Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Steve Benen: Greg, it’s great to be back.
Benen: Well, I can try. I think that we reach a new point in this story in July when The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of this so-called “birthday book,” at which point The White House, Donald Trump, and his allies immediately denounced all of this. In fact, they sued The Wall Street Journal saying that this entire reporting is fake, that there is no such document, that the president doesn’t like to draw, that no one should take any of this seriously. And for a while, that was more or less going to work for them as an official line—because at that point we hadn’t seen any evidence of the contrary. We had the Journal’s reporting and we had the Trump’s claims, and that was it. But things changed this week, obviously. Now we’ve seen the document. Now we’ve seen this letter. Now we’ve seen this information that has been released by congressional Democrats. And so the story has fundamentally changed.
Sargent: The White House is claiming Trump’s signature as a forgery. And Steve, in your piece, you pointed out for this to be true, for Trump’s signature to be forged, it would have to have been done many years ago since the birthday book is from 2003. And this would have been done despite the book being in possession of the Epstein estate, which has it. So it turns out Karoline Leavitt was asked about this little problem by reporter Maggie Haberman. Listen to this.
Sargent: So yeah, that doesn’t really add up. The Times looked at a bunch of Trump signatures from around the time of this “birthday book” and they had almost identical features to the ones on the birthday note. And that aside, saying he has a famous signature—the most famous signature in the world, note again ministering to the audience of one’s ego—doesn’t explain why it’s on that note or why someone would have forged it. Your thoughts on that, Steve?
They have nothing else because the alternative is to acknowledge the fact that Donald Trump sent this cryptic message with this creepy drawing to a convicted pedophile who was his longtime friend. And so rather than acknowledge that reality, they’re stuck spinning this preposterous tale that no one can seriously believe.
Benen: Yeah. One of the most remarkable things about this controversy over the course of the last several months to me is the fact that they’ve taken a series of steps that have made it much worse for themselves. I know a great many of observers in media and the public and elsewhere who have said that they were skeptical of the entire controversy until they started to watch the Trump White House and its allies engage in this cover-up. At that point, the people who were skeptical of it became less skeptical and more interested in hearing more about the controversy—because ordinarily when we’re dealing with Trump and his allies, when they act like they have something to hide, it’s because they have something to hide.
Reporter (audio voiceover): One of the other documents released by the House Oversight Committee contained a photo of Jeffrey Epstein holding an oversized check that was made out to him from the president for $22,000 for a “fully depreciated” woman. I wondered if the president has any recollection of that, or what do you guys make of that photo that was included in those documents?
Sargent: So, Steve, of course she totally dodges there. The issue is not the check signature. It’s the note that was with it. Why is that note there?
Sargent: I want to move to Republicans because what they’re saying is even crazier if that’s possible. They’ve all been forced to pretend Trump and the White House are making a real argument here. Congressman James Comer, the chair of the Oversight Committee said, “The president says he did not sign it, so I take the president at his word.” And Comer says they won’t investigate the signature piece of this. Steve, it’s really something for the chairman of the oversight committee to say we’re not investigating because the president told us it’s a fake charge.
Sargent: I want to read a quote from Senate Majority Leader John Thune, which isn’t much better, “There’s a dispute about whether that’s really his signature, so it’s just going to be argued back and forth.” Yeah, it’s just a dispute. We don’t have any role here, says the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, which has all kinds of oversight powers and responsibilities.
Sargent: Well, Steve, you’ve been covering politics a long time. There was a time at which you would have expected senior leaders of a party whose president is in such a pickle, in such a deep scandal, to go to the White House and say, Mr. President, this isn’t working. We really have to do something else here. We’re going to have to be a little more transparent. We know that you’re in a difficult position, Mr. President, but this isn’t working for us. We’re getting absolutely slaughtered out there. By the way, Republicans are getting absolutely slaughtered out there. The polls are killing them on the Epstein stuff. And so why isn’t that happening here? If you step back, it really feels to me like something different is happening here from what you’d ordinarily expect. There’s a level of cultish devotion to the guy at the top that’s just deeply unnerving and very different from what we’ve seen in the past.
