Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Nicole Hemmer: Great to be back, Greg.
There’s tons still out there, apparently. Nicole, can you bring us up to date on what we’ve learned in the latest round of revelations?
So we feel like you’re still not being fully honest with us, which is why it’s so interesting that he’s asking for these DOJ memos, because now you start to get the sense that he’s shifting from the crimes to the cover-up. And that’s what he, I think, is hoping that the DOJ memos will show—to what extent has the DOJ been covering for Donald Trump?
Hemmer: Right. Because the thing that became clear—I mean, we’ve known for a long time that there were so many elites across the world who were in relationship and had connections with Jeffrey Epstein and with his crimes. But there was something about this latest tranche of files that just blew that open for most Americans. It’s as though most Americans suddenly realized: It’s everyone. It’s leaders in finance. It’s leaders in politics. It’s world leaders. Like, everyone is implicated in this.
Sargent: Well, Trump was asked basically exactly that question by Steve Doocy of Fox News. He asked whether people will go to jail over the Epstein revelations. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, you know, I’m the expert in a way because I’ve been totally exonerated. That’s very nice. I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s a very, very sad thing to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing.
Hemmer: He was not. I mean, he’s trying to control the storyline here by repeating that over and over again. But first of all, we don’t have all of the files. There’s no way to have him “exonerated.”
Sargent: Yeah, I’ll say. And note that Trump has nothing to say about whether others will face accountability over what we’re learning. And that was Steve Doocy’s question, right?
So he should have some concern about whether people are going to be prosecuted. But then again, he runs the DOJ in a way that has compromised its independence. So maybe he’s not concerned about it because he knows there won’t be prosecutions.
Hemmer: Right. And in those cases, the DOJ has complied, even when there is simply no evidence to pursue those cases. We’ve seen attorneys for the federal government be sanctioned because they are putting forward inadequate or false information to judges in order to get these indictments. So the fact that he is willing to go so “hard into the paint” for the people that he doesn’t like, and unwilling to do that in the case of Epstein’s co-conspirators, is another tell.
So you get both here, right? You’ve got elites who are getting, you know, incriminated in some sense with these releases, but you also have the sense of a cover-up from the redactions. You know what I mean?
I think that we can say who he is willing to cover up for because, again, he is directing the DOJ in a way that I think it’s fair to say no former president—no previous president—has. And so, yeah, I think if we find out those redacted names, we learn a little bit more about Trump’s own network of elites.
Hemmer: Right. And that’s what we need to know. We want to know both: What was his involvement in the underlying crime, and what is his ongoing involvement in the other crime—which is not following this law and covering up for other people?
Sean Ryan (voiceover): You’re going to protect pedophiles. You’re going to protect pedophiles rather than go after them, and hope that everybody’s happy that the Dow hit 50,000? Are you fucking out of your mind? I guess the whole “drain the swamp” campaign promise was another fucking bullshit lie, huh? Man, the lies are stacking up fast.
Hemmer: This very much is about a schism that is happening in MAGA. And some of the schism predates Epstein, and we’re just seeing it play out. Like, the people who are willing to attack Trump over Epstein already had problems with Trump.
And so you’re seeing the schisms in MAGA over Trump and over, like, the nationalists versus the MAGA people. You’re seeing that play out through the Epstein files: who they talk about, who they’re willing to implicate, who they’re willing to acknowledge are implicated, and, in particular, what they’re willing to say about Trump himself.
Pam Bondi does what Trump says. But at the same time, she’s almost being set up as the person who’s the one making the decision here. It’s like a pantomime where Trump and MAGA kind of know that the way this can work is MAGA figures, who want to maintain credibility with their own followings, can go hard at Pam Bondi, but maybe not so hard at Trump. Does that make sense?
And she set her own self up with her early comments about, “There’s a list sitting on my desk, and I’m going to have all these influencers come over.” So she has been a bit of the goat for this group for a long time for her own actions. But now she is very conveniently placed to draw the heat away from Donald Trump for those who want to draw the heat away from him.
Hemmer: What a great question, because actually a Fox News gig isn’t worth what it used to be. But I think it is important to remember that there are people who desire power and proximity to power. She is the Attorney General of the United States. That is a powerful position.
