Sarah Longwell (2:54)

So, first of all, the bigness is by design, you know, like in. In a world where they were, like, you had a good faith effort to take the things that, you know, like, you could put them out in tranches, you could put them out sort of thematically, you could do a lot of things that made it say, like, all right, we understand this is in the public interest and whatever. Instead, they're doing these massive data dumps on Fridays. And then basically, as people unearth things that are too hot for it, they pull them back, right? They, like, take them out of the files as people unearth them, which. And like, they haven't redacted them properly. Like, the victims are all over things, but then the perpetrators are all. It's like, anybody could be as heavily redacted. And so I just think that the bigness is in part meant to confuse us, to get through, overwhelm us so that, like, you can't like, like, settle in on one thing, which I actually think our job, what I've been focused on with my Twitter feed is trying to figure out, like, okay, let's really look at the people who, after 2008 or 2010, which is. Which are the years where Epstein gets caught and convicted of child sex, procuring a child for prostitution, right? And. And so that the. The people who talk to him after that, to me, are all people who do so knowing that he went to jail for child sex, prostitution and trafficking. So any. And that's where Elon comes in, right? Like, Elon has long held, like, well, I. I never went to the island. But you can see clearly in these emails that post that conviction, Elon Musk is begging to come to a party on Epstein Island. And I do think that their hope is that because. Because Bannon's all over these, and it's very incriminating for him because Elon's all over them. Because, you know, there's like, a number of people who come up over and over again who are.

Sam Stein (5:15)

Howard Lutnick.

Sarah Longwell (5:16)

Howard Lutnick. They're sort of hoping that if you can't go after. You can't go after one of them, if you have to go after all of them.

Sam Stein (5:24)

Yeah, I think that's right. I guess it's important to kind of maybe summarize it for the people who are watching. And it's hard. This is why it's hard is it's hard to summarize it. But I think my main takeaway is this. It kind of echoes what yours is. You have a situation in which many, many powerful men from media, business, politics, philanthropy, whatever, knowingly sought to have an audience with this deviant. They knew how bad he was, they knew what he was up to, and they didn't care. They sought him out. You have a number of those same individuals who spent the last, you know, five years or so, or portion of them insisting publicly that there was a Epstein cabal and that there was a great conspiracy to hide all this stuff, even though they themselves knew that they had been converting with Jeffrey Epstein, which is remarkable to me. I mean, you have people like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk who spent years being like, we must uncover the truth, and they themselves were involved in it. And now you have a number of these people who are insisting that, well, everything you just read is irrelevant or it's context without context and things like that. So that. That's the gist of it. What I struggle with is will there be professional consequences for anybody? So there are people like Elon who don't, who live in a consequence free world. But like Howard Lutnick, for instance, was very public, saying he had cut off ties with Jeffrey Epstein in 2005. He understood how horrible he was, never wanted to step foot in his house again, and yada, yada, yada. And it's quite evident that that was just. It was a lie. So are there going to be consequences for Howard Lutnick? I don't think so. Do you?

Sarah Longwell (7:13)

Well, this is where there's going to be different tiers of consequences and different people can inflict different consequences. Now, the problem is, is that Trump himself, right, their boss, is also all over these files, not in direct communication, because Trump doesn't email, doesn't.

Sam Stein (7:32)

He doesn't email.

Sarah Longwell (7:33)

Yeah. He has people print things out for him and then he signs them or whatever. But Trump doesn't. This is why he DMS Pam Bondi things that accidentally go public is like, he's not putting things in email or sending people messages. So he's not in there that way. But he is referred to all the time in sort of like joking ways or ways of like, I didn't want one of them is, is someone saying, like, well, I didn't want to knock on the door because I didn't know if Trump would be in there getting a massage or, you know, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of Trump jokes and references that like, bring him into the whole thing that make it clear he's around all of this, but those are what is different. And there's also a lot of references that make it clear. Because I would say that one of the things about this tranche dump is that it catches a lot of people lying, as you pointed out. It just catches a lot of people who had statements that they made about what their relationship was with Epstein, where you have Lutnick saying, oh, I met him, you know, in 2000, whatever, seven. I never talked to him again. He was such a creep. And then of course, these solicitations from like 2012, 2013 all the way up to like 2018, seen in Lutnick's case where it was all well known. And so, so I don't think that the consequences though are going to come from Trump. The question is, can they come from the media? Like, can they come from the family members? Like, the problem is, is that Trump doesn't have any moral problems with these people. And actually throwing them under the bus is worse for him because says that like there are consequences for people who've done things exactly like he has done. In fact, maybe quite a bit less than he has done. And so they won't come from the Trump administration, they can come from the public, Right. And they can come from friends and family and they can come from communities. And like in Elon's case, he's got boards of his companies and those boards should care that he was asking to go to wild parties on a sex offender and child traffickers island like that. That in a normal world, in a normal corporate world, not in the political world like, but in the corporate world, that would have immediate consequences because they would believe the public wouldn't tolerate it.

