98. Trump, Epstein, and The List That Won’t Die

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0:35Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with both of us, Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci in London together. After a very fun evening, Anthony. Nice to be here and a beautiful river ride home from the Indigo Theatre last night. I thought that was a lot of fun too. Where we had our first London show together. And a big shout out and thank you to the people that were there last night. It was really a lot of fun. It was fun. A lot of founding members came and we got a lot of questions, which was great. and we sold a lot of Mooch 2028 hats, which your wife is not going to like. Mooch 20, the slogan will be, lose half your net worth in New York State in 2028.

1:13Yeah, that would be in divorce filings. Everybody in this, you missed that. But I will say this, it was a great time. And we tried to get the non-founding members into a separate room to listen to our advertisers. On a loop. But they were not having it. So they stayed for the second half. Yeah, anyway, and then we ended the evening, which was spectacular. Our producer, Izzy, had organized a boat to come from the O2 Stadium to Westminster, and we both felt like we were in a kind of James Bond movie. So that was about the most glamorous world ever. What are we talking about? We're going to go back to Epstein?

1:44Yeah, so we talked about Epstein a little bit on the podcast last week. I'm glad we did so because it was starting to bubble up, and we kind of jumped on that then. But this week, we're going to talk about what is happening in the MAGA movement with the Epstein files, why MAGA is so unhappy about this and what this all means for Donald Trump. And then in the second half of the show, we're going to talk about Ukraine and more specifically about Donald Trump's kind of changing relationship, as it seems, with Vladimir Putin and discuss that a little bit. But let's start with the Epstein file revolt that is happening in MAGA world.

2:18Just to lay out those who don't know what is happening, pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who was sent to prison, killed himself or possibly didn't kill himself in prison, is at the center of a huge storm. You say pedophile, I say pedophile. I do. Okay, I wondered what that was about. That was about tomato, tomato. There's a big furore in MAGA world about whether there were powerful people who were wrapped up in Jeffrey Epstein's world, did nefarious possible illegal things, and are those powerful people's names on a list? list and why have we not seen that list if there is such a list and um is this a sign of i think what they're so upset about which is sort of the basis of much of the maga movement which is there are powerful people protecting powerful people and the epstein issue that is what is the foundation of maga right you've lived in washington for 30 years 25 years is that true that there are powerful people who protect powerful people of course there are powerful people that protect powerful people so we both know that's true i have a little you know you always quiz me i have a quiz for you okay great i'm going to read the following from my phone and then you're going to tell me who said it ready show us all the epstein client list now exclamation point several times why would anyone protect those scumbags question mark ask yourself this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent now who said that on july the 8th 2023 so i'm going to go with donald trump so you're very close so you know what if we were on jeopardy as the judge i would go ding ding ding you've got that right who is donald trump is what i would say okay but it's actually who is donald trump jr so donald trump jr is the heartbeat yeah this is the point he's the heartbeat of the maga movement and what is the heartbeat of the maga movement the deep state is after you.

4:21The deep state only cares about itself. The deep state is who we're going to demolish. Now, I don't know the math on this, Gaddy. We could probably do some research on this. There's a very large percentage of core MAGA that believes that. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her constituents are an example of that. So this is a schism. This is a schism. You can't sew it back up. And now I have to ask you the question I was dying to ask you all morning, which is Donald Trump said, you're a weenie if you don't support me on not disclosing the list and quote unquote, I no longer want your support. So what is that about, Gaddy?

5:05Is he going to get away with that? So I think Donald Trump, as you say, this is a schism in MAGA and it's really, I think, the first major test of Donald Trump's control of the MAGA movement that we've seen since the inauguration, possibly actually ever. We haven't seen MAGA revolt like this after he has specifically asked them in a huge long social media screed. He asked them to let this go. He asked them to say, he fueled this conspiracy theory. I mean, let's be completely honest about this. He had a flamethrower. I mean, he had Duraflame logs. He was throwing them everywhere. He took the tank.

5:39He did the flamethrower, created the conspiracy theory, led directly into QAnon and this whole idea that elites who are pedophiles are running America. I mean, where have we heard this before? Pizzagate, right? Hillary Clinton was a pedophile who had children locked up in a basement of a pizza parley that some guy goes and shoots up. And this is - Which was Russian propaganda, by the way, just for everybody's point of view. Totally. Our intelligence community - That's just not actually true, guys. Our intelligence community believes it was created by Russian propaganda and then fueled by social media influencers in America that were paid by Russia.

