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- [00:00]
Thomas Keller
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- [01:00]
Sam Stein
Hey, guys. SAM Stein here, managing editor at the Bulwark. I'm joined by Bill Kristol, professor emeritus.
- [01:06]
Bill Kristol
Look at this, you know, cordial conversation. He's already making fun of me. Out of touch, academic. You know, I'm a little concerned about Epstein. People like Sam, the political pros, the pros like Sam, but just, oh, come on, that's just in a day's work.
- [01:21]
Sam Stein
You know, it's a pleasure being in studio with Bill. We're going to be talking about Jeffrey Epstein, as everyone is talking about. But before we do, subscribe to the feedback. We appreciate that. All right, so I don't think we're in total disagreement, but there might be some interesting divergence of opinions about Epstein, the salience of the scandal and whether Trump can maneuver around it. Our colleague Will Sommer had about five factions of the Epstein universe and how they're approaching Trump. I'm not going to go through all five, but suffice it to say, he thinks some people are going to agree with Trump and just move on. Right. And I feel like that has you a little bit sort of. I don't not panic, but a little bit frustrated. Is that fair? No, no.
- [02:04]
Bill Kristol
Totally unfair.
- [02:04]
Sam Stein
I'm believing unfair.
- [02:05]
Bill Kristol
I'm leaving.
- [02:07]
Sam Stein
What do you make, do you think? I guess the question is, can Trump get through this?
- [02:11]
Bill Kristol
I think I will say last week, I will say one of the few things I've gotten right in recent months and years is that I thought Epstein could be bigger than people thought. When everyone on Tuesday was just kind of laughing about Trump at the, at the Cabinet meeting, I thought this could be more of a problem. And it did pick become a problem with his base, certainly, which he then tried to deal with on Saturday with that insane long truth social post. And so that's been the saga. And then meanwhile, there's the Charlie Kirk thing going on. The Turning Point.
- [02:36]
Sam Stein
Let's just stop and say the Charlie Kirk thing is that Charlie Kirk had a call apparently with Donald Trump who told him move on.
- [02:44]
Bill Kristol
Charlie Kirk, he runs that group, what's it called? Turning Point. Yeah. Which was having its big conference that weekend and everyone was showing up and people like Roger Stone, who were true Trump loyalists, were trying to tell the crowd, cool it, don't worry about it. And he was getting booed. Charlie started off Charlie, Charlie Kirk, I knew him a little bit years ago, before he was a total Trumpy lunatic. Started off by saying, I'm very worried about this, Epstein. We were all so concerned. We can't just shut it up. Trump called him Saturday morning. Apparently by Monday, Kirk saying, we've just got to move on. So I'm assuming Trump. So on the MAGA fracturing and causing massive problems for Trump or Republican members of Congress really being upset. I hope it does cause trouble for Trump. I think it is causing some trouble and it has weak and it's not going away. But I suspect at the end of the day he can bludgeon those people into mostly into subservience. Do you think so?
- [03:41]
Sam Stein
Slightly different interpretation, but probably the same end result. And this is the basis for morning shots this morning, which is these. The issue with a conspiracy theory is you can't tell people, oh, it's not true, because they'll never believe that it's not true. I mean, there's no rationalizing with a conspiracy theorist. What you can do is you can create a different conspiracy theory sometimes on top of the existing conspiracy theory, or you can distract them into something else. You just try to turn the page more or less. And I think that Trump can do. He can do it through a different. A variety of different things, but mostly just by being Donald Trump. Everything is just like. There's always a new story that people talk about. We always move on to the next story. You can always say, oh, my God, do you remember a week ago we were talking about this? Because you've forgotten that you were talking about that. And I think that's probably what ends up happening here. Morning shots this morning was about a White House that did not know this and failed to understand the lessons of this. And that was the Obama White House. So the basis of the story is that Trump in 2011 gins up, reignites the flames around birtherism. And I remember being in the White House at the time as a reporter covering it and they were trying to talk about the budget and this fight with the Republicans on taxes and domestic spending cuts. And they couldn't get any traction because everyone was talking about birtherism. So they thought, well, rationally, what do we do? We just finally will put out this birth certificate. And everyone realizes this is so stupid. And it didn't do anything because Trump just said, oh, thanks for doing that, but is it real? And then everyone was like, well, where's the long form birth certificate? And truly the only thing that could get them onto a different topic was to essentially have a different topic to talk about. I think that's probably what's going to happen here.
- [05:26]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. And as you and I discussed this earlier this morning as we were editing morning shots, which is worth reading today, and suddenly Andrew Egger has a very good piece on this aspect of it, I'd say. And I have a piece on a sort of slight different, slightly different aspect. But as we were saying this morning, Obama did, on the other hand, get reelected in 2012. And so these things can be a pain in the neck for you as a White House, but not decisive.
- [05:52]
Sam Stein
Yeah.
