Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Ana Marie Cox: It’s good to be on.
The Times described the assault this woman alleges as a “violent and lurid encounter,” adding: “More than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files.” Ana, that’s rough stuff, and The Times treating this as a big story means the media hunt will really intensify now. What do you think of this?
However, The Times is still the leader for all American media, for better or worse, one might say. For them to take this—to take it that seriously, to put it on the front page—and they have the goods, right? This was reported before, but The Times has gone very deep on it, and they have treated it with a seriousness that they usually reserve for Hillary Clinton emails and questions about “trans panic.”
Cox: Yeah. And I think what you’re going to see is a trickle-down effect to maybe less prominent media sources, but there will be podcasters discussing this. There will be people seeing bits of it on the evening news. There will be a filter. We already have seen the late-night comedians do it, but I think we’re going to see even more comedy, even more memes. And that is how public opinion shifts.
Now, that’s pretty funny because, at previous junctures—as Media Matters also documented—Fox figures have spent a fair amount of time claiming that Trump has been “totally exonerated” of everything Epstein-related. So, what do you make of that? How does Fox work its way around this one?
And bad news for the true believers is that this is a flashy story. This is a story about a sex trafficking ring. It has automatic interest in it. There is no way that Joe Rogan is not going to talk about this, that Theo Von is not going to talk about this. Any podcast that is consumed by some of these people—who only have a tangential interest in politics, but they talk about the news—they’re going to talk about the Epstein story.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think it’s an important insight that you bring up: that Fox News really is much more of a propaganda organ for Donald Trump than maybe some of those “bro podcasters” are.
Ana, this is an amazing reach to haul Hillary in. Like, you’ve been covering this stuff for some time. Hillary is still their go-to target? She lost to Trump ten years ago. That’s a decade. And that was her last big moment in public life and, like Let’s haul in Hillary. It’s like, what?
The thing is—and the good news is—that the Republicans are trapped in the same place. They’re still obsessed with the Clintons. They’re still obsessed with Obama. The people whom they really need to reach, and the people that they moved in 2024 to their side, barely remember that. Like, this is talking about ghosts. This is talking about World War II. It’s as distant to them as, let’s say, 9/11, right? I mean, they recognize perhaps that it’s something important that happened, but it’s not relevant to them. And they don’t think of the Clintons or Obama as the kind of big bogeymen that the GOP still does. The GOP is still fundraising off of fucking Hillary Clinton.
Cox: That’s right. They were teenagers when Bill Clinton was another butt of late-night jokes, right? Like, they don’t know really who he is besides some figure from the distant pop-culture past, right?
Sargent: Yeah, well, that is certainly true. I just want to point out—just to make it even more ludicrous—like, when Bill Clinton was president in the second term from 1996 to 2000, a lot of these young people hadn’t even been born yet. And any of them that were born were, you know, around five, six, three, four.
Sargent: There’s this weird twist here, too, with the Hillary thing. Hillary had wanted to testify publicly, but Republicans said no. And now MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson just posted a photo on social of her in the hearing, and MAGA Congresswoman Lauren Boebert elevated it. But that just served to undermine the case for keeping the hearing concealed in the first place.
Cox: I don’t think it can. It really does speak to a kind of Streisand effect, right? Like, as soon as you start trying to cover something up, people are going to get interested.
Sargent: Yeah, and what’s funny is that Hillary Clinton just jumped on this. She said, If you’re going to post pictures of me, then let the reporters in to watch the hearing. It’s just like they’re in total chaos, it seems to me—MAGA is.
What the Epstein story does is plug directly into that narrative, even outside the specific, horrific scandal that he represents. I think the number of Trump administration officials and Trump-world people who are in these documents is proof that Trump is part of the problem—that these elites have no accountability.
Sargent: Well, I want to point out to your point there that MAGA—including the podcaster world and even the people around Trump—is quite split. MAGA elites are split over this whole thing right now, precisely because of what you’re getting at: It’s actually blowing up the myth that Trump and his people are somehow not part of the elite.
Cox: Yes, I agree. And I think it points to something that should be heartening for those of us pinning our hopes on the midterms, which is that the MAGA coalition—while it is tough to crack in one way because it is a cult and resistant to logic—was never actually that sturdy based on interests.
Cox: There are a lot of people who came into Trump-world just because Trump seemed to be the winner and the kingmaker, right? As soon as he weakens, I believe people are going to peel off—and he has been weaker and weaker and weaker.
Sargent: You know, just to support your point there, nobody is more aware of that aspect of Trump’s mystique than Trump himself. He absolutely knows that winning is the thing that attracts people to him. And so you will note that when he loses—like when he lost before the Supreme Court—he immediately tried to flip it around by saying something like, “We’re going to investigate them.”
Cox: Yes. And he is losing more and more. All of these special elections we’re seeing, all of this resistance to data centers and ICE detention centers—this is a multi-pronged attack. Epstein just represents one really important wing of this method.
If we can use the “Epstein class” to puncture Trump’s power—if we can make him seem a part of that—I think it contributes to this overall disintegration of his popularity. His popularity is all he has. He has to appear to keep winning and winning. As soon as he starts to lose, he will lose people more and more. I believe there are going to be Republicans in Congress who try to save their own skin—and thank God they do.
And now, incredibly, we have amazingly damning revelations about exactly that—a new dimension to the cover-up in which dozens of pages from the files are literally missing. And they involve a very, very powerful member of the elite: Donald Trump himself.
Cox: I genuinely believe they’re falling apart. I don’t know if they have a way to deal with it. The interesting thing about cults—are you aware that this whole When Prophecy Fails study that people have recited for years about how a failure of prophecy really unites cultists, that that’s turned out to be disproven and falsifiable?
I don’t know if all of those votes are up for grabs for Democrats, but it means that the solidity is no longer there. I think that there is a possibility that there’s going to be other folks that come in and try to sweep up those votes to the right. But who’s that going to be? It can’t be JD Vance. I don’t know who on the right has the ability to come in and try to capitalize on the people who are disappointed with Trump, but still don’t want to vote for people on the more Democratic side of things. They might be just lost; they might just go back to not participating, which is something that a lot of Trump voters used to just be outside of the political sphere.
Vance can’t really—he doesn’t have the charisma to keep it all together. Some of these MAGA figures are going to be staking their own claims and saying, “Okay, I’m going to say that I was one of the first to warn you about Trump way back when and Epstein,” and this will be ways for them to build their followings in the post-Trump era. I think it falls apart potentially at that point. Where do you see it going?
But overall, we can look on the far horizon and it’s good news, because that stuff is extremely unpopular. It will only hasten the peeling away of people and the growth of the movement on the left. And what I want to say to people is: The way to get through the tough stuff is to do the activism that you can now; to band together as you can now. I think Minnesota proved that it can be resisted and you can grow community in the face of it.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly right, and I think that’s what’s going to happen. Ana Marie Cox, really good to talk to you. Folks, if you want to check out Ana’s work, you can check it out up at tnr.com. She writes for us regularly. Ana, really nice to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Cox: Really good to catch up. Thank you, Greg.
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