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Americanswers! Why is Trump so annoyed about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl?
00:38:47
And why is Donald Trump refusing to apologise for the racist video aimed at the Obamas?
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- [00:00]
Justin
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- [00:06]
Mariana
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- [01:11]
Mariana
Well, I have to say that, Justin, I'm pretty surprised that you are able to make this episode, given that you must have been up all night watching your favorite artist headline the Super Bowl. Bad Bunny.
- [01:24]
Justin
Okay, look, word of explanation for those who haven't come across. My love for Mr. Bunny before is actually my daughter, Clara. Mr. Bunny, who is a fan of Mr. Bunn, is also a Spanish speaker and very keen on the whole Spanish side of it. So she I was in contact with, she says it was very good. Not too political, she says before the end. So I suppose the question is that also going to be the finding of those Americans who watched it in the United States? Because one American who watched it in the United States, we know already, don't we, guys did not particularly appreciate it.
- [02:03]
Anthony
Yeah. Shortly after Bad Bunny's concert finished, halftime concert finished, Donald Trump was on his Truth social website posting his take on it. And it was not a positive one. He said it was absolutely terrible, one of the worst ever. He said it made no sense. It was an affront to the greatness of America, didn't represent our standards of success, creativity, or excellence. Nobody understood a word this guy is saying. And the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the USA and all over the world. By and large, a not positive review from the commander in Chief.
- [02:39]
Justin
Okay, so we'll be answering your questions about Bad Bunny, but you've also been asking us about other things as well. What's going on with ICE is a perennial. We get to that almost every session at the moment. The Epstein files as well, and there is more to be said about them, but also how the President has dealt with the backlash after that video, that racist video involving Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as well, the one that he posted to his social media page. So all of that about to come. Welcome to AmericasT.
- [03:06]
Mariana
AmericasT, AmericasT, from BBC News.
- [03:11]
Anthony
When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir, right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world.
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Helena Merriman
Oh dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?
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Mariana
Of course the President supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question.
- [03:25]
Questioner about Epstein
Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?
- [03:35]
Mariana
Hello, it is Mariana in the worldwide headquarters of AmericasT in London.
- [03:39]
Justin
And it's Justin in bath today in the English west country.
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Anthony
And it's Anthony here in Washington D.C. justin, I always kind of picture you when you say you're in bath, lounging in a hot tub with the phone by your. By your ear, recording this with steam all around you.
- [03:57]
Justin
Yeah, well, you got it in one then. That's exactly what I'm doing. But in your imagination, Anthony. But nobody else wants to have that thought. But if you have it, that's great. Okay, it sounds, that sounds like there.
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Mariana
Might be a bit of an X rated podcast.
- [04:12]
Anthony
Yeah, it could be.
- [04:13]
Justin
And which brings us very nicely onto Bad Bunny and his performance at the Super Bowl. So it was the super bowl, this massive, massive sporting event, but of course, of course just a massive cultural event the day that my daughter Clara was born in the US on Super Bowl Sunday 2004. Very difficult to get help in the hospital when my wife was having Clara, although we forgave the nurses because it is a big US event and it really is. It's one of those things, isn't it, Anthony, that just brings the nation out. I don't know what the viewing figures were this time round, but you don't have to like American football basically to be part of the Super Bowl. And it's not just the halftime performance, is it? It's the adverts as well and all of the stuff around it that people put so much effort into.
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Anthony
Right? People throw super bowl parties, they all gather together, they have chips and salsa and beer. And it's a social event as much as it is a sporting one, probably more than it is a sporting one. And the advertisements, as you mentioned, are a big thing. People spend $8 million just for a 30 second spot during the super bowl. Ads, super bowl program. So it all becomes very focused on what are the different companies going to talk about and what are the big issues that they're going to be pushing. AI, of course, being the biggest one, it seems, this time around. And then also, as you mentioned, the halftime program is usually something people watch and comment on. There's been a whole variety of different celebrities and singers and artists who have done halftime shows. But this with Bad Bunny was the first time that an entire halftime program was done in Spanish and not English. And I think that definitely reflected a portion of the American culture that hasn't gotten coverage, hasn't gotten the attention of mainstream culture in any sort of way. Like this.