- [05:53]
Bill Kristol
And so what I said, so supplementing Andrew's piece, I think is that one interesting question then is does it go beyond an internal MAGA world problem, Trump supporter problem to. And the Democrats are now trying to make it more of a real problem, a broader problem for Republicans. And you know, they again, that could blow it up a little more. One thing there though, it has to Democrats have to decide is there a real, you can't just, you can play games for a while, of course, and say you said this and you said it was, you said it was a, he was murdered. Now you're saying we can't even look into it and okay, fine, you get some. That's the kind of thing that lasts for a week or two or three and then goes away. If Democrats are willing to say the whole Epstein thing is kind of a disgrace, though, honestly, which I think it is. And he got slapped on the wrist and it shows you the establishment did have real problems before Trump came along and MAGA came along and totally demagogued it and invented other, you know, made it much more crazily conspiratorial than it needed to have been, than it is. And we're willing to be the party that's anti Epstein, sort of anti establishment, but also anti Trump MAGA craziness that I think would be an interesting future for the Democrats. And final point is the lefties, of course, on the Democratic side, they're happy to do this because they hate the establishment. And so, you know, it fits into their narrative. Right. The question is if you're a moderate Democrat who's serious about governing but also has the sense A, that the Epstein thing really is a disgrace and B, that you sort of need to be more of a reformer, you can't just be like defending the old establishment. I think there's a real avenue there to do what we've all discussed this. You, me, Tim, can you be a moderate Democrat on sort of policy issues while being a fighter and a reformer and a change type? Temperamentally almost. So I think that's a bit of an opening for the Josh Shapiro's and Buttigiegs of the world.
- [07:35]
Sam Stein
I see that. I think it's interesting because there's the distinction between trolling, which is what some of them are doing now, a privileged resolution to unleash all and votes to make it all public, and then a substantive argument around whether this is part of something bigger. Elites who run the country and actually cover up for each other. And if some in our tent get hurt by the disclosure, so be it. Right. I think the problem, if I had to guess for Democrats is probably that they don't want to be associated with conspiratorial thinking. Right. And that's partially because they don't want to be accused of being like Trump. I mean, Trump basically is birthed in this type of politics totally. And they've made themselves the oppositional party to not just Trump, but that type of politics. And so if you feel like you're in the kind of mud, you don't like that.
- [08:32]
Bill Kristol
I'm not saying that's good or bad.
- [08:34]
Sam Stein
I'm just saying I think that's probably.
- [08:35]
Bill Kristol
No, I think that's a very good point and well said. And I do think, look, I think it's a correct hesitation. You don't want to be cheek by jowl with MAGA conspiracists.
- [08:45]
Sam Stein
It's like how they always hesitate to like, you know, Trump has all these stupid nicknames. Right. And then when the Democrats are like, let's try our hand at the nicknames and they look so silly and stupid.
- [08:54]
Bill Kristol
But because the Trump White House isn't Going along this time, I do think they can be anti Trump, anti Epstein, anti conspiracy, but anti an establishment that did give him a disgraceful slap on the wrist in 2008. And it took Julie Brown a year of courageous reporting to get him indicted again, charged again, and indicted again in 2019 and so forth. So I think they can maybe on this one, it's a little tricky. Sort of have the best of all worlds.
- [09:18]
Sam Stein
You've made, I think, a pretty compelling case, that Trump obviously is signing off on all this stuff, that he's directing Bondi not to release these files and that he's probably talking to Cash and Bongino and saying, you can go out there and tell him. What is your theory of the case now about actual Trump culpability or an involvement or vulnerability here?
- [09:42]
Bill Kristol
I mean, I don't know. It's gotten so distorted by all this talk about the client lists and all these things which may not exist. I mean, Trump is in the files. We know that. We've seen the logs of the airplanes. I mean, the files are probably tens of thousands of pages of investigative records. And of course, there is some truth to the argument. You can't just release these things. I mean, no one ever has in any criminal case. There's interviews with X who says something about Y is totally unconfirmed. X, maybe, and that's that.
- [10:07]
Sam Stein
Now Y suddenly is a child.
- [10:10]
Bill Kristol
And it's feeling irresponsible. I think it may be illegal in some cases to just release that stuff. Sure. Having said that, it's also the case that we had a massive conspiracy that was horrible and took advantage of. And I took advantage. It's too weak almost, you know, just treated in a criminal way. Underage girls, maybe 1,000 of them. And two people, at the end of the day were indicted.
- [10:31]
Sam Stein
Right.
