Transcript
Ari Melber (0:00)
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Patton Oswalt (0:30)
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Ari Melber (0:45)
Welcome to the Beat. I'm Ahri Melber. Tonight, I want to tell you first, we have another installment in our special report. As we go through these emails, evidence and facts. This one is on some of the other powerful figures ensnared by these early Epstein files. The emails are unexpected tranche of part of what is the larger Epstein files. Last night, you may recall, we showed you some of that footage of Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein, which now looks a lot worse when we see their secret private emails leaked about rehabilitating Jeffrey Epstein's reputation. Why did such a top Trump ally want to do that? Well, we have more for you, Volume two tonight. That's coming up. But I begin right now with something you know about that's only getting worse since it happened. We have the reporting here on President Trump's clearly worst week this year, that bipartisan rebuke from Congress on a key vulnerability forcing the coming release of the Epstein files.
Patton Oswalt (1:45)
The president has just posted on his social network that he has now signed.
Che Komandoori (1:49)
The Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Ari Melber (1:51)
We're just hearing that Trump has signed the Epstein Act.
Patton Oswalt (1:54)
Donald Trump put his surrender and humiliation in writing, in capital letters. He didn't do it in front of the cameras. He likes to do everything in front of the cameras. Not this.
Ari Melber (2:05)
Trump does like cameras. In fact, Donald Trump, through a very long public career, has followed the pretty cliched claim that any press is good press. But I guess that has its limits when it comes to press about blatantly hiding a sex trafficker's files. Why would you do that? Or any press is good press. But what if it's press about your massive, humiliating loss that's really been heard around the world, a loss that shows Republicans will actually overrule Donald Trump as he gets deeper into his lame duck era and that he doesn't have total power over his party despite the many Many times we've been told that by some, whatever their agenda, reason or just misperception, he didn't have total control over any of his party. In the Senate this week, we've also seen how he has now followed the Democrats lead, surrendered to their demand and position, even in a time where he controls Congress, of course, and the White House. So he doesn't want press for that level loss. And so unlike past bill signings by President Trump, we're showing a photo of a past example of this performing a signing this time on this big issue. He denied cameras and coverage, no pictures. And so this is just a piece of the story. But as I begin with you tonight, I just want to do what we do sometimes as so much is happening in the news, and just say something pretty straightforward, maybe even obvious. Consider the irony of claiming to support and sign a law about transparency. It's called the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And you do that while denying any transparency for the public. Final step of turning that bill into law. Reality stars know the power of the camera. So he couldn't bring himself while claiming to have seen the light and now support this bill to allow the light and cameras in to sign it. Because he fought the bill all year. And we've shown you the examples of that. From distributing binders with old material that they wanted to check and see if they could fool their MAGA followers on, they literally handed out binders mislabeled, falsely labeled, claiming they were the Epstein files. That was the beginning of the year. That one didn't work and they did a lot of other hijinks I've shown you. But once he got rolled, that's how they put it in Congress. He then rushed to do a very trumpy PR thing and pretend that he was suddenly okay with passing the bill that forces him to release the files that he's not releasing, which means he continues to obviously be against doing that thing until he hits the legal 30 day deadline, which is new. And we have new reports that expose how that final cover story was not even true. Oh, that he suddenly decided the last minute, maybe he's okay with this. Actually, no. Trump was secretly lobbying Republican senators to slow walk the bill, which you follow the news. So I'm sure you've seen this on matters of a far less consequence than this. Delays are a tool in Congress and sometimes a tool to get more leverage or dilute something when people are paying less attention. And Speaker Johnson publicly claimed the Senate was going to do some of that. That was this week. They were going to he said, take the bill, review it, edit it, make some changes. And remember, we can't say in the news automatically whether that's good or bad. We'd have to see what the changes are. What if they strengthened the enforcement mechanism? Okay. Or as many feared, what if they were pursuant to what Trump wanted, trying to delay, to water the thing down or dilute it? But they didn't do that because Johnson, like Trump, was just shown up in public by these Republicans. And