- [06:14]
Justin
Yeah. Okay, so look, we had a question from Rafe in London who asks us this. Really following on from that, Anthony, could the Bad Bunny super bowl performance shift the narrative about Latino people in the with the current climate around the killings of Alex Pretty and Renee Goode, or are people just too entrenched in their views? Mariana, what has changed in the world that you look at? Were there entrenched people who were suddenly unentrenched? I somewhat doubt it.
- [06:43]
Mariana
Yeah. As we know very well in social media land, everyone who is entrenched stays pretty entrenched. And it's quite interesting because when you wake up and you haven't stayed up like you, Justin, to watch your favorite Bad Bunny and you see all of this un on your social media feeds, or in my case, on my undercover voters, my fictional characters that have profiles on the different sites and they sit across the political spectrum, you'd think that people were watching entirely different events because you've got people who love Bad Bunny, who think it was absolutely brilliant and love, you know, the kind of message of like, unity and love, Trump's hate and that, that sort of thing, and all of the kind of flags of the Americas and everything else. And then on the other side, you've got lots of pro maga influencers who thought it was terrible, that it was all in Spanish. And what I would say is quite interesting is I think a lot of people, because of the comments that Bad Bunny had made at the Grammys, thought that he might say something explicitly critical of Donald Trump and or ice, and he actually didn't do that in the way that people thought. And I think that that has gone down quite well with someone like Gabriella, who is a Latina undecided voter who actually like her feed is mainly people just praising the performance itself, like the choreography and that it had loads of energy and that it was really exciting to watch. And so actually to some extent, I think that to answer the question that Rafe has, I think probably for people who aren't tuned into the whole, you know, everything around sort of immigration and ICE and a kind of staying out of it a bit, it probably did reinforce quite a positive image of people who are Puerto Rican or from Latin America.
- [08:19]
Anthony
Right. At the Grammys, you'll remember Bad Bunny said ice out. Very political, very direct. He didn't say anything like that. During this halftime show, which began kind of in the sugar plantation feel that they had created in the center of the football stadium. It went through kind of a tour of Puerto Rican culture, coffee shops and dancing. There was an actual wedding ceremony. At one point, he gave his Grammy. He went into Roman gave his Grammy to a small child that looked a lot like Liam Ramos, the five year old who was detained in Minneapolis. It wasn't him, but there was a lot of speculation that maybe it was him or was supposed to be him. And then that ending that you mentioned with all of the flags of all of the Americas and Bad Bunny ticking through all of the countries and saying we're all together, including the United States and Canada and all the Latin American nations, including Cuba for instance, that had a very powerful mess, I think one that is very different from the America dominated Western hemisphere that you hear Donald Trump and a lot of conservatives talk about.
- [09:30]
Justin
I just felt, I don't know what your view is, Anthony. Just listening to it, I was thinking 20 or 30 years ago, certainly when Obama came to power, Americans would be saying, look at us. We've got this amazing cultural event. We've held it almost entirely in a language that is not spoken by most people in our nation. And they would celebrate it. And yet now it just seems to me the atmosphere so poisonous that you can't anymore. And there'll be plenty of Americans who say it's a bit of a cultural abomination, really. Why speak a language that we don't speak in this big cultural event to.
- [10:06]
Anthony
Say that the United States is a melting pot, that there's strength and diversity. That used to be kind of pablum. That was kind of a non controversial thing for an American to say. Now, as you rightly point out, it is politically charged. When you have Trump and conservatives talking about Western civilization and Western culture and protecting our homeland and protecting our culture, they do so in a way that is at its heart exclusive. And so here you have Bad Bunny saying God bless America, which is a term that a lot of people use to celebrate Kind of a traditional view of America, white America, Christian America, and then using that to describe all of the Americas and not just the United States, but from Chile through the Caribbean all the way up to Canada. Yes, it maybe wouldn't have been controversial at one point, but now, very pointed, very political. Even if Bad Bunny wasn't up there, saying Ice out wasn't being directly political. The message there was clear for those who wanted to see it.