Sargent: Just crazy stuff. So it gets really, really interesting with Steve Bannon. You mentioned earlier that he’s kind of under fire as well. A bunch of MAGA voices are pissed off at Bannon, who appears in the files. It turns out he was advising Epstein on how to handle the pedophile allegations. Bannon was basically contacting him daily and saying things like, You know, do it like this, do it like that, do it like the other way. Media Matters had a very good roundup of some of these MAGA podcasters. Let’s listen to this. Here’s Ben Shapiro.
Greg Sargent: Here’s Benny Johnson.
Sargent: And here’s Dinesh D’Souza.
Sargent: Nicole, Steve Bannon was the keeper of the MAGA flame. And now—my God—this. What do you make of it?
And for good cause, right? Bannon’s name isn’t just all over these files. He wasn’t just helping Epstein to, like, figure out his legal defense; he was making a documentary about Epstein and hasn’t released the tapes from that. And so there is this kind of sense that Bannon, too, is covering up—that he was much more deeply involved.
So there is this tension between how much can we really say about him. For people who are already anti-Bannon, they’re having the time of their lives. For the rest, they’re trying to figure out how little they can get away with saying about what Bannon’s done. So that’s the divide that you’re seeing right now.
If you look at the way these MAGA podcasters are talking about this, they don’t seem quite as exercised about Donald Trump as they do about Steve Bannon. But here’s where it really breaks down for me: It is up to Donald Trump whether anybody pays any kind of price or is held accountable for what’s in the Epstein files. It’s up to Donald Trump because he controls Pam Bondi. We know that.
Hemmer: I mean, they’re going to try to do it for the rest of Trump’s time in office. This really is something where they’re just—they’re going to try to hold it together as long as they can, because there’s a real cost to going straight for Donald Trump. And there’s a real cost with their audience.
And he has positioned himself as like, Because I’m the elite, I’m the one who can attack them. But in this case, he’s just not going to do it. He’s not going to have Steve Bannon arrested. He’s already pardoned Steve Bannon for crimes against MAGA, right? Steve Bannon scammed MAGA. He was trying to raise money to “build the wall” and that money went to buying a yacht for Steve Bannon. So he is somebody who actually gets prosecuted for that scam and was going to go to jail—then Trump pardons him.
Sargent: This is what’s amazing to me about the whole thing. The MAGA mythology all along—the very reason MAGA got exercised about the Epstein files in the first place—was because it allegedly contained lots and lots of information about “global elite pedophiles” who were, you know, acting with impunity and doing all sorts of horrible things and were kind of helping each other cover it all up.
So it’s like—if they were just willing to be honest and kind of consistent about this and willing to criticize Donald Trump, they could say, We were right about this. You know, it was an elite cover-up. But they can’t quite get there, because that would require indicting Trump.
And so it’s people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes who can talk about this elite corruption because they have a bigger project. Their bigger project is a white nationalist ethnostate, and Donald Trump is useful for that—but when he’s gone, their project lives on. It’s the people who are tied to Donald Trump’s power who are having such a difficult time talking about this, and are going to continue to have a really difficult time talking about this.
Sargent: Yeah, the bottom line is that they are not able to hold Trump accountable for anything. And so they themselves become participants in the failure of accountability toward elites.
And that is putting them in, I think, a tricky position. And so I do think you are going to see more of that, though. I think there is going to be some “Epstein denialism” that begins to emerge, because there’s no other way, really, to defend the right-wing elites who are caught up in the scandal.
And the other is that the pressure for more revelations and accountability for the Epstein crimes—and the elites who are implicated in them—isn’t going to let up. Those two dynamics are, kind of, what are coming. What happens now?
We are seeing world leaders put on trial—both for their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, but also for trying to overthrow their governments. There are people being held accountable outside of the United States in the way that they’re not being held accountable within the United States.
It can be channeled toward authoritarianism and toward a further right-wing radicalization, but it can also be channeled toward reform movements. And I do think that as people are thinking about, “What do we make of all of this?” our energies could be fruitfully spent thinking about how do you reform this system so that impunity isn’t the “order of the day” in the United States?
Hemmer: Not just disappear from the scene, but he has to be held accountable. And that, I think, is going to be the heaviest lift in American politics and in the American judicial system. Because that’s the problem in the system right now. And if you can fix that, then you can start to make headway on other things.
Hemmer: The door will open sometime, so we just need to be ready to walk through it when it does.
Hemmer: Thanks so much for having me.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump s epstein evasions collapsing as maga fury explodes was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump’s Epstein Evasions Collapsing as MAGA Fury Explodes )
Also on site :