6:17And by the way, it's stuck, Kat. There's 15 % to 20 % of the people on social media that actually buy into it. And here's an issue, Kat, and just address this for me. Marjorie Taylor Greene is going after this issue. It pulls well for her. And Trump, as I continue to repeat on this show, tick, tick, tick. He's a declining political asset. She's got to get reelected in 26. He's on his way out. And she's sticking with the Epstein story. How is that going to impact Donald Trump? I mean, I think the question is how long this story lasts and how much impact it has in the midterms. But I think to understand how long it lasts and why it's blown up so ferociously and why it's caused this schism, you have to also get back to the story's kind of origin roots, which is this deep belief in MAGA world that this is real, right?

7:14that there are pedophiles at the top of government, that there are powerful people protecting other powerful people, that there were people associated with Jeffrey Epstein whose names have never been released, many of them they believe are Democrats, and that the system is protecting them. And of course, Donald Trump, when he was out of power, called for the release of all the Epstein files. Pam Bondi said, there is a list, the Attorney General, there is a list, it's on my desk. Could you survive that in any? So you went on television. I'm associated. I cannot survive. I wouldn't be able to survive.

7:46If you went on television and said, I've got the list on my desk for review. There's an extensive list. And you've invited people into the White House West Wing. And you handed them these big loose leaf binders with Epstein information in them. And they're all walking out of there showing them. And then six, eight weeks later, you say, there's no list. There's nothing more to see. Well, make that announcement on the Independence Day holiday on a Sunday when you're trying to drive home from the beach. And by the way, she is the nation's top law enforcement official, which generally means you're meant to speak the truth.

8:20That's not so wrong. So I don't know if she's lying or not lying, but at some point she seems to be obfuscating. And it's like they're doing a kind of Jedi mind trick here. There is no list. Nothing to see here. We told you there was a list, but there is no list. No, it's the men in black neuralyzer. They want to like, everybody get in front of the TV. We're going to flash your brain and erase your memory. Everything we have ever said about the FC Files. And everything that we stand for, by the way. We stand for Pizzagate. We stand for taking out the - Us against them, taking out the powerful, taking out the vested interests, the elites.

8:49This is the ultimate kind of rotten elite story. But can I do another quiz with you? You get that very good quote. Here's another quote. Let me give you this one. I found it. This was a fun one. Okay. Who said, it's even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. Well, okay. So that is Donald Trump's senior, but let me just add a - In 2002, in an interview with New York Magazine. Yeah, but let me add an anecdote. And you wonder why they're now a little nervous about the Epstein files. And let me add an anecdote to that. He was going up the escalator at Trump Tower one day, and a young girl below the age of majority was coming down.

9:26And he said, oh, look at you. I'll be dating and married to you someday, as he was going up and down the escalator. Now, they've done everything they can to stop that video from coming out. Now, they've tried to submerge that in every algorithmic way possible, but who knows? I'm not here to throw rocks at anybody. I'm just here to point out if you start a conspiracy theory and you have this conspiracy theory burning brightly and you promise people that you're going to divulge a list and you're going to open up the worms, the can of worms in the deep state and kill all the worms, and then you say, oh, by the way, there are no worms.

10:00I think you got a problem. I think you have a problem with your base. So I went out last night before our show and I called people in the media. I called people at Fox. I called people at CNN, former CNN, MSNBC, et cetera. Is this going to finish him? Did we find something where that's going to schism MAGA and this is going to finish him? So, Gaddy, 15 of 15 people that I spoke to said no. I agree with that. What say you? So, we're now 16 of 16. We're 16. So, I'm 17 of 17. So, does that mean as a Wall Streeter, when everybody's in agreement, that means we're possibly wrong. Okay. So, because that's what Wall Street.