- [11:13]
Justin
But just on the politics of it. Just going back to Rafe's question, because it's really important. He's asking, does the super bowl performance shift the narrative about Latino people in the U.S. i mean, that's interesting because the narrative actually has been that Latino people, of course, as Rafe, I'm sure knows, went for Donald Trump in the last election in staggering numbers, nearly half of them actually, and certainly record numbers in, well, in recent times, certainly in the times when the Latino vote really counted for something, there were enough people, people to make a difference. I mean, he won in all sorts of places. We've discussed it before, haven't we? Anthony won down in Texas on the border, wholly Latino counties or sort of 95% Latino counties going for Donald Trump. And the first time for some of them, they'd ever voted Republican in a majority sense. So the narrative was massively that he was doing things for working class Americans. And many, many Latinos are working class Americans to the extent that you could. They are increasingly the backbone of working class America, you know, particularly the men on the construction sites, et cetera, et cetera. So the narrative actually was they were enormously positive about Donald Trump. But the issue now, as Rafe, I suppose, is pointing out, Anthony, is that that narrative, because of all that's been happening recently, has really changed.
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Anthony
Yeah, Texas, South Florida as well. Miami Dade county, where Miami is, was carried by Donald Trump for the first time in decades. A remarkable turnaround as a lot of South American voters, South American descended voters, rallied behind the Republicans and Donald Trump and not just the Cuban Americans who have been traditionally conservative. So, yeah, it was a remarkable achievement that Donald Trump pulled off in 2024. And I think now, as you say, the concern is that, that Trump is alienating that. And if we look at what Rafe is saying and if there's any kind of a consequence of the super bowl, it may not be the halftime show per se. And what was in the show and what Bad Bunny did, it would be the reaction to it from Donald Trump and from other conservatives pushing back and saying, why are they speaking a language I can't understand, I couldn't understand any of it, that the dancing was inappropriate, that, that it wasn't an American message. I think that could alienate a lot of the Latino voters who rallied around Donald Trump in the past. And actually, if you look at some of the reaction, I think Marianna can speak to this, it wasn't unified among conservatives that this was awful. You saw some people, even Trump supporters, even people who had been in Trump's administration or had been associated with him, stepping forward and saying, no, this actually was a very uplifting message, particularly Hispanic surrogates for Donald Trump, people who had been in his camp before saying this was actually a celebration of Hispanic culture, Puerto Rican culture, and not something that's divisive. I think they may sense that just bashing this and hitting it with a broad brush is not a winning strategy politically.
- [14:27]
Mariana
Yeah. I think that when you look at, if you look at lots of the MAGA accounts on social media, I mean, there are some very vocal ones on X who've been incredibly critical of it, and I think they probably would have been critical of it, of the, of Bad Bunny's performance, no matter what, unless he turned around and said, I actually love Donald Trump and I take back what I said about ICE and everything else, which he obviously wasn't going to do. But I also think that, as we've pointed out, the contrast, the slight softening, if that's the right word, between what he said at the Grammys and then this meant that it has been received by some sort of more conservative influences and certainly those that are Hispanic actually fairly favorably. And it's worth pointing out, I mean, as you were just saying, but there are a huge number of people, including lots of people who voted for Donald Trump, who speak Spanish and who, you know, there's These stats from 2024, the government census in the US says that approximately 45 million people who are aged five or older speak Spanish at home, which is about 14 of the US population. So going down that narrative of, of sort of speaking Spanish is not very American. It's kind of alienating. And, and it's interesting because most of that narrative is happening on X, but on the kind of mass platforms, as we'd call them, like Tick Tock or Instagram reels. Again, most of what I've seen has been fairly favorable. It hasn't been super negative or people just not having an opinion at all.
- [15:42]
Justin
You mentioned ice. Mariana, let's go on to another question, because we had a question specifically about them. Is there a chance of a government in 2028. In other words, a Democrat president. This question coming from Chris Wilson. Is there a chance that they would disband ice as their reputation is so tarnished? Do you think they might restart a new agency with a different name? Tricky one, Anthony, isn't it, for the Democrats?
- [16:05]
Anthony
It is tricky because Democrats had come to the conclusion that calling for the abolition of ice, abolish ice, which was a kind of a refrain among the progressive left, Bernie Sanders and The like, in 2020, that, that campaign, that was a losing issue, that it positioned them as against law enforcement and soft on crime because Trump had done a very effective job of painting immigrant crime as a threat to American public safety. And so they have been somewhat reluctant to rally around doing away with ICE entirely. And if you listen to Democrats in Congress who have been threatening to defund the Homeland Security Department temporarily unless they get ICE reforms, They're focusing on reforms. Things like body cameras and things like requirements for warrants to enter into homes, and not just administrative warrants, but one signed by judges, and more oversight of these detention facilities and procedures in place to ensure that people are treated properly. That's not abolishing. That is reforming and improving. And so you do see a certain reluctance even now to say we're just gonna do away with ICE entirely. But in reality, the candidate who wins might be the candidate who runs on, gutting this agency totally and starting over from the beginning. And when a president, if it's a Democratic president, comes in in 2028, there now is a precedent for using the authority of the chief executive to just cut off funding. Donald Trump did it with a variety of different government agencies, the Department of Education and USAID when he became president last year. So you could see a Democrat doing the same thing, just defunding it, cutting out all this money and letting the enforcement of it drop to practically zero.
