Will The Epstein Files Sink Trump?

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Konikova.
And I'm Nate Silber.

Speaker 1 So, Nate, today on this show, we're talking about some important things

Speaker 1 that are going on in

Speaker 1 government right now. The name Jeffrey Epstein probably rings a bell to some of our listeners.
By the way, please exchange.

Speaker 1 I've never heard of the guy. I've got nothing to do with him, Maria.

Speaker 1 I think I exchanged emails with him once.

Speaker 1 And on that note, yes, I am actually taping this from an office location.

Speaker 1 um so you might hear some more background noise than usual um but yeah um you and i are both back from vegas night well first of all maria

Speaker 1 i want to congratulate you for winning a poker championship trophy you won the five thousand dollar

Speaker 1 no limit hold them event at the north is it north american poker tour anyway we are both out in vegas this is the last event of this NAPT series,

Speaker 1 but it's a tough event. $5,000 price point.
I want to be super honest. I thought it was a fairly tough tournament.
A lot of regs, a lot of Vegas local pros there.

Speaker 1 Not the softest fields I've ever played. I flew home scared.
Maria played this $5,000 event and she won the fucking event. Tell us a little bit about that, Maria.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much, Nate.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was the 5300 high roller, the final high roller of the series.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I had busted out of the 10K high roller, as had you. We were playing that together.
And

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 decided that, you know what, let's do one last hurrah. I tried to convince you to play.
And you said,

Speaker 1 I would have had to. downgrade from a business class seat on Delta to coach on, I would would have had to take a red eye on Spirit Airlines, Maria.

Speaker 1 There are some things that are negative expected value.

Speaker 1 But if I had known how to win the fucking tournament,

Speaker 1 then I would have happily flown Spirit Airlines. But Maria, this is amazing.

Speaker 1 I was just about to make the joke, Nate, that I'm glad that you decided not to downgrade because I would have had to come in second. So

Speaker 1 I'm glad I got to win. So thank you.
Thank you for flying home in business class.

Speaker 1 It was, you know, it's always an amazing experience to win a tournament,

Speaker 1 but there's something extra special about winning a high roller where the fields are tough.

Speaker 1 You know, it feels really good when you are able to hold your own and kind of prevail against opponents who, you know, most of them are.

Speaker 1 lot better players than I am. I am not afraid to say that.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, it feels good when you can actually make it happen.

Speaker 1 I did, you know, I started, it was a multi-day event and I started the final day,

Speaker 1 day two, as the chip leader, which is always a great position to be in, but that usually does not translate, right? No, it's almost

Speaker 1 harder.

Speaker 1 It's almost harder, right? You have to like remind yourself that like,

Speaker 1 oh, I'm chip leader. at the end of day one, fifth in chips out of a thousand people.
Yeah. Your odds of winning are not that much higher than they were at the start.

Speaker 1 Your odds of caching often are even

Speaker 1 depends, right? Even your odds of cashing can be below 50-50, right? So you have to, you have to not rest on your laurels.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not resting on your laurels and like being able to get,

Speaker 1 to keep everything going

Speaker 1 is a really

Speaker 1 Really tough thing to do.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, it was one of those days where everything went right. You know, all of my bluffs got through.
You know, when I went all in with Jack High, I got the fold. I didn't get the call.

Speaker 1 And I got the calls in the big spots where I actually had really good hands.

Speaker 1 That's what needs to happen, right? Like, you need to make some hands and get calls, and you need to be able to, you know, play when you don't have the best hands.

Speaker 1 And I also made some really good call downs. There were a few pots that gave me a lot of chips where really good players bluffed into me.

Speaker 1 And I was able to call down with

Speaker 1 the hands that made me close my eyes and

Speaker 1 call instead of slam dunk calling. I was comfortable with you.

Speaker 1 Are there any particular players you want to mention? Is this based on

Speaker 1 GTO? Is it based on live reads? Is it based on your expectation of how people play against you? Do you think they think you're overfolding?