Sam Stein (10:03)

Right. And there's other apolitical tiers to this or so like Steve Tisch, who is one of the owners of the New York Football Giants. He, he's caught up in this. Epstein's like, scouting women for him. The idea that the New York Giants could maintain a relationship with Tish after this is difficult for me to process. And yet I'm not totally sure what happens next. There's a CBS News contributor. I forget his name is a medical correspondent just hired by Barry Weiss.

Sarah Longwell (10:32)

Yeah, a tia.

Sam Stein (10:33)

Yes, that's the one. He's in there. I mean, grotesque. I can't even. I don't want to. Quoted exchanges with Epstein. Could CBS possibly continue to, you know, employ this person after that? Seems far fetched to me. And maybe I'm expecting action to happen too quickly because we're just a couple days into the revelations and, you know, it's the weekend and all that stuff. But there are second and third tier characters throughout these files. And the other question is, and we don't know. We don't know, but like, what's. What did they not release? Right? Like there's. They only released like 3 million of however many million they had. What did they not release?

Sarah Longwell (11:13)

Guys, this is the thing. If, I mean, so Trump's DOJ is protecting him at every turn, right? And the amount of Trump stuff that's in here, they were okay to release because they're clearly scrubbing it with an eye toward one thing which is protecting Trump.

Sam Stein (11:32)

Right?

Sarah Longwell (11:33)

Stuff like what's in there about Trump is already really bad. And so, like, if they are holding more back, one assumes that it is either people, it is either Trump himself, evidence of things with Trump himself, or people even closer to Trump. Maybe, like, because Kushner is mentioned quite a bit. Sam, I'm sorry, can I just. The one thing, I'm not sure if I want to say that, like, this is something I got wrong or didn't understand, but I think that my initial sense of the Epstein files was that people were being a little conspiratorial. I just sort of, like, I, I didn't believe that there was a elite cabal that had all sort of participated in child sex trafficking or sexual assault and all of those things. That just seems sort of far fetched. And actually what's in here makes it clear, like there's a. It's. It's the banality of the evil of it. They were all friends, they all knew about it, they were all talking about it and like joking about it. And it is the way that the people talk about women in these emails, like where they call certain women knee pads in these Texts with Bannon. Like, I can't imagine being a woman, being willing to work for any of these people. Like, it is. It is. Or. Or anybody. Any human with a conscience. And this is where. This is where the thing is. Like, we should not be so desensitized from 10 years of Donald Trump's depravity that we sort of shrug our shoulders by saying, well, other people are going to shrug their shoulders. No, we should be appalled and we should demand accountability and try to. And create consequences. These people, because what they did was really wrong and really gross. Just the words, it's all grotesque.

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Sam Stein (14:33)

Yeah, well, there's two levels to this, so there's the banality of it. And what's evident from all these emails is that there was this kind of insane deviant social structure that was. Had Jeffrey Epstein at the middle of the nexus of. And all these people who he knew who were talking to him, who were partying with him, who he was scouting for. I put that in air quotes, things like that. And it's, as you say, it's grotesque, it's awful. It's way more expansive than I initially probably thought it would be. I mean, it touches on a lot more industry than I thought it would. So that's one element. What we don't know, and presumably what's in the. The tranche that they haven't released is the, like, the actual trafficking element of it. The.

Sarah Longwell (15:18)

Right.

Sam Stein (15:18)

The the. Where the crimes would be prosecuted element of it. Like, we don't know that. And I. You have to presume that that's what's in the unreleased stuff. It doesn't make the first element less bad. I mean, when you have people talking the way they do and discussing underage girls the way they do and, you know, joking about it and it. It's. It's horrifying. It's legitimately horrifying. And it's also, like, I don't want to diminish it, but it's really pathetic, honestly, too. Like, these are grown men who are. Who should be, in theory, happy in life. They're well off. They're titans of their industry. Presumably they can do whatever they want in the world, and they chose to spend their time with one of the slimiest, grossest, most depraved human beings on the planet to get their rocks off. I mean, it's just. It's really pathetic. It makes you wonder how these people got to where they got to. It's honestly shocking in some respects.