- [17:59]
Justin
Should we hear what Donald Trump himself has been saying? Because he's been talking about those two killings, Alex Pretty and Renee Goode, both of them killed by immigration agents. Trump was doing his interview with Tommy Amos on NBC last week after the.
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Anthony
Shooting of Renee Goode. You said ICE made some mistakes. What were the mistakes?
- [18:20]
Questioner about Epstein
Well, look, I'm not happy with the two incidents. It's not, you know, it's both of them, not one or the other. He was not an angel, and she was not an angel. You know, you look at some tapes from back, but still, I'm not happy with what happened there. Nobody could be happy, and ICE wasn't happy either. But I'm going to always be with our great people of law enforcement, ice, police. We have to back them. If we don't back them, we don't have a country.
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Anthony
So there are no angels. Kind of a cliched phrase that we heard a lot during the Black Lives Matter movement when they were talking about victims of police brutality not being upstanding citizens. And now Donald Trump is actually using, literally saying no angels to refer to the two American citizens who were killed by ice. I think that that is going to be something that is chewed over for the days ahead. But then also defending ICE and defending ice, as he has in the past, saying that these are people who are going after criminals and trying to keep American streets safe. Although there was a study by CBS News just released today, saying that of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year, only 14% of them had any kind of charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses. So Donald Trump may be trying to characterize this as a necessary thing, that these are people, law enforcement are keeping us safe. But the statistics, at least for now, tell a somewhat different story.
- [19:52]
Justin
The thing is, we've mentioned this before, haven't we, Anthony? There was this phrase, defund the police that did the Democrats so much damage. And there's no question it did do damage. It's empirically there, you know, when it's put to polling sessions, as it was down the years now, since it was first invented by some progressive Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialists, et cetera, and run in some cities, and indeed, some people elected on that platform in some cities, but all of it ending, frankly, in tears, some of them having to go early, some of them being voted out, and a lot of a sense that actually what a lot of core supporters of the Democrats or those they would like to get back on board, particularly poorer Americans running, I don't know, corner shops in poorer parts of the big cities, the one thing they do not want is disorder, because actually it impacts them more than it does wealthier people. And if you seem to be the remotest bit in favor of disorder, the electorate more broadly will punish you. And so the Democrats have to walk this line between saying, we absolutely do not approve of and we'll do everything we can to stop the sort of brutality that leads to people who should not be shot being shot. But at the same time, we very much support the idea that we do have the right to take action against people, including people inside the United States who shouldn't be there. And I just, I think for the Democrats, it's going to be interesting because, you know, it could be, as you say, Anthony, that the next candidate is, if it's someone from the left of the party, takes a pretty robust line about ice, that there'll be plenty in the party who say that's not the thing to do and that actually electorally it could be pretty disastrous. So it's another of those discussions, those sort of internal discussions, isn't it, that the Democrats have to have?
- [21:55]
Anthony
Yeah, it's fraught for both sides. Obviously, Democrats have to be careful not to be perceived as anti law enforcement in general, as you mentioned, anti police, which I think a lot of Americans still support, and to draw the distinction of what ICE is doing. And then on the other side, Trump and the conservatives not being seen to be the ones who are contributing to this disorder that you have ice, masked ICE agents running around in cities grabbing people out of their cars and pulling people from their homes. That feels pretty disordered, too, or at least, you know, menacing. And that I think would make people feel like their safety is threatened in a different way, but still feel like there's chaos and it's the conservatives and Trump that are contributing to it. So, yeah, it is definitely going to be a potent political issue this year in the midterm elections and one that it is still not absolutely clear which way it's going to break.
- [22:53]
Mariana
Okay, onto another topic, which I've actually had a lot of messages about over the past couple of days, and we have had this voice note from Josh in Birmingham.