10:46This isn't Wall Street, though. He's going to be three weeks from now, we're going to be moving on to something else. He'll drop a bunker buster bomb. He'll start a fight with Putin. something will happen where this will go away am i right in saying that i broadly agree with that and we've been doing this on morning joe all week too it's been the kind of main topic of conversation we should talk about how the democrats are handling this and how kind of liberal media is handling this in a second but i think what it does point to is a problem within maga of ideology and schisms and splits that are held together at the moment because donald trump is there.

11:22But once Donald Trump leaves the scene - Such a good point. I mean, that is when you start seeing there's schisms over aid to Ukraine. There's schisms over whether you should have bombed Iran. There's schisms over whether you should cut Medicaid. There's schisms over free trade versus protectionism. There's schisms over whether they should do something more about the Epstein files. And it reminds me of a family where you have a very powerful patriarch. And once that patriarch dies, the kids will start fighting with each other. Or, you know, to go back in history, Yugoslavia, you take away Tito, what happens?

11:55You have the Bosnian war, right? I mean, you have a country held together that can no longer be held together. And I think we should be looking at this as an indication of the future. Not while Donald Trump's around. He survives this because Donald Trump is stronger than MAGA at the moment. He's going to keep telling them, let this go. And he's had a bit of success with that. Some of the people who he told dropped this, Laura Ingraham, she actually dropped it. He told Charlie Kirk, the influencer, to drop it. He's kind of revived it again now. But I think he survives this because I think in three weeks' time, you're right, he'll invade Greenland or drop another bunker buster and actually impose tariffs on a whole bunch of countries and we'll move on.

12:29But it gets to unhappiness in the family. And I see Donald Trump in a certain way, so I'm going to make a statement and ask you to react to it. I see Donald Trump as a person who has almost a fixed volatility. And what do I mean by that? He is president. He got back to the presidency. presidency, he's entitled to that job for the next four years if he's not impeached and convicted. His own party won't do that to him. So there's a bandwidth of volatility where he could be slumping a little approval ratings or going up a little, but it really doesn't matter. He's a fixed asset until it's time for him to go.

13:05And so these things are not going to really have major consequences. Is that your opinion or you differ from that? No, I think this doesn't have major consequences for him.

13:19Let's play out one scenario. This causes him problems in the midterms, or something causes him problems in the midterms. He loses the House. The House begins impeachment proceedings. They try to have him for everything that they've got on him, corruption, etc., etc., etc. Worst case scenario, he gets impeached, he gets tried, he goes to prison. I also think all of that's a very remote scenario. But I suppose anything that plays into the prospect of him losing the House in 2026 increases problems potentially for him. But I agree with you and the 16 other people that we've spoken to and all of the people that I've spoken to on Morning Joe who say, yes, this is a problem, but it's not a problem particularly for Donald Trump in the short term.

13:59What do you think about how the Democrats are handling this? Is there any... They're on the list. There is no list, Anthony. There's no list. Oh, okay. Let's step back for a second. I'm not saying Epstein had a client list. Okay. Just to clarify. But I am saying that there were people that hung out with a guy, flew on the plane with a guy. We know that he was a known pedophile, just slain Maxwell. If it's all a hoax and there's no list and nothing happened, why is she in jail? I think stuff happened. She's in jail for sex trafficking. Isn't that why she's in jail? And it was super suspect. Okay, so who did they sex trafficking to?

14:41Who did they sex trafficking to? And the answer is there were executives and there were politicians that they were sex trafficking to. And oh, by the way, let's not forget Alex Acosta. And for those of you that may not know who he is, he's the former labor secretary. He worked in the Justice Department and he prosecuted Jeff Epstein in Florida. up. And he said to people, I was told that he was part of an intelligence operation and I needed to lessen his sentence and punish him, but get him out of jail quickly and make sure he was in a minimum security jail. He returned to jail in 2019. But I'm just saying, are we going to wash over all that?

15:22If we're going to wash over all that, that's fine. It's a little bit like the Panama Papers. You remember the Panama Papers? Yes. We don't talk about them anymore, but It was rife with self-dealing and it was rife with corruptible behavior. So if we're not going to talk about it, it's okay. But you see, the thing you can't get away with in my mind, I'm coming after the deep state, but it's like the horror movie where the call's coming from inside the house. By the way, I am deep state. You see that? Yeah. And I don't think that's going to fly with the Marjorie Taylor green quadrant. So your insight, which I think is a brilliant one, and I just want to expound upon.