Sarah Longwell (16:17)

Yeah. I mean, this is where sort of like Larry Summers, who is now. He's suspended, but, like, he's, like, asking Jeffrey Epstein, like, coming to him, being like, give me advice on how to talk to these women. And, like, I just. It does. It does betray a kind of. And this, I guess, is. I don't understand this world of men where Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein are, like, the alphas, and all of these other people, these coaches, these businessmen and, you know, celebrities, like, want to be near them. Like, why does Elon Musk. Why does he want to go to a wild party on Epstein Island? And they are like, we've known for a while that these are all these, like, broken men, like Elon and whatever's happening.

Sam Stein (17:07)

I didn't realize. I did not realize how broken. I did not realize how broken these people are psychologically.

Sarah Longwell (17:13)

Yeah. Because this was like a. Like, that's the thing is, like, how normalized it all is. Like, the way Bannon talks to him. It's like they're all. This is how they talk, talk to each other, how they think about women. It's how they think about. It's fine to have women who are underage there. And in fact, it's like, part of the. It's part of the fun of all of it. Right. I hate them. And I think that they should experience, like. And this is the thing. Have you seen this this weekend? That there is some corners of the sort of release the Epstein files, like, Maga right. Are dropping off this weekend are saying like they, they were lying to us because the theory QAnon was right about this like big elite that was doing this stuff. It just, it's not the left. That doesn't mean. And it has been funny to watch some of the broken brain partisans try to be like, here's one Democrat who's in this. It's like Obama's former legal person.

Sam Stein (18:18)

So Kathy Rumler. Yeah.

Sarah Longwell (18:19)

And guess what? And they're like, oh well, the left have to wreck, has to reckon with this. And we're like, throw her in jail. I don't care. No one cares, man. You're the only partisan brained weirdo who thinks that somehow the left is going to try to protect anybody who is involved with this guy. That's not, no, that's not what's happening here.

Sam Stein (18:37)

And I mean Bill Clinton obviously is involved here and like what we saw in Congress is a bunch of Democrats voted to hold them in contempt. Like, it's like not people are not protective of Bill Clinton anymore. No one cares about Kathy Rummler and her future anymore. Like Bill Gates. Like no one cares. I, I think people overestimate that. All right.

Sarah Longwell (18:58)

Before we close the book, held accountable.

Sam Stein (19:00)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we close the book on this section because I have like four other things I want to talk to you about. But like it's okay.

Sarah Longwell (19:06)

No.

Sam Stein (19:06)

What's the next steps here? So obviously Congress passed legislation to get these files out. We've been having some hearings from the, the Oversight Committee in the House. But where does it go from here? I mean, how much do you centralize this politically if you're a Democrat? Does Congress have an additional role that they could play? I don't know what you, where you see this turning.

Sarah Longwell (19:32)

I do think so. I mean, I think that there's a couple things. One, and this is why you have to worry about the elections in 2026 is that Donald Trump is petrified of oversight. Like petrified of not having Mike Johnson there running interference with him and Thune running interference with him for exactly this reason. So that is, it is important that Democrats have the gavel and are able to lead investigations. And I think that they can do that where they get Elon Musk back in front of Congress to talk about the information that they took when they were running Doge and also the Epstein stuff. Like. But my, my main, the main thing I want to see happen is that right now I was very shocked. I don't know if you were and I haven't Looked at the New York Times homepage today, but there was nothing yesterday about Epstein on the page.

Sam Stein (20:26)

Okay, yeah, I'm looking right now. Here we go. On the main page, not on the top. Okay, keep talking. I'm looking.

Sarah Longwell (20:37)

So here's the thing. This should be the biggest story in the country and it's all over Twitter. So, like, if you're sitting on Twitter, it is just us unearthing the files, talking about the files and like. But it is not like we are going to need everybody else in the journalistic world to, like, start reporting these things out. Getting Musk on the record now. He's, he's tweeting about it and I presume people from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are calling him up to say, like, hey, so you said this, and this is in the email. But like, they have to feel the pressure of the public scrutiny that comes with things like this. And so that's the next step. The next step is like, make them answer for this. Don't just shrug about it.