Speaker 1 I think that it's a combination of all of these things.

Speaker 1 There was one player who I haven't played with before

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 he'd been running well the whole series. He'd had some good results and

Speaker 1 I felt like he was trying to take advantage of that a little bit. And so this was actually one of the hands that made me into the chip leader on

Speaker 1 day two.

Speaker 1 He triple barrel bluffed into me

Speaker 1 where I ended up having a straight, but I had a straight on a double paired board. So for people who don't play poker, it's not a very strong hand in that particular case.

Speaker 1 Because if you, you know, if you're holding any one of the other cards,

Speaker 1 you have a full house. And he was the button.
And the... two cards that were paired were a queen and a 10.
So those were both very likely cards for the button to have and for the button to represent.

Speaker 1 And in that particular case, there was just some spidey sense that just made me hit the call button. And I actually have no idea what he had because he mucked his hand,

Speaker 1 which is something that I actually never

Speaker 1 advocate players do. So if you muck your hand, that means I don't have to show my hand, right? So

Speaker 1 that means that he doesn't get the information with what I was calling him

Speaker 1 with. And had he known that I called him with the hand I had, you know, that would have been, I think, very valuable information.

Speaker 1 So in that particular case, it was, you know, it was a combination of just the way that the the hand played out. Um, and like I said, the fact that he had been very aggressive all day.

Speaker 1 Um, then there was a there were a few hands against Joey Weissman.

Speaker 1 Um, I love Joey, we're friends, um, he's an amazing player, we've played a lot together, um, and he did, he tried to bluff me in a, in a spot where he had the blocker to the nut flush, and um

Speaker 1 I ended up calling without a flush, um, but with uh you know, with a with a good hand. And

Speaker 1 it was one of those things where he understands GTO play so well. And the way that I played my hand, it was pretty clear that I did not have a flush.

Speaker 1 And so I thought that any good player would probably try to exploit that. And he did.

Speaker 1 You know, I had bet the flop and then I checked turn and he bet big and then he over bet the river.

Speaker 1 And I ended up using a time bank because in these events, you do have a limited amount of time to make your decision. So I ended up using a time bank.

Speaker 1 And then I did make the call and saw that he had just ace high,

Speaker 1 but he had the right ace, right?

Speaker 1 He had the ace that you wanted to represent the flush. So it was a good bluff.
I almost folded.

Speaker 1 But I'm very glad that I ended up making the hero call. And that was one of the big hands of that final day that made me really keep my chip lead.

Speaker 1 And it made Joey short, which is good because Joey's a very good player and he was to my left and it was very good to have him bust out of the tournament.

Speaker 1 It's always nice when players who are better than you bust out.

Speaker 1 I have a final table too. A final table, the $550

Speaker 1 OE stud 8 mixed event.

Speaker 1 Congratulations. You literally won $1,000.
Gross. That's $450 net.
Hey, you should be proud. You should be proud.
I would have to turn up nowhere from tier to

Speaker 1 Delta. Tell you that much.
Nice. Nice.

Speaker 1 On that note, Nate, let's shift gears a little and talk about some political news. So we're recording this, as always, on Monday, November 17th.

Speaker 1 By the time you're hearing this, there will be more updates in this. But there have been

Speaker 1 things going on in the Trump White House, including major shifts on the dunk-dunk-dun Epstein files.

Speaker 1 I feel feel like we need the X-Files theme or something playing in the back.

Speaker 1 Do you know there's a Harvey Weinstein running for city council in my district? That seems like an unfortunate name. That's amazing.
That's amazing. What an unfortunate name.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine running for office with the name Harvey Weinstein right now?

Speaker 1 Pretty bad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Adolph. Let's not go there.
Let's not go there. Anyway, I don't mean to compare.