- [23:01]
Justin
So my question is regarding the recent offensive and demeaning racist posts about the Obamas. Isn't Trump ultimately responsible for any, in quotes, mistakes his staff make? And shouldn't he very publicly condemn the post? Thanks.
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Mariana
Okay, so let's rewind and explain what Josh is talking about there. So it's this video and this clip that was shared on Donald Trump's social media profile and it's set to the song the lion sleeps tonight. It's 62 seconds and it says various things about voter fraud and in the 2020 election and stuff like that. And specifically it depicts Barrick and Michelle Obama as apes, which it's got kind of AI generated cartoony type figures, political figures, and obviously that caused very serious offense and triggered accusations of racism. And then Donald Trump got asked about it and essentially said, oh, it was shared by a member of staff by mistake. And this is what he had to say on Air Force One on Friday. So excuse the audio because it's not great.
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Donald Trump
I looked at it. I saw it And I just looked at the first part. It was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia. There was a lot of voter fraud, 2020 voter fraud. And I didn't see the whole thing. I guess during the end of the. Of it, there was some kind of a picture that people don't like. I wouldn't like it either, but I didn't see it. I just, I looked in the first part and it was really about voter fraud in and the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is. Then I gave it to the people to generally they look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn't and they posted and we took it down and we did it. Yeah, but that was a voter fraud that nobody talks about. They don't like to talk about that post. We took it down as soon as we found out about it.
- [24:55]
Anthony
So most of the video was about conspiracy theories of voting machines that were tabulating too many votes for Joe Biden and not Donald Trump in the 2020 election. And again, these, these allegations have been debunked. There's no evidence of it, but it's something that Donald Trump has time and time again touted as evidence that he actually won in 2020. And then at the very end, just the last few seconds, was that snippet. And he was catching flak for it, not just from Democrats, but also from many Republicans who said it was racist, that it needed to be taken down, and that Donald Trump should have been. Should directly apologize for it, which, as you heard there, he has not done.
- [25:37]
Mariana
I think one thing that's interesting is we've spoken loads about the kinds of posts that get shared on Donald Trump's social media profiles. Often that we would consider rage bait, like stuff that is designed to trigger a reaction and outcry. Think of the Gaza Riviera video, ice, immigration raids, videos, all of those things. I think when something like this happens, a lot of people's instinct is to think that it's been done on purpose in order to incite rage. But obviously in this case, actually, you know, people across the political spectrum were very quick to say, hang on a second, this is not all right, this is racist. Can you take it down, you wonder? I mean, you think that you would watch the whole video through, don't you, Justin? Like to check, because it's pretty explicit.
- [26:17]
Justin
It is. And, and you know, who knows whether he saw it or. Or not. I thought it was quite interesting that he said, I wouldn't like it either. He's not trying to defend it. I mean, some of the stuff, some of the rage, bait, things that have gone out, he either hasn't talked about at all or he's defended.
- [26:33]
Mariana
Actually, yeah, he's definitely taken a completely different position on this, which suggests that it genuinely could have been an error.
- [26:42]
Anthony
It is interesting that the first response from this White House and Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said in a statement that it was just an Internet meme depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King, saying, please stop with a fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public. So the, the White House response in the beginning, as this was starting to get some traction, was, it's no big deal. Why are y' all getting upset about this? And it was one of those rare instances where the outrage grew and it grew from their own side, and the White House had to subsequently blame it on a staffer, take it down. And then you heard Donald Trump there saying, well, I didn't see it.
- [27:22]
Mariana
I mean, if you look at the response on social media, for example, most of the outcry and outrage has either come from politicians themselves and political figures and that sort of thing, or from people who are quite politically engaged. I imagine that a lot of people probably won't have heard about this, and in fact, well, they wouldn't have seen it at the time and have now, probably, if they've heard about it, it'll be because it got taken down rather than if it had just sort of stayed up. I do think, though, and I think with something like this, when something's very visual and very explicit, I think when I was talking to this, the guy in Atlanta, what he is, was saying was, you know, there's a lot of kind of what people would refer to as sort of dog whistle stuff, like kind of racism that's implicit rather than explicit. I think something like this, like, is just offensive. And I think. And it's not very funny. Like, it wasn't particularly funny. I mean, the thing about a lot of the stuff Donald Trump shares is that people tend to forgive it because it's funny.