Sam Stein (21:28)

So the Times has one piece up. It's below the top of the headline, the website, but it is up there. It's from Nick Confessori. And it gets at the hypocrisy, but also them, the lying about how they weren't, people say, claiming they weren't close to Epstein. Documents show otherwise. And it goes after Musk and Lutnick on top. But, yeah, that's about it. They got one piece. And I agree. It's huge on Twitter. It's everywhere on Twitter. That might be algorithmic. Okay. Two stories that are semi related. We're going to start with Trump and the irs. And I know we have some video clip to play for this one, but basic gist is Trump this week decided he was going to sue the IRS for, I kid you not, $10 billion. It's like a comically large.

Sarah Longwell (22:15)

That's our money.

Sam Stein (22:16)

A comically large figure. It couldn't be more villainous. It's like you might as well just, you know, do the Dr. Evil thing while you're saying it. It's for the release of his tax records. The leak of the tax records, I should say. Of course, Donald Trump can instruct the IRS to settle with Donald Trump for $10 billion. And this is. He was asked about this on Air Force One yesterday. And I want to play the clip of him talking about what might happen here. So let's play.

Sarah Longwell (22:45)

It's very interesting.

Donald Trump (clip) (22:55)

Have another one where, you know, I've virtually won the Mar a Lago Break in suit and, you know, I have to work out some kind of a settlement. I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself because, you know, when the FBI broke in, we sued. When I was, before I was president, I said, obviously it was a very good suit. And I have that one. And I, I have to work out the settlement.

Sarah Longwell (23:17)

Have you started Pam Bondi on how to handle that at all?

Donald Trump (clip) (23:21)

I think what we'll do is do something for charity. You know, we're thinking about doing something for charity where I'll give money to charity. We can make it a substantial amount. Nobody would care because it's going to go to numerous very good charities.

Sam Stein (23:39)

Okay, this is ridiculous. This is just ridiculous. What charities are going to be the Donald Trump Presidential Library?

Sarah Longwell (23:47)

Presidential library, sure. It's absurd.

Sam Stein (23:50)

He's just taking taxpayer money.

Sarah Longwell (23:52)

Have you seen the story this just broke, I think, this morning, about the 500?

Sam Stein (23:57)

That was my next related story. Okay, well, these all intertwined.

Sarah Longwell (24:01)

Yeah, they are intertwined. Will you just tee that up so then we can talk about them together?

Sam Stein (24:04)

Because they're so the other story, the other story, which broke from the Wall Street Journal this morning, and it's, like, pretty shocking when you think about it. Basically, an Abu Dhabi royal quietly put about 500 billion, 500 million, I should say, million dollars into the Trump family crypto currency right before or right early in the administration or right before the inauguration, I forget which one. And lo and behold, Donald Trump sold American AI chips to the UAE several months later. These very sensitive chips that our national security apparatus was saying. He, these are important. Like, we don't want them to get into the wrong hands. This is not maybe the best deal, but if you just connect the dots, it was a $500 million payment to the cryptocurrency run by Trump's sons in exchange for this incredibly lucrative chip. And it's a level of corruption that I think is like, again, we talk about vastness here with Epstein. We talked about vastness, but it's hard to wrap your hand around this. That combined with suing your own, the IRS, that you run for $10 billion so you could take the money and then do whatever you want with it. It's nuts.

Sarah Longwell (25:20)

This is, this is what, what is happening. This administration that I think we all knew, like, it would be corrupt because Trump is inherently corrupt. But the level of Trump is selling out America. Like, the reason that our government said don't sell these chips to Abu Dhabi is because they're going to turn around and sell them to China and we were trying to keep them out of the hands of the Chinese. Not now. Trump is for investment in his crypto. He sold out. He is selling out America, our national security. He's selling out NATO. So people put a billion dollars into his, you know, whatever of peace, his board of peace that he's selling for a billion dollars thing to the, to Putin and other dictators. Like, they are selling out America. They are selling off America, I mean, for money. I don't mean selling us out for in the colloquial term. I mean they are literally selling out America for their own personal enrichment of them and their family and, and their friends to make them more powerful. And, and they're using it, they're doing it through the boardroom, through their, or not the boardroom, sorry, the ballroom, which by the way, some of the big ballroom donors, also in the Epstein files, They're, they're selling out all. There's Donald Trump's. Just the whole thing's got a for sale sign on it and the scale of it. And this is where, I mean, we're just, we're underreacting by such a degree. Like you want to say we have TDS like you guys, we can't get mad enough about what's happening right now. We've never seen anything like it. And yeah, the DOJ is under the control of the Trump administration and so there's nobody to hold them accountable. We have no independent agency.