Speaker 1 Anyway, friend of the pod, the now deceased Jeffrey Epstein. No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 1 Where do you want to start?

Speaker 1 Someone's going to clip that out of context, Nate. Someone's going to clip that out of context.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So just, you know, for people who've been hiding under a rock, the Epstein files have been a point of contention for quite some time.

Speaker 1 It was part of the things that the Republicans and Donald Trump ran on, you know, release the Epstein files. Tell us what was going on with Jeffrey Epstein.
You know, we want to protect our children.

Speaker 1 Once Trump got into office, all of a sudden there was, don't release the Epstein files. There's nothing to see here.
Pam Bondi said, you know, nothing to see here.

Speaker 1 Let's move on.

Speaker 1 But the popular clamor for the files never died down. It kept growing, kept gaining momentum.

Speaker 1 Cue

Speaker 1 an attempt of the Democrats to actually get the files released by circumventing the normal way for a measure to come in front of Congress.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, so usually the party that controls Congress has control of what is litigated or debated in Congress.

Speaker 1 In the House, there is a mechanism known as a discharge petition, whereas if an outright majority of all members of the House, which in this case,

Speaker 1 or not in this case, with 45 members, the magic number is 218. 218, yes.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there had been 213 Democrats in the House. There were four Republicans,

Speaker 1 Thomas Massey, who's kind of this libertarian from Kentucky, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is now feuding with Trump, and who's the other, Lauren Bobbert.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so that plus all Democrats was 217. However, Democrats won a special election in Arizona.

Speaker 1 The Republican Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, dragged his feet to avoid seating her for as long as possible until the shutdown was over.

Speaker 1 She finally got seated and sworn in. There were now 218 to force to vote.
By the way, there are many other Republicans who are going to, who are planning to vote for this bill, right?

Speaker 1 And so what Trump finally did was he said on Sunday night

Speaker 1 that, okay, go ahead, House Republicans, and vote for the sepsim file. It's a big hoax and and a big distraction, but like, you know, go ahead and vote for it, House Republicans.
Now,

Speaker 1 hopefully, our American listeners know, maybe some of you Europeans don't know, but we actually have multiple chambers of Congress in the U.S. So the bill has to pass the Senate.

Speaker 1 It also has to be signed by the president, or you need a veto proof majority, two-thirds, to override it. Right.

Speaker 1 So I thought it was interesting that Trump in his language said House Republicans and not Republicans overall. So it it may be a way for him to save face.
He's going to lose this vote.

Speaker 1 Now you kind of can't tell. You're like, okay, yeah, throw your, you know, throw your tomatoes at me.
I'll take.

Speaker 1 Doesn't necessarily mean he wants the files released, but that's what's kind of forcing it. It's like, finally,

Speaker 1 finally, this Democrat was seated. This petition's been in place since September.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, I believe it's the House Oversight Committee has released some files related to Epstein. Trump is mentioned quite a bit in there.

Speaker 1 A lot of speculation. I mean, by the way, Maria,

Speaker 1 do you know that I fucking hate email?

Speaker 1 I hate typing out long emails. I know you hate email, Nate, as evidenced by the impossibility of getting you to reply to

Speaker 1 first of all.

Speaker 1 You pay for money for your email.

Speaker 1 But like, if I did, I wouldn't fucking email this fucking crazy shit. Yeah, no, no, no, I mean, it's, it's actually, it's quite crazy to me how

Speaker 1 much is in email form and how many ridiculously smart people put things into email that you're like, are you fucking kidding me?

Speaker 1 Like, we've obviously, you know, Trump has mentioned many times, Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, current university professor.

Speaker 1 He has quite the correspondence with Epstein. You just see, you know, you see all of these people and you're like, guys, you know, this is email.

Speaker 1 This ain't even, you know, you're emailing Gmail account to Gmail account. Like, I don't need to be a great hacker to be able to hack this.