- [28:14]
Justin
I think your final point there is really interesting, actually, and right on the money, that Trump gets away with a lot because he's genuinely often funny. Sometimes you're laughing in spite of yourself, but you are laughing. And this wasn't funny. No, it wasn't. There was nothing funny or amusing or engaging about it, was there?
- [28:32]
Anthony
That's why you saw people like Tim Scott, the black Republican senator from South Carolina, Republican senators from places like Nebraska and Mississippi, And Donalds, who's running for governor of Florida, all of them came out and said, this is racist. It's gotta go. So that was kind of the remarkable moment here. All of those Republicans so quickly coming out and undercutting the White House's original line.
- [28:58]
Justin
Okay, talker, gotta go. I think you've got to go, haven't you, Mariana?
- [29:01]
Mariana
I do. I've got to go to a different podcast.
- [29:04]
Justin
Okay, see ya. Anthony. Let's. Let's carry on with a voice note we've had from Alex in Chester in England.
- [29:11]
Alex
Hi, Americast Alex here in Chester. I was wondering, with literally millions of Epstein files, how do you and other journalists go through them all? Do you split the work with other broadcasters or is it like a race for each corporation to finish getting through them first? Are there any left to be read? Are we likely to find out any more details? And also I'd like to know, are there many other countries dealing with a fallout from them like we are? Was Epstein close with any other high profile people from other countries or is it just the UK and the us thanks.
- [29:43]
Justin
We've also had an email from Robert. We don't know where Robert is, but this is his email. With the news that 3 million redacted files have been released and what a monumental task it is to read them all. Imagine the work involved in the reading and deciding who and what to redact. There must have been a huge team of redaction staff and supervisors involved. Who and where could they be located? And still more to come is rumored. Quite a task, Robert muses, which is no less than the truth, Anthony.
- [30:13]
Anthony
That's true. The BBC had its own plan, its own setup that actually we put together back last year, before that first big deadline for releasing Epstein files, where we had spreadsheets and we had people, teams of people going through each file and making notes of ones that should be flagged because they might be newsworthy. Other news outlets did the exact same thing. So it wasn't collaborative between news organizations. I think it's much more of the kind of race to find things that was described there. And it got harder, I think, because it wasn't just one big day. We got drips and drabs and new revelations and new tranches of documents being released over the Christmas holidays and into the new year. And when those last 3 million pages came down, it was hard. And we're still going through a lot of it. And a lot of news outlets are still going through a lot of it because 3 million is just a lot of documents to try to find and try to sift through, especially when so much of it is redacted.
- [31:16]
Justin
I'm really interested in what happens now, because we've got this guy, Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman. He's a sort of libertarian who lives off the grid, as it were. He's taken issue with Donald Trump about this and Trump has gone for him, but he hasn't seemed to mind at all. He's got quite a thick hide and I suspect that's because he just doesn't care. He's not looking for any kind of political future, particularly. But he now says he's going to go to the Department of Justice. Anthony, what do we make of this? He's being allowed into the DOJ to look at the unredacted files. So in other words, to look behind all those black boxes that there are. And he's asked people, what documents should I view? How seriously should we take this? Because on the face of it, that sounds like quite a big development.
- [32:08]
Anthony
It was something that was in the law that members of Congress have the right to view the unredacted files. So by law, Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California, who was a co sponsor of this legislation, do have the right to go to the Department of Justice and view all of these files. It's, What, Monday, almost 11 o' clock in the morning here, and they're planning to go to the Department of Justice later today, this afternoon to begin viewing these files. And obviously there are so many of them, but you could see what has been redacted in all of these files. And so it is perhaps they have some in mind that they want to look at in particular, and they're now crowdsourcing it, as you mentioned, Thomas Massie asking people to come up with ideas of what they want him to look at. So it is the potential that this will be the next big twist in this. And we could hear members of Congress talking about what they've seen, maybe not directly, but saying this was definitely a big story, a big bit of information that the public has not yet been able to see, and then pressing for these things to be released in an unredacted way.
- [33:19]
Justin
Because there is this feeling, isn't there? And this goes to that question about the other countries affected. Obviously, the UK has been affected, quite seriously affected, but the really interesting thing that a lot of Americans feel is that the United States has not been affected to the extent that it should be. And specifically, it's these people who appear to have written emails to Epstein about potentially illegal activity involving underage girls, where they appear openly to be talking about that kind of activity. But the thing that's redacted is their names, which is, it's fair to say, causing real outrage, isn't it?