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Sam Stein (28:10)

Well, no, it's okay. I wonder about it because like, the only reason we know about this obviously is because the Wall Street Journal put together some incredible investigative reporting. And like with the Epine files, again, we don't know what we don't know. Right. Like, there's just no way that this is the extent of the amount of profiteering they're trying to do off the government. You, you have to imagine that all these ballroom donations, they're disclosing the ones that are donating. I'm sure they're not disclosing every single ballroom donation. How much is Trump taking off the top? Like, there's no transparency around any of these processes. That's not just Trump in this Wall Street Journal story. It's also. Steve Wyckoff and his family got in on the action.

Sarah Longwell (28:50)

Sure.

Sam Stein (28:51)

They, they got a 30 cool 31 million it appears from this. And you know, it's a secondary component of this. But it does need to be stated. The, the big charge against Joe Biden, Hunter Biden was that Hunter Biden was being hired by these foreign business entities to influence his father's foreign policy. This was the entirety of the Hunter Biden Ukraine scandal. And Joe Biden wasn't even president at the time or vice president at the time. This is that but on steroids. This is that but at a magnitude that is incomprehensibly larger. And you know, it kind of, it does piss me off a little bit that people who complained about all this stuff just go quiet on this stuff. Right. It's just so annoying.

Sarah Longwell (29:36)

There's an amazing amount of strategic silence happening on the social media platforms right now that couldn't shut up about the Epstein files about Hunter. Like part of what's happening right now is that. And this is, this is where having a right wing media ecosystem where they just don't care about called the hack, the hack gap.

Sam Stein (29:56)

You're aware of the hack gap, right?

Sarah Longwell (29:58)

No. What's that?

Sam Stein (30:00)

That's a long standing term hack gap was always used. I mean I come from the lefty media, but it was always, it was always sort of, it was coined to say that the right wing media ecosystem is way more hackish than the left wing Media 100. The left wing media. The left wing media love loves nothing more than to like go after Democrats when they're in charge. Like that's what we love to do. And I shouldn't say weeks, I'm not there anymore. But the right wing media, that, that's a hat gap is that they are willing to turn and turn a blind eye on this stuff.

Sarah Longwell (30:32)

They are. But in. What's incredible though is that right now we are at the nexus of a bunch of stories that they were obsessed with a bunch of issues that, that the right has long churned up lots of content on whether it's Second Amendment rights, whether it was the Hunter Biden, which was really about whether or not there's like cor. And self remuneration out of the presidency by presidents and their families. All of these. Epstein. Like the. Oh, sorry. I think I've already said Epstein, but like. Oh, sorry. This is just one point I wanted to make, which is on the FBI because part of the Hunter Biden thing too was like independence of goj, which of course there's no independence of the DOJ right now.

Sam Stein (31:15)

I'm gonna get to that in a second.

Sarah Longwell (31:20)

Oh, oh, but Cash Patel too. This is another.

Sam Stein (31:23)

Yeah.

Sarah Longwell (31:24)

Him going in front of Congress and saying there's no evidence. There's like nothing. Right.

Sam Stein (31:30)

Yeah, we've looked at it all. Nothing to see here. It's like, wait a second, what did you mean? Obviously there's something to see here. Holy.

Sarah Longwell (31:39)

Sorry.

Sam Stein (31:40)

Okay, sorry. That's great on doj though, because this, this actually segues pretty nicely. The. In normal times, independent Justice Department would in theory look at some of this stuff. Right. They launch investigations. We might not know about it, but like, you know, it's funny. Ilhan Omar, like in the corruption allegations against there was an interesting story. It didn't get much attention, but that the Biden DOJ had actually launched an investigation into Ilhan Omar and whether or not she was profiting. And so like that's how it normally works. They don't talk about it. It happens. It is supposed to be nonpartisan. Now, obviously there are some considerations that go into it all the time. Yesterday we got a great indication of how corrupted and partisan the Department of Justice has become because the guy who was the former chief of staff at the Department of Justice, guy named Chad Mazel, put up a tweet and I'm going to just read it because it's so. It's so blatant, it's so ridiculous that I had a number of lawyer friends just be like, text me. But this is shocking. It says this, if you are a lawyer and are interested in being in AUSA, that's an assistant U.S. attorney and support President Trump and anti crime agenda. DM me. We need good prosecutors and DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for the country. First of all, soliciting AUSAs over DM is ridiculous and hilarious and pathetic, but secondly is, it's just blatant. We want people who support Donald Trump to be the aas, not the US Attorneys, the Assistant US Attorneys who are supposed to just take cases and, and, and go about it dispassionately.