15:59there's going to be a major civil war post the patriarch's demise i think you can't over emphasize that a month enough and that's a great point and i think we should start looking for that because i think it's brewing and i think the splits within we've spoken a lot about the splits in the democratic party and they are sort of almost traditional ideological splits between center and left the splits between the republican party are more widespread and they're more weird and they're more deep founded because of Trump and they're more emotional. They're not just policy. And this is definitely one of those emotional ones.

16:32I'm not saying there were not people who did things with Jeffrey Epstein. And we know that we're sitting here in Britain in the royal family that seems to be missing one member because of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Bad things happened with Jeffrey Epstein and an awful lot of powerful people spent time with him, went on his plane with him, went down to his parties with him in the Caribbean. And the chances of some of those people having been caught up with women who are underage, I think is reasonably high. I think the fact that there are questions about where's the missing two minutes or whatever it is from the camera that was outside his cell on the night he died, why were the guards asleep oddly at the moment he was committed suicide or said to have committed suicide i think all of that is weird and you can see how it definitely fuels conspiracy theories i mean there's so many gaps in the story that i can understand i mean the why i would like answers to all of those things or when i say there's no list i think there's enough from jr he wants those answers he wants those answers so does martin taylor green i'm just curious why is donald from jr quiet about having been so because i think his dad doesn't want the story to be talked about anymore because this is not helping him he wants to get back to the big beautiful bill He wants to get back to the things that he says he's achieved.

17:49And he doesn't want the distraction of this story. As he said to Maga, stop fighting among yourselves. You're not helping me. 30 seconds on Vance. I think this is important. Vance is going to get destroyed. And so if you're listening to this podcast and sometime in 2026 or 27, and Vance has been meleed like Elon Musk, you'll remember that I said this because he's going to get destroyed because he doesn't know where to go. because they because trump says do this and he goes and does that he goes on the theo von show and says we got to get the list out now he's saying do that he's over here they're gonna they're gonna put him you know i said the wood chipper but i actually think they're gonna put him in a blender first like a food processor and then pour him into that's a kind of sarah palin image okay i'm just letting you know this is gonna happen okay you can talk about the democratic party right now but i'm just letting you know bye-bye okay we'll forget the gore just dumb vance just something and anyone who thinks vance is the kind of patriarch that can keep this fractious maga movement together no chance is dreaming they're on one other thing and for the younger people listening because i know you guys see these memes of vance all fat and like round faced on instagram no chance to be president when you are round faced and fat and just blowing all through the instagram channels and so forth so i'm just letting you know and by the way excuse We have a president who is a little on the overweight side.

19:14But they don't meme him like a blow up doll, like a cabbage patch kid from 1984 with a beard. They don't do that to him. They do it to J.D. Vance. Bye bye. Bye bye, J.D. Vance. OK, go to the Democrats. So the Democrats now, of course, are jumping on this. They are it's you've got this irony of the Democrats saying crying conspiracy theory about something they said there was no conspiracy theory about and trying to kind of make hay of this. I think you can see that as totally cynical. Of course it is. That's what the Democrats are going to do. They see a political opening. They'd be fools not to take it.

19:47And I think they have a couple of opportunities. One is they have internal polling by this Democratic polling company called Blue Rose that shows that 61 % of Trump voters do think that law enforcement is hiding information about powerful people. So they can see that this is a movement, an issue. Do I think law enforcement is hiding information i don't know in this case i'm i'm not in the kind of there's a deliberate conspiracy to cover up about powerful people okay but you said earlier i think i want to know powerful people protect powerful yes i think that's true powerful powerful people protect powerful people by passing legislation that gives powerful people massive tax breaks they do it all the time rich people protect rich people in that way we've just seen it happen in the united states i don't know in this instance but here's the irony of what you just said by the I completely agree with you, but I want to explain this to people from a social engineering perspective.

20:40And then I'll get back to the Democrats. But it's been proven, okay? Right. You protect rich people by burgeoning the middle class, okay? Teddy Roosevelt understood that. Henry Ford understood that. Henry Ford said, hey, I'm going to pay these people enough money to buy the product that they're producing. I'm going to make sure they're in single family houses near the factory so they don't come after me in my mansion with tiki torches and pitchforks while I'm carving up my steak and eating my caviar. And so this nonsense that we're doing in this generation, where we're regressively shifting the tax code to favor the rich to try to get us a few trillionaires, is going to blow back on us, Caddy.

