gossip and people, not gossip, but people who just love. One of the things I don't like about our brothers and sisters on the left is we seem, I think we need a massive redistribution of income and they're much more interested in a massive redistribution of virtue.

18:54And yeah, this person's a creep. Yeah, it makes your skin crawl. But the FBI isn't in the business of disclosing things that make your skin crawl and make people look like creeps. That's not what they're there for. They're there for criminal indictments. And all of this, what I'll call redistribution of virtue, is diluting from the premise, from the whole shooting match here. And that is, we need to put in place a series of incentives where no matter how rich and powerful you are, if you in any way provide the infrastructure, traffic, or enable, or conduct child rape, we're coming for you. And everything else, it strikes me that this is the best thing that happened.

19:35And the way this has been parsed out sclerotically was a gift to the people who have actually committed crimes here because it's diluted the whole thing. Let's talk about Jelaine Maxwell. Where do you think her case goes from here? I don't think anywhere that she wants it to. It's been really interesting to see the folks coming out of the DOJ's reading room. So I don't know if you know about how it's designed, but it has just four computers in it. And there's no way, to your point about how poorly this has been done or rolled out, that there's no easy way to search through it. I mean, people are basically just taking what they can and reading it, and you have to do it in the room.

20:20So people are spending, you know, hours in there. Raskin said that by his team's calculations that it would take seven years to get through the files in the current conditions established by the DOJ. So you have that going on, which basically allows the administration to say it's all out there, even though redactions were done apparently by just like blurring out any female's name, which is certainly not how to do this when someone like Colleen Maxwell is such a central player in this. But she's over there saying, oh, I want clemency and pleading the fifth to everything. And you're seeing the response of people coming out like Lauren Boebert, remember, was really out front about the Epstein files.

20:58And that's where she was breaking with the Trump administration. Then he personally called her, asked her to pull back. She had been quieter. She's not quiet anymore coming out of that room, saying that obviously she can't be granted any kind of clemency. incumbency. Representative Paulina Luna said, according to the files we saw, Galene Maxwell was engaged in trafficking and rape. I don't think she deserves special treatment. She's a monster. So I think that if the administration was thinking that they could pull another move, like what Todd Blanche did in getting her to that cushy prison, because she, quote unquote, was going to exonerate both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, because I guess they think that the two sides are as partisan dug in, which I have not seen to be the case.

21:40Obviously, Bill Clinton, and I'm not alleging that either of them did anything with an underage girl. But you don't see liberals getting their back up against the wall in a partisan crouch, right? They're just saying, let the chips fall where they may. Let's just find out what's going on here. But I hope that there is some world in which Maxwell is moved back to the bad prison and has to rot in there for the rest of her life. I don't think you can trust a single word that comes out of her mouth. I think her testimony is meaningless at this point. She committed psychological and physical torture on these girls.

22:17I don't know if I really mean this, but to some degree, the person who is recruiting and feeding these girls to Jeffrey Epstein almost feels worse in some way. And you know how I am about women that do things like this, where I just think that there is something built into us as the people who bring other people into the world, that you should not be this depraved and sick. And I think that if Trump is reading any tea leaves or Susie Wiles is, she knows that there can be no kind treatment for Galene Maxwell and that no one trusts anything that she says. Let's leave it there. We're going to take a quick break.

22:58Stay with us.

23:23See you next time.

23:32Welcome back. Trump is proudly claiming we're already living in the Trump economy. In an NBC interview that aired during the Super Bowl, he touted strong growth, foreign investment, and a boom fooled by AI-driven productivity, while insisting that any economic problems are Biden's fault. But the reality is more mixed. Most Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy, consumer sentiment is still low, and some of his growth claims are inflated. As Trump rolls out this barnstorming economic message ahead of the midterms, the question is whether voters will buy it or if rising costs and skepticism about his numbers could undercut Republican prospects.

24:07What do you think Americans think about the Trump economy? They don't like it. Yeah. Everybody doesn't like it. I mean, maybe the richest of the rich, but it doesn't matter the survey, the pollster. I mean, this has been an interesting week because right-leaning polls have now moved squarely into negative territory about Trump. Rasmussen's pollster has been posting a lot on Twitter about how dangerous the territory is that they are now. So his net approval is minus 18, 26 points lower than it was in his first term, 53 points lower with the independents. House and now Senate is widely talked about as being in play.

24:48We assume that about the House, obviously, but Senate is a big deal. Tax Foundation just came out with their appraisal of the Trump tariffs. American households paid$1 ,000 more last year because of the tariffs. The journal did an analysis that the American consumer is bearing up to 43 percent of the burden. So yes, the corporations are taking some of the hit, but the average American is feeling it too. And there were big special election results for Democrats. Again, you know, 30 point plus over performances in Louisiana and Texas, right? Like this wasn't happening in deep blue territory. So I think that people know what's up.

25:25What are your observations about the economy and how people are reacting to it? Well, 36 percent of adults say they approve of his handling of the economy, while 59 percent disapprove. That's according to NPR and the Marist PBS News survey. about 3 in 10 adults rate economic conditions in the country as excellent or good, while roughly 7 in 10 rate them as only fair or poor. And 71 % are concerned about the cost of health care. 71 % also say the income gap between the richest and middle class in the U.S. is increasing, and consumer confidence is as low as since 2014. In addition, the Gini coefficient, which measures, I guess, variance and it's applied to wealth, zero would be everyone has exactly the same.

26:11Everyone has the same would be zero. If one person owned everything, that'd be 100. When the French Revolution happened or the kind of, you know, let them eat cake era, the Gini coefficient was at about somewhere between 80 and 85. Today, in America, the Gini coefficient around wealth is 83. We are literally at the point where revolutions happen. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3 ,000 for the first time. The level of wealth is higher than any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger. Billionaires are over 4 ,000 times more likely to hold political office. The one I like is that if you're a kid from a top 1 % income-earning household, you're 77 times more likely to get into an elite university.