Sarah Longwell (33:25)

It's wild ideological litmus tests in our legal, it's not even ideological because this is just pure, it's not a limitation. Loyalty as over as it over talent and credentials and, you know, professional seriousness. Yeah, no, they're, they're not hiding what it is that they want to do and what they're, every day, for them, they're playing a kind of chicken with the public.

Sam Stein (33:56)

Like, right.

Sarah Longwell (33:57)

Will they get mad enough that, like, we get on our back foot and they're basically betting no. Donald Trump's I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue is really being tested through this administration is like, apparently your ICE agents can shoot someone. Right? Like, and murder Americans in the streets. I do think, though, I, we can wait and see, but I think there's going to be a new round of polling this week, maybe next, and you're gonna see, I think people are starting to get upset. Like, this has been the, one of the worst news cycles for Trump probably since January 6th. And, but I, I, I don't want people to sort of rest on their laurels. Like, the thing that you can do, every person is go demand accountability. Say, just say like, Elon Musk. Everybody should tweet right now. Elon Musk should be held accountable. Ask Elon Musk.

Sam Stein (34:55)

Yeah, go ahead. For Trump, though, it's like, kind of interesting to your point. You know, you see the, you see the, like, the influencer crowd that kind of saddled up with him and in 2024, really turn now. I mean, they're just like, wait a second. You know, we have like ICE agents killing people in the street. This is not, I don't want this. And then the Epstein stuff, wait a second. Like you told me, it's a democratic hoax. Like, come on, this is, this is messed up. And then you have like, you know, pretty tried and true conservatives who, I mean, there's always going to be Trump diehards are going to apologize these people. But you have like, people who are really shocked by this. So back to the, the DOJ story. I mean, Andy McCarthy, who is like just one of the most outwardly conservative legal minds, writes for the National Review. I never would have imagined him turning on a Republican administration. He responded to this news. He says, if support for the President is now conditioned of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund doj. DOJ should only exist if it's nonpartisan. I mean, having Andy McCarthy say defund the DOJ, along with Bill Crystal saying defund ICE. Hey, we're in like some weird universe here where there's a huge shift happening now. I don't know, you know, you, you would know better than me. But, like, he'll always get that, like 35, 38. I just think that's unbreakable. But yeah, it does feel like a shift's happening, though.

Sarah Longwell (36:19)

Yeah. Although I, I think we should be careful always about shifts because I do think people come home often times when, when things sort of go back down.

Sam Stein (36:30)

You know, the temperature lower when the election years. Right.

Sarah Longwell (36:33)

Yeah, that's right. I have, I have watched a lot of the conservative influencers and there's still, I mean, I saw Andy McCarthy suite, but I've also watched Eric Erickson and most of the right wing influence types, Megan Kelly, everybody else, like, they are happy to smear Alex Pretty as a domestic terrorist or a left wing agitator along with the administration. They're happy to defend ICE and what they're doing right now. I think, though, the American public is increasingly against them on that. But, like, the corruption stuff has not broken through to the American public.

Sam Stein (37:10)

Why not?

Sarah Longwell (37:12)

I think that, I just don't know that there are voices on the either, like, let's just call it the big, broad pro democracy community who are hammering this as relentlessly as they need to. I mean, that goes back actually to where we started, which is volume. This has always been part of Trump and Bannon's understanding of public sentiment. With the new, in the new communications environment, which is when you flood the zone with shit, it overwhelms people's nervous systems. It makes it more difficult for people to sort of pull it apart. And it all becomes a white noise of corruption and people lose the ability to properly calibrate the asymmetries between what Trump and his administration are doing. And like Hunter Biden, right. Like, they start to treat those things, they treat those things the same. Like, well, they're all corrupt. Here's the other, here's the, the, the thing, though, that, that I believe very firmly is that voters, for better or worse, they will forgive Trump a lot of his bs, including probably corruption, as long as their lives are getting better. This was like how, how we saw it play out in the first Trump administration today. Their lives are not getting better. And so they are. They are quicker to be angry about these other things. But I think that the information, like the fact that, like, the New York Times doesn't even have this on the front page or at the top of the fold, and it wasn't even in there yesterday. Like, you know, the way that the information works right now is like, it's like if you drop a stone, like a big rock in a placid lake, people like us, we're the first ripple. Like, we are following it closely. But as you get closer to the shore, those ripples are really small, and they depend on the size of the rock to begin with. You know, they depend on.