I mentioned some of this, including that new reporting, because on the night of the thing, we weren't up in the process of it. We were covering the substance as we've been covering the emails. But it's also a striking rebuke to Trump, the way it went down. That was we were learning as he called around and couldn't find one Republican senator. Remember, if you want to get into Senate procedure, I was a Senate aide at one point, they call that unanimous consent agreement a way to move things forward. But if you think about all the issues that you might want action on, say gun safety legislation, if you just go down to the floor and say, hey, I want to put this bill forward, it only takes one senator to object. And that's why both parties always have senators on the floor, because the unanimous consent provision is only for things that are so widely agreed upon that you can skip the other hurdles. Sometimes they use it for naming a post office here because the Democrats led and won. John Thune left the floor. Floor. There wasn't any other Republican, if Trump could have gotten one, to go down there and object when Schumer said, we need unanimous consent to move forward on this thing, they would have objected. And under procedure, it would have at least delayed it. So that was, again, a smaller point, but not an insignificant one. It was a final procedural loss for Trump on the way to the big loss. And for those who understand how the Senate works or want to kind of get as dry and procedural as I am and nerd out with me, now you know how it works, too. You probably already knew. It shows he didn't have one friend in the Senate on this issue. Republicans ignored him, and some are now going further. And so that procedural point I made that there was nobody to help is relevant to where we go next Reporting tonight is Republicans want to push Trump to understand that this is not some show that changes next week or when the deadline hits. They want him to take this seriously. And apparently, again, I'm not judging, but apparently Republicans are concerned that sometimes he doesn't take things seriously or Follow the law. Because really you shouldn't have to remind any president who takes an oath to uphold the law that, well, when the law says something's released, you release it. And so what you're also seeing I think is two layers here. That's what I'm reporting for you. That one layer is what I just told you. And the second is they're in charge, not him. They write the laws. And however many times we've been told Republicans won't do this, some are now saying, hey, Mr. President, maybe you didn't feel this way earlier, maybe you had a so called honeymoon, maybe your approval's so low that we're acting different, different energy. But they are telling the law will be followed. Headlines about Republican senators, not just Democrats, warning Bondi, who is Trump's fixer on this, not to delay or slow walk or play games around the Epstein file, which is now law. It gives the DOJ 30 days. So if you're tracking little calendar here on when to tune back into the news, I mean we would love for you to watch all the time, but you definitely would want to watch on the 19th. Cuz either they'll have turned it over by the deadline or they will have failed to turn it over. And those I can just tell you are both big developments. So it's the worst period for Trump this term. More Americans think his policies have hurt them writ large, not just on this issue than help them. You see this 46 to 15 is pretty bad. And if you're saying, oh well, Trump's going to say where's that poll even from? He doesn't believe polls. It's a Fox News poll. As for how badly the economy's going, which is never fully in control of any president but is usually the greatest indicator of that president and their party's success, particularly heading into midterms, 76% of people view the economy negatively. Now that goes in a lot of directions. It might explain why a Democratic socialist did so well in the capitalist city of New York. It might explain why people aren't having all of Trump's bs, as they would put it, some of them as opposed to other times. Also a bit worse than the end of Biden's term. Trump's responding by posting online and ranting while leaders from both parties gathered for a more somber show of solidarity at former Vice President Cheney's funeral. I'm showing you who was there. Leaders who've clashed, of course, the Bushes and the Bidens, Al Gore. That's a type of unity that I guess sometimes it's only a funeral where you'll see it these days. But even there, out of the wishes of the Cheney family, there is of course one person absent. You don't see in these photos Mr. Trump. The President was not invited. In the peril facing Trump, things are changing fast. And the fact that Republicans are part of this revolt upends a narrative. I bet you've heard heard it from people when you chat politics in your normal life. We've heard it from MAGA a lot and we've definitely heard it from some of the elites and media figures even who swallow this MAGA narrative that somehow Trump is Teflon and can't be stopped and controls everything, when in fact this objectively now measurably unpopular leader is having trouble.