Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re talking about all this with historian Nicole Hemmer, who’s one of our go-to people on Epstein and the right wing, a topic she’s written several books about. Nicole, always nice to have you on.
Sargent: So Pam Bondi, the former AG, was on Capitol Hill as part of the House’s ongoing investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein files, which are the investigative materials gathered as part of DOJ’s probe of Epstein’s sex trafficking.
Robert Garcia (voiceover): In that interview and what she’s saying here, in her words and remarks, is that it was Todd Blanche, the current acting AG, that was leading the Epstein investigation. And quite frankly, all of the mistakes that we saw—the redactions, not protecting survivors—she continues to push that back onto the acting AG Todd Blanche, who, by the way, was Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer.
Hemmer: It’s an interesting move. Pam Bondi is in such a different position at this point than she was when she was first subpoenaed to give this testimony. She used to be the attorney general. Now she’s been forced out and she is shifting all the blame onto her presumed successor. Blanche is going to have to go through confirmation hearings soon, and she has just made that very difficult for him. Epstein is going to be the focus of conversation when Blanche goes up for confirmation.
And so it’s a little too little too late, but I think that it plays into her hand—and into Democrats’ hands—for her to push the blame on Blanche, who’s not only going up to be attorney general but also is Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. And so she’s making his life difficult, probably because she was forced out of her position.
And then of course, as soon as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the FBI director, got a look at what was in the Epstein files, they were just like, no, we’re not doing that anymore. Can you just sort of talk about that big history in context?
And so I think Bondi thought early on that she could score a lot of points with the Trump base by pushing the Epstein story to the very front of her time as attorney general. This was going to be the thing that she was going to make her name on because it was so important to the base.
They’re all crushed by this untenable position, which is you cannot disabuse the MAGA base of the Epstein scandal. They’re not going to drop it. And you cannot force Donald Trump to talk about it because he’s also unwilling to engage with it.
Robert Garcia (voiceover): I also personally asked the former AG five times—five different questions—about her conversations with President Trump: whether he directed her at any given time on the Epstein files, what he knew, what he asked her to redact or not. And she refused to answer any questions about President Trump. In fact, she said that she would not speak or respond to any questions that had anything to do with President Trump.
Remember, Trump himself at one point, when the heat got very intense, tried to look as if he wanted the Epstein files out. He basically said, release them, I’m all for transparency. But now what Bondi said will only whet the appetite of Democrats more to find out about how Trump conspired to cover them up. Right?
And she chose to highlight that she just couldn’t say anything about Donald Trump. And I think that puts Trump in a tough position, but also it puts Blanche as Trump’s lawyer in a particularly tough position, because he goes into his confirmation hearings looking like someone who’s covering for Trump.
It seems like the key thing that people still don’t really know yet is what Donald Trump knew about Epstein and when, which seems critical. Can you talk a little bit about what we still need to know? What do we know? What’s outstanding?
So there are things that we do know, but a lot that we still don’t know. First of all, we don’t know how many mentions of Trump still haven’t been released. There are still files that are unreleased. We can’t know what they say yet. And that’s why there’s still a push to continue to release the rest of the files.
We don’t know what Donald Trump knew and when he knew it, as you were saying. And that, I think, goes to the extent that Trump was covering up for Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s what people want to know.
Sargent: Right, and we’re going to get more because Democrats are now saying that they’re going to push for Todd Blanche’s testimony under oath. They’ve been armed with this new set of claims by Pam Bondi, throwing him under the bus, basically saying he ran the cover-up. She didn’t use those words, but that’s basically what she said. Todd Blanche ran the cover-up, I didn’t.
What do you think will happen then? Democrats are going to really try to pin down precisely what Trump ordered his underlings to do in terms of the cover-up, as well as trying to ferret out whatever else is in there about him, right?
And what lengths did they go to to ensure that the American people never saw these documents? To what extent did they fail to follow the law that was passed forcing the Trump administration to disclose the files related to the Epstein investigation? Those kind of cover-up questions, I think, are going to be much more the driver of the investigation under Democrats.
Both those things have badly alienated Republicans. Now you’ve got whatever effort they were making to protect Trump from further inquiry on Epstein—that doesn’t seem to really be working, especially if Democrats take back the House. The Republican defenses are going to more or less vanish.
So he’s got that. He’s able to control Republicans to that degree. But on the other, more and more, you’re seeing the party as a whole, as the elections approach, start to worry more about voters outside the MAGA bubble. And so all that control he wields over Republican primary voters isn’t translating into control over the party. I wonder what you think of this moment.
Donald Trump has not been serving the interests of the base in a number of ways. The Iran war, his relationship with Israel, the Epstein files—these have caused a real split in the MAGA base. It has led to a number of right-wing personalities to openly question and criticize Donald Trump more than they had in the past.
But you are going to have purple-district Republicans suddenly, again, cross-pressured, because as Trump’s popularity goes down, they’re going to need to win centrists and Democrats in order to win their election. That is going to lead them to criticize—and in an ideal world, maybe even vote against—Trump on a couple of different bills.
Sargent: Yeah. And you sort of see that schism inside Pam Bondi in the sense that he absolutely screwed her royally. She got tossed out as soon as she was no longer useful. And we should recall that Donald Trump basically commanded her to do something impossible, which was run the Epstein cover-up. And that just was never going to really succeed in any major way. But then when she failed to be corrupt enough for Donald Trump, he just tossed her out.
Nicole, I kind of think that’s a striking quote. On the one hand, yeah, right? Like he is asking for the impossible. But on the other, you knew that about him.
Sargent: For years he was telling them to do the impossible for him and throwing people out when they failed the despot in some way. And now they’re essentially fed up.
Hemmer: I do to a certain extent. Certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans and even within parts of the base when it comes to Donald Trump. To the extent that he has lame-ducked himself—fantastic term—to the extent to which he’s lame-ducked himself, it is by his own making. It’s not just that he goes off and says crazy things.
So all of that, I think we have to take in and to a certain extent celebrate because it’s a weakening of Donald Trump. And here’s my caveat. My caveat is Donald Trump is not somebody who’s ever believed in majorities.
Sargent: Well, you’ve been observing the right for a long time. And I think what all this adds up to is the following: we all know that the real story here, the thread running through everything, is that Trump is on his way out.
Can you just reflect a little on the future direction of MAGA, now that Trump has, number one, essentially screwed the movement in every which way, betrayed the movement in every which way, and number two, is going to be gone soon. Where does this all go?
But he has helped to continue the commitment of the Republican Party to minoritarian politics. He didn’t invent this, but it has accelerated rapidly under Trump. We’ve seen this with the Supreme Court rulings on gerrymandering, the attempts to purge voter rolls, the attempts to strip people of their citizenship.
And I think we should be happy that there is not a charismatic authoritarian leader poised to take Donald Trump’s place. And we should be worried about the minoritarian politics that he leaves behind, because even the Republican Party that’s not entirely bought into Donald Trump at this moment is 100 percent bought into ruling as a minority. And that’s something that I think we should be keeping our eye on.
Hemmer: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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