Sam Stein (39:01)

I look at it differently. I'm going to extend your men far, please, I think. And I'm just. Look, I'm groggy. I had maybe had a couple too many glasses of wine last night, so. Forgive the metaphor, but I think the media ecosystem is a lake, but there's like, rocks being dropped all over the place, right? Like, some. Some are big rocks, but there's like rocks everywhere. And like, you and I are in the middle and there's a bunch of people and like, we're getting hit from different ripples. And so to me, like, you know, the New York Times not covering this, like, I know it matters, it should matter. I know it's important that they cover this because it's going to set the agenda for other people because it influencing elite opinion matters on the secondary and tertiary level. But I think a lot of people in that lake, so to speak, are getting it from different ripples like Twitter. Twitter, you know, YouTube, podcasts, influencers, things like Tik Tok. I know Tik Tok's another beast, but I feel like this will break through because it's just going to be covered in a million different ways. It's going to find. You find its way to your social media feed now.

Sarah Longwell (40:08)

Yeah, everybody watched it with them themselves, but go ahead.

Sam Stein (40:12)

Yeah, no, no, that. That's it, though. It's like you can see video of the shooting from your phone. You don't need the New York Times to cover it. The Epstein files, you can scroll through your feed and you can see five.

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Sam Stein (41:24)

So like you're going to get it. I am with you A little bit on there's going to be a rally around the flag type element here. That happens all the time. It's why I've been a little bit hesitant to say, oh, these special elections, they really matter because they're, they're occurring in a vacuum. That said, there was a special election last night in Texas and it was in the biggest county and very red county and there was a 30 point shift in the state senate race to the Democrat who won. I'm not going to pretend I have any idea who these people are. I wasn't this race was not on my radar. But it a 30 point shift is not something to sneeze at. Totally right?

Sarah Longwell (42:13)

Not at all. I mean, and in deep red Texas, I look, I think you can both overread these things individually. But I do think that this is where a collection of whether it's the 15 points that Abigail Spanberger won by and the 15 points Mikey Cheryl won by, which is funny because Trump just in this just was this week said, well, the only way Democrats win is if they cheat. I'm like, they won by 15 points, man. What are you talking about? But this is, we're getting a lot of different data points and so I would put this in the bucket. Not of this alone matters a great deal. However, this, with all everything else that we're seeing, I think, look, it shows two things that we know. One is Democrats have a massive structural advantage in these off year elections because the most highly educated, highly engaged voters show up for them, which now tend to be more anti Trump. They're more college educated suburban voters who are more likely to read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And I don't know. And that, like, that. Well, that actually is just like the biggest factor, like, that is what's happening here.

Sam Stein (43:24)

And so I guess that raises the question then, if they, you know, as we get closer to the midterms, like, will that advantage become diluted? Right. If more people plug in. But then again, now I'm thinking out loud, but this is why I think the Epstein stuff and the ICE stuff and the economics really matters, not is it just going to depress their side of the equation? Like, if you are a sort of informal voter and, you know, you decide to vote in 2024, you might have voted because you felt like, you know, Trump would, you know, expose the cabal that was behind Jeffrey Epstein. Or, you know, there might be another reason that. Because he, you know, he seemed like he. He knew what he was going to be doing with immigrate immigrants and, like, get them out of the country. And then you look at this stuff and you're like, wait a second, they're shooting people. And the cabal was real, but it involved, like, all these people in Trump's orbit. You're not going to go out and vote. You're not.

Sarah Longwell (44:15)

Sorry. That was the other half of the equation that I meant that I was talking about, which is like, who turns out and who doesn't turn out is basically what happens in these particular races. And I think you're right that a lot of the people who, you know, turned out specifically to vote for Trump a. Don't. Like, these other. Aren't attached to these other candidates the way they're attached to Trump or. And they simply are. Like, I'm pissed off about everything now. Like, I don't feel that, like, hope in voting. And this is why when Susie Wiles said she wants to put Trump on the ballot.