- [10:31]
Bill Kristol
And one, Epstein killed himself, and the other, well, had a slap on the wrist and then killed himself the second time. And then the other was Maxwell, who got a sentence. But, you know, these conspiracies do take more than two people. And I'm not saying every person. The person who flew the plane to the island, okay, maybe he didn't quite know what was going on. He shouldn't be indicted necessarily, 20 years later. But there are a lot of middlemen, so to speak. There are a lot of people who took advantage of these girls, to say the least, who maybe knew what was going on, maybe they didn't. I mean, I think we do deserve some at least clarity on what we know, what we think. Maybe not individual names, maybe not More indictments even. I was thinking of other examples of this. I'm sure you can think of a whole bunch too. When Comey decided not to prosecute Hillary for emails to take an obvious kind of political. Very different situation. But, you know, he decided not to prosecute. May have been the right decision. Maybe. Now it was kind of messed up the way they handled it, but. But he also made a. Had a press conference and they issued a real statement which gave you a sense, here's what she did, here's what she did.
- [11:27]
Sam Stein
And nothing ever came of that.
- [11:28]
Bill Kristol
Here's what. Yeah, well, that's. Yeah, that's. Well, maybe that's. Which way does that lesson cut? Maybe. No, but I mean, at least it was an attempt, I think, sort of in good faith to say the public deserves some sense of what she did that may have been wrong, inadvisable, but not criminal, and so forth. And you could think of many, many other instances where we've gotten some notion of what happened. This does seem like an unusual case in that we know so little about what was a massive criminal conspiracy run by an extremely prominent person which involved a lot of other prominent people. We don't need to need the details of Prince Andrew did this or whatever.
- [12:02]
Sam Stein
I wouldn't mind the details.
- [12:04]
Bill Kristol
Well, some of it might be legit, incidentally. But anyway, I do feel like the. So this is. Yeah, but it's a problem. The MAGA people turned it into a crazy conspiracy and then everyone. And I felt this. Personally, I think you may have thought that, you know, it's like, well, I don't know, it's some crazy conspiracy. I'm not paying attention to it. And it really took me a while to focus on what was happening this last two, three, four weeks. And it took me actually a conversation with Julie Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who did such courageous work on this, to really think, you know what, there's kind of a scandal here.
- [12:31]
Sam Stein
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- [15:35]
Bill Kristol
No, I think that's right. And I also think, just to double back to that original point, I think you're right to think that this is a trickier thing for Trump to handle than a typical attack by Democrats on Trump. You know, that's like, he's kind of used to that. And once you've won two general elections, you sort of, people discount an awful lot of those attacks at this point. Whereas I do think this one, because some of it comes from his base. It has to do with what is undoubtedly a truly grotesque situation.
- [16:02]
Sam Stein
He's also acting just weird about it. Right. Like it's very.
- [16:04]
Bill Kristol
And they are these photos of him and Jeffrey Epstein.
- [16:07]
Sam Stein
But just the way he's like, oh, why are you focused on this scandal? We have really important policy stuff. Like that's not Trump.
- [16:12]
Bill Kristol
No.
- [16:12]
Sam Stein
When did you care about policy stuff? Over the salacious scandals.
- [16:15]
Bill Kristol
And don't you think the Saturday tweet, Truth Social, where he starts screaming about how these could have been fake?
- [16:22]
Sam Stein
I read that. I read that five times. I couldn't figure it out.
- [16:25]
Bill Kristol
And that shows a kind. I mean, he's doing what he instinctively knows he should do, which is blame the other side.
- [16:29]
Sam Stein
Sure.
- [16:30]
Bill Kristol
You know, I think even when that, when the tape came up of his own voice, the Billy Bush tape, the Hollywood tape, didn't, the first thing they said is, I think this is right. It could be, it could be fake.
- [16:40]
Sam Stein
No, no, at first, no. What happened was he first apologized for it because his people made him do it.
- [16:44]
Bill Kristol
I see.
- [16:44]
Sam Stein
And after that he said, well, I don't know, did they doctor that thing?
- [16:48]
Bill Kristol
So, I mean, that's always been his instinct. It's of course, from his point of view, like a reasonable thing to toss out there, because why not? Maybe some people will believe it that. But I agree. But there's a kind of desperation on that Saturday thing. So I'm very open to the view that. I do believe that it's a more difficult thing for him to handle than most things he's had to deal with. And I'm open to the view that it really could be very damaging to his political well being. I also am open to the view that he's pretty good at controlling America.
- [17:14]
Sam Stein
Yeah. Here too. I think the birtherism storyline is instructive because back then when Obama did produce the birth certificate and Trump said, well, I'm grateful that he did it, I take credit for him doing this. But is it real? In fact, he then upped the ante. And he said, well, can we see his college transcripts and his passport records? And I will give $5 million to a charity of his choice if he does produce it. So it's always about upping the ante. So that's why. And that explains, I think, the true social post, which is actually, no, Obama and Hillary wrote these files. And so he'll figure some way to up the ante on the conspiracy. All right, Bill, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate this. It's a pleasure being in studio with you. Thank you guys for watching this. Pleasure for your viewership as well. Subscribe to our feed so you can get more content like this. And. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.