- [33:59]
Anthony
Yeah. There's a feeling that no one here has been held to account, and there have been some people who have faced consequences. Larry Summers, a former Treasury Secretary who was a Harvard professor, has had to resign from his positions. But there hasn't been the kind of heads are rolling moment here in the United States that we have seen, certainly in the UK and in some of the other European nations that you mentioned, where people have had to resign from public or government office, despite the fact that there are people who are in government right now. Howard Lutnick, for instance, the Commerce Secretary, a friend of Donald Trump's who was in Jeffrey Epstein's circles, and there are emails where he was asking Epstein if he could bring his family to the island. So there are people in positions of power and government power that did have contact with Jeffrey Epstein. Although if you're looking for the kind of smoking gun that we've seen with Mandelson or the former Prince Andrew, there hasn't been that revelation yet. And people will look at that and say, well, that's because they're being protected. But whether or not that's the case, there hasn't just been that aha moment where you can point to and say, look, here is someone who is currently in power, not someone who is out of power or someone who is already tarnished, such as Woody Allen or someone like that, but someone who is in power, who needs to go, because he knew about what was happening and he was complicit, and he should be not only shamed, but prosecuted, perhaps.
- [35:28]
Justin
Yeah, that, of course, is worth repeating. And we say this all the time, but it's true. Just because you're in the files doesn't mean that you have yourself been involved in any kind of wrongdoing. But I'm really interested, Anthony, in this spat that's opened up between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. I mean, they obviously, anyway, didn't like each other. But when we talk about the politics of MAGA and the politics of the future of the Republican Party, you think of Steve Bannon, this very mouthy and once pretty powerful Trump advisor, now got his own podcast, and he's a big figure on the right, and a lot of people really like him and support him. And he is the sort of, I don't know, the kind of community based face of Trumpism, the nationalist face, the keep the foreigners out face, the rebuild America and American factories and American communities and the heartland sort of face of Trumpism. And then you've got Elon Musk, the other face, the outward looking face that bring in all the people to make our industries great. The kind of globalist agenda of Elon Musk in the sense that he wants billionaires to be free to make a lot of money and all the rest of it, and he wants American workers to be part of that. And you've got this incredible spat on X now, or at least I think it's a rather one sided spat because you've got Elon Musk just pointing out on X the extent to which Steve Bannon is mentioned in the Epstein files. And he is mentioned a lot. And he was obviously at one stage pretty friendly with Epstein.
- [37:02]
Anthony
He went to Epstein's house. He was apparently planning a documentary to help revive Epstein's image after he had pled guilty to sex crimes and had scheduled an interview right up until when Epstein was arrested in 2019. And yet, despite the fact that his pictures were there at Epstein's house in New York, that he had meetings, that he was giving, political strategy, these long kind of conversations back and forth via email, he hasn't paid a political consequence. And he's not in government office anymore. He was a senior White House advisor to Donald Trump in his first presidential term and a campaign chairman during Trump's presidential bid in 2016. But now he just as a kind of a gadfly and has a podcast. But yeah, the fact that there hasn't been a big outcry to somehow hold Bannon to account for these ties, and not necessarily illegal ties, but questionable ties, given what he should have known about Epstein in 2019 and yet still associating with them, I think Musk is touching on that and maybe Musk is doing it as a way to deflect some of the things about Musk in there, including emails asking when he should come to the island and when the biggest, you know, wildest party will be.
- [38:20]
Justin
And just before we go worth saying that Howard Lutnick says he cut ties with Epstein back in 2005. So that was well before he was convicted of any offenses involving underage girls. Steve Bannon, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, has not replied to the BBC's request for comment. And Elon Musk responded in an X post last month in which he acknowledged that the emails might be used to smear my name as he put it, but he said he was more concerned about the prosecution of those who had committed serious crimes with Epstein. So there we are, Anthony. Been a pleasure.
- [38:58]
Anthony
Bye bye as always. Bye y'. All.
- [39:03]
Justin
Thank you for listening to another episode. It is you, the ameracaster, that makes ameracast the community that it now is. If you like what you heard, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. We always want to hear your feedback as well. We look at every single bit of correspondence that we get so you can send us an email americastbc.co.uk the WhatsApp is 443-301-239480 and you can get involved in the AmericasT Discord server. The link to that is in the description. Till next time, bye bye.
- [40:01]
Helena Merriman
If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.