Sam Stein (44:50)

Go for it. Go for it. Yeah. Well, Trump. Trump can't help but be on the ballot. Like, he's gonna. He's gonna go out there, he's gonna make himself the center of the. Of the election, I presume. Right. Like, he's. He's just not capable of doing it. I guess the one other. The one thing that does sort of linger over this is just money, right? So ELON Put in $5 million to the Senate and House Republican super PACs. You have this crypto pack out there with insane amounts of money, like 90 million or something in cash on hand. Money could swamp this whole thing in ways that I don't think people are really prepared for. There could be more money spent in this election. Midterm election than we've ever seen in a midterm cycle. Actually, it's guaranteed, pretty much.

Sarah Longwell (45:34)

Yeah. Guaranteed. This is. There's a bunch of things that are building up that are part of, like a new conversation that we're all going to have to start having. I think for Democrats who talk about money and politics, they are thinking about it from like, corporations and, you know, that's not where we are anymore, really. Like, the money in politics now comes from. Trump is basically handing out favors to his rich friends who then in turn spend enormous amounts of money to try to keep Republican control of things. And some of those friends aren't just billionaire rich. Some of them are almost trillionaire rich. And Elon Musk can spend like the GDP of a small country on this race, and they will work to try to turn out their base. That's why they're. What Susie Wells really means about putting Trump on the ballot actually is she says Trump's going to lead a get out the vote effort.

Sam Stein (46:38)

Right.

Sarah Longwell (46:39)

For these Republicans in the midterms. I'm not sure I think that works, but that is, that is their plan. And yeah, I think you're right that they're gonna flood. I mean, probably with like, look at all the, like raping, murdering immigrants we've gotten off the streets and like, look at all the trans people we stopped from doing things.

Sam Stein (46:59)

Yeah, that's not like, that's the thing is what is the. What is their play at this point about. If the election were a month round, it's not. So let's say we're a month from now. Like, what is the card that they play here? It's not going to be economics. I mean, no one's feeling really great about country's economic trajectory. They might be able to say we brought inflation down, but, like, I don't think people feel that. So they'll be cleaning up the streets and crime getting rid of criminals and crime going lower. And I think it's just gonna have to be real sort of fling whatever dirt you have against Democrats. That's it. It's just gonna get dirty. Yeah, we'll see. All right, last thought, because I have to go. You're gonna go see the Milani documentary?

Sarah Longwell (47:45)

Yeah, man, of course. My whole day is blocked around it. That's family.

Sam Stein (47:51)

I bought about three tickets in a row. I'm gonna see it back to back to back. Yeah.

Sarah Longwell (47:57)

What a way to spend a Sunday. Don't go to church. Go see Melania. Did you see? So it's done.8 million in sales, which for a documentary, is not nothing. I will say our boy Jeff bezos spent, like 70 million making it and promoting it. So it's worth it for Jeff.

Sam Stein (48:18)

I'm glad. I'm glad he did that. Yeah. Real good investment for him now. I mean, look, hey, 8 million is nothing to sneeze at. I'm happy for Melania. She. She got a good movie out of it. The critics reviews have been brutal, but that's just because the critics are a bunch of elitists, you know?

Sarah Longwell (48:33)

Yeah. Our own sunny bunch who an elitist truly is here. He said it's real bad.

Sam Stein (48:44)

It's like, it seems real bad. I'm. I'm not gonna see it today. I'm probably not gonna see it at all until it comes out on streaming.

Sarah Longwell (48:50)

All right.

Sam Stein (48:50)

I do have to.

Sarah Longwell (48:51)

I will never watch this movie. You would have to drink work orange me to make me watch this movie.

Sam Stein (48:57)

Like, and hold my eyes open. That's not true. You take one of those 15 milligram souls.

Sarah Longwell (49:05)

That's right. The Super Gu.

Sam Stein (49:08)

The super gummy. The high dosage. We. We sell souls on the podcast. And then you would, you know, get a nice little wine, a glass of wine, some popcorn, and just see how long you could last.

Sarah Longwell (49:19)

That's true. I'd have to set my clock, because if I did that and you put on the Milani movie, I would either. I would either go into, like, a rage fit that did keep me up, or I just immediately just giggle.

Sam Stein (49:30)

No, you'd start giggling. You'd be like, is this real?

Sarah Longwell (49:32)

Is this real?

Sam Stein (49:33)

Am I alive? All right, Sarah, it's been a pleasure. I think Bill will be back next Sunday, but, you know, the show goes on with or without him, so thank you for doing this and for those who have been watching, thank you for watching us on your Sunday morning. Hope this was informative. Hope you got more coffee than I did, and we'll talk to you soon.