21:22It's going to be a really bad thing. That's why we were asked about whether there could be a revolution in the show last night. I thought it was a very interesting question. You got to fix that. I think the other thing it does for Democrats, and then we are definitely going to take a break, one last thing, is that it gives them the opportunity to show that Trump is a flip-flopper. And American voters generally don't like flip-floppers. It was what sunk John Kerry in his candidacy. Remember in 2004, when literally at the Republican convention, everyone was up there. I was there at that convention holding flip-flops because John Kerry had flipped his position on the wall.

21:53It's not something that Americans tend to like. And they can say, look, he's flip-flopped on this and look at all the other list of things that he's I'm going to push back on it. Okay. Because yes, I hear you and the flip-flops and so forth. But John Kerry lost that election because he was a wooden Ichabod crane. That's why he lost the election. Okay. And the only thing people saw of John Kerry was his Adam's apple. And that's why he lost the election. And so you could disagree with me on that. But we do a lot of flip-flopping in this country. We had Reagan as a Democrat. He went to be the Republican.

22:25I can name every single candidate that is flip-flopped on almost everything. And politicians, whether we like it or not, do flip-flop. So I don't think that's it. I think where the Democrats could really make headway is if they expanded the tent of that party and they said, okay, hey, guys, these MAGA people are nuts. Or in my neighborhood, they say, goo-goots. You got a chicken running around in your head. I did the guguts. And what you got to do is widen the party, strengthen the democracy, strengthen the system. And my friend Gavin Newsom, which you pointed out in last night's show, is finally switching the narrative on California and pushing back on people and saying, hey, California is tech.

23:11California is Hollywood. It's culture exporter. 71 % of America's GDP. And it's also$83 billion of money getting exported from California on a net basis to the federal government. It's minus$71 billion for Texas. And kudos to Gavin Newsom for finally pointing that out. We've kind of drifted away from Epstein. But anyway, that was a very nice ending to the first half. We'll take a break and come right back.

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24:49Okay, welcome back, everybody. Anthony and I are still in London recording this. And in this half, we are going to talk about Ukraine, where there has been an arc of change in the president's message towards Vladimir Putin recently. I think we can both say that, where he came out clearly very frustrated with Vladimir Putin, potentially because Melania Trump had told him she didn't like bombs being dropped on Kyiv. For the fifth time by my count this year, Donald Trump has issued an ultimatum to Vladimir Putin and said he has 50 days to agree to a ceasefire, or there will be tariffs and secondary sanctions put on those countries that are dealing with Russia.

25:41And also, more importantly, he has said that he is going to send Patriot missile systems to Ukraine, which they desperately need. He says it's going to be billions of dollars worth of weaponry. Sitting in the Oval Office with the notice, Secretary General Mark Rutter. He said that he made it very clear that it's not going to be American money. European countries are going to pay for these patriotism systems. There'll be American systems, but they will be sent to the Ukrainians. When he announced this, Antony, what I heard from Kiev was that there was euphoria in Kiev, but it didn't last very long.

26:14So as the details and the realization of what this actually meant came out, or rather the lack of details because everybody wants in Ukraine more defensive weapon systems and potentially even offensive weapon systems. There was initially some speculation that there'd be offensive weapon systems in this package. Now that's gone away. He's made it clear there aren't going to be offensive weapon systems. We don't know how big this package is going to be. Is it going to be when he says billions? Does he mean 10 billion? Does he mean 2 billion? 10 billion will probably be significant. 2 billion won't last them terribly long through what has seemed to be a Russian summer offensive.

26:48And this idea that the Russians have just been given 50 days carte blanche to do what they like before Donald Trump does anything. And even then, will he actually do anything given that he's threatened four times already this year to do something and then hasn't done anything? So there's been, I think, since that Monday meeting, when initially this was seen as a real change of Donald Trump's towards Russia, there's been something of a kind of little bit of cold water thrown on this in Kyiv. And they're a bit more concerned that this may or may not happen. They don't know how big it's going to be.