That’s first part. The second part, though, I think is something that you just said a moment ago. It’s cultish behavior. I do think that the Republican Party, to a very real degree, became a cult of personality. I think that Donald Trump, of course, is the strongman at the head of this cult. And for most Republicans, it’s a question of just this blind loyalty, this knee-jerk reaction to every scandal, to every controversy, to every question. So Donald Trump says that he didn’t sign this document that he obviously signed—as far as they’re concerned, that’s just good enough.
Benen: Yeah, it’s funny how quickly they can change their minds once Donald Trump has told them everything’s fine. Don’t worry about what’s in the documents. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. And then a lot of that crowd just moved right on.
Benen: One might assume, and yet here we are.
Benen: Yeah, I think the use of the word “machine” there is important. What we’ve seen in this instance and in every instance as far as I’m concerned over the last decade or so is that no one person can drive disinformation by himself or herself. It requires a coordinated, comprehensive approach. And so there’s Donald Trump. There’s Karoline Leavitt. There’s the White House communications operation just writing the script. As absurd and preposterous as it is on its face, they write this script and they send it out. And then what happens? We see congressional Republicans reading it. We see conservative media personalities reading it. We see MAGA activists promoting it on social media. It is a comprehensive approach. And they do this because they have a track record of success with it.
Sargent: Well, where’s this going, Steve? You’ve got this pressure building. Recently, the Epstein survivors all spoke out and it was incredibly powerful stuff. We’re at the point where it looks like a discharge petition really may well pass that would supposedly compel release of the Epstein files, although there’s some doubt about whether it actually would or not and there’s some doubt about how the Justice Department would handle it. I have trouble understanding how the status quo continues forever. And I’m looking for some help here, really, in understanding where this could go. Does there come a point where Republicans finally relent and in some sense maybe allow or call for a larger release of the Epstein files than the one we’re seeing right now that House Republicans are engineering, which is all bullshit? Maybe a limited release that looks more like a release than what they’re doing now? Does this change?
So do we come to a point in the near future in which Republicans will relent, or at least just enough Republicans relent? I am skeptical. I think that we will soon see what’s going on in terms of the House discharge petition, whether there could be just a small handful of GOP House members to come around. But yet they’ve had plenty of time to do that. They’ve had plenty of opportunities. They’ve seen plenty of the polls and yet they don’t do it, which is why I’m so discouraged, which is why I find it hard to believe that in the coming weeks and months that there will be this turnaround. They haven’t done it yet. And given their track record and their slavish devotion to Donald Trump, it is difficult for me to see a point in which they come around.
Benen: Yes, that is what I think is going to happen.
Benen: Well, if we’re waiting for a smoking gun, there will probably will not be one. There’s not going to be a document in which Donald Trump makes some unbelievably felonious admission to his former friend and that comes to public light and then all of a sudden the sky falls. It’s unrealistic to think that he ever signed such a document or there is such a piece of evidence like that. But I think that in all likelihood, this will simmer for the next several months. The White House will continue to go with equally preposterous denials and the MAGA base and conservative media and their allies will just continue to play along.
Benen: Instantly, of course. Yes. That is one of the foundational problems here is that we are all aware of that dynamic and yet the administration can’t overcome it and Republicans aren’t prepared to ask questions about it.
Benen: Yeah, the point you raised a couple minutes ago, Greg, was resonating with me and I think is especially salient, which is we saw so many Fox hosts and others in conservative media who were really taking a relatively principled stake, were taking a relatively principled line as it relates to the Epstein scandal—and then all of a sudden they did that 180. And I think that really speaks to the fact that we’re no longer really dealing with media professionals, even conservative professionals. We’re dealing with hacks. We’re dealing with people who will simply go along with what they’re told to go along with. There are people who are willing to take direction and read script as it’s been handed to them. And that’s fundamentally different from what we saw, say, five, 10, 15 years ago in conservative media where they were a force to be reckoned with instead of a joke.
Benen: Thank you. See you soon.
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