Transcript: Trump Press Sec Knifes FBI in Back as Epstein Mess Worsens

Morris: Yeah, and I think that point’s got to come pretty soon. So we know that Trump’s really unpopular with all voters, but he’s also unpopular with Republicans, the types of people that vote in the primary elections. Those are still about nine months away, but hey, you’re always campaigning when you’re in Congress, right? So in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week, 35 percent of Republicans say they approve of the way Trump’s handling this. Trump’s approval rating with Republicans is usually 90 percent, so the fact that he’s at 35 is pretty telling. If these people are looking to signals from their constituency about what to do next, they’re going to be getting a lot of really negative feedback about the president’s strategy here. And I imagine either they change course and they respond to the public or they respond to their party leader. And what determines how they respond to this is: Who’s the loudest in the meantime? Are they paying more attention to Twitter and people yelling at them, or are they getting a bunch of phone calls from Trump and the White House?

Sargent: Well, you wrote this piece trying to dig into why this is so problematic for Trump. I want to read a bit from it, “y siding with Epstein and against transparency, Trump significantly injures his reputation as an outsider fighting the ‘deep state’ for God and country. Much of the conspiratorial wing of the Republican Party has been arguing that Epstein was in bed with major Democratic donors and other political elites — by refusing to side against them, Trump implicitly sides with them.” He’s the traitor to his class, in a way, to appropriate the FDR idea. He’s the guy who’s going to go in and avenge the people by showing them how elites rigged the system in their favor, how corrupt their globalist schemes are and so forth. So I think you’re really getting at something essential there. This cuts against his political mystique at a very deep level.

Morris: And it’s not just his mystique, as you call it. It’s his entire “value-add” in the Republican Party. In the 2016 primary, this is why Trump beats Cruz and Rubio. In 2024, this is why Trump outperforms with young men who would otherwise be liberals. It’s because they feel like the system is corrupt; especially at a time of inflation, they feel like it’s not giving them what they need. When there’s lots of these narratives about the elites being in bed with some pedophilic ring and covering it up and Trump says, I can fix it. I alone can uncover the story for you—when he doesn’t do that, when he looks to be actually continuing to cover stuff up, then he loses a lot of credibility. And this isn’t … There’s lots of stories like that over Trump’s term, but it does seem like this one is unique; there’s a lot of staying power. In most of Trump’s term, there’s lots of news events and you move on every two or three days. This has been the lead story for two weeks at this point. And because he really got behind it in the 2024 campaign and so much of the party was behind the transparency, for him to turn around completely the opposite direction, I think, is hurting him in a unique way that we haven’t seen before.