Speaker 1 And, and, Nate, how many huge leaks and data breaches have we had over the last decade? You know, the Sony emails, all of these things.

Speaker 1 Haven't you seen enough to realize that everything you put in an email is going to be easy to see? Anyway, this is an aside, but the stuff in these emails, it really is truly mind-boggling.

Speaker 1 And obviously, there are tens of thousands of them. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 1 But I want to go back just a second to what you were saying about Trump's specific language about, you know, house, go ahead, you know, I want you to release this, which is a huge about face, you know, this U-turn that he pulled to try, I think, as you say, to save face, because it was very clear that this was going to happen no matter what.

Speaker 1 Now it looks like he's saying, oh, well, I have nothing to hide, right?

Speaker 1 Going on the offense, but we still need the Senate. Unclear if it's going to pass the Senate.
And on Friday, he also issued a command to his favorite Pam Bondi

Speaker 1 to start investigating some of the Democrats that are in the emails, such as Clinton and Summers.

Speaker 1 What that means is that he actually has another lever through which he can suppress some of these files, even if the measure passes both the House and the Senate, because if they're part of an active investigation, you can say, oh, you know, for the integrity of the investigation, we can't actually release them.

Speaker 1 So he has a few different points that he can play going forward where we might not, you know, people might think, oh, slam dunk like he's done. He's in a corner.
Not so, right?

Speaker 1 There are lots of strategic exits that are still left and lots of plays still remaining.

Speaker 1 The flip side being you have subpoena power, you have Freedom of Information Act, you have leaks to the media,

Speaker 1 you know, and you have a lot of members of Congressman and various committees who have access to some of these things. And so,

Speaker 1 you know, you can do also reporting

Speaker 1 by organizations, those organizations. It's not what the federal government is doing.
If that information is out there, there's a good chance it will be. discovered eventually.

Speaker 1 You can leak it to Silver Bulletin if you want.

Speaker 1 I have to check our liability insurance situation.

Speaker 1 Probably would get sued. It might be good for subscriptions at first, right?

Speaker 1 I've been sued by the president. Subscribe to Silver Bulletin.
No, I would say that. It would be much more eloquent.
Why would I smoke that baby voice?

Speaker 1 That would be a good fucking, that'd be a good reason to subscribe. You need a different voice for that night.

Speaker 1 I've been sued. I am an impartial journalist.
I've been sued by...

Speaker 1 Yes, the BBC voice. That's perfect.
Okay.

Speaker 1 But there are ways for the information to get out, right? I mean, look.

Speaker 1 Yep, absolutely. The initial news in July that Trump had been named in the Epstein piles

Speaker 1 didn't actually seem to move the needle all that much, right? There was a little bit of a tick down in the popularity. The tick down seemed to be more about the

Speaker 1 obstruction than anything, right? When Pam Bondi said, oh,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 we investigated it, and it turns out nothing funny going on there. You know, let's not, let's not, let's not keep litigating this.

Speaker 1 Let's move on to the things that really matter to the American people.

Speaker 1 And nobody, nobody, nobody,

Speaker 1 nobody bought.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, your Pam Bondi voice is

Speaker 1 stylistic irony. Yes, yes, absolutely.
But like,

Speaker 1 nobody bought that, right? Nobody bought that. No, and by the way, Pam Bondi is now obviously doing an about face because before she said absolutely nothing to investigate.

Speaker 1 And then on Friday, she opened investigations. So

Speaker 1 clearly one of the two bambooes was lying. So to me, the question is:

Speaker 1 are we past not necessarily some type of inflection point, but like,

Speaker 1 is Trump in some sort of a lame duck downward spiral, which are not quite the same thing, right? By lame duck, I mean, so Trump technically is a lame duck,

Speaker 1 unless he figures out a way to run for a third term. I don't know.
I don't know if we should dignify that or not. But like putting that aside for now,

Speaker 1 he is a lame duck in the sense that he can't run for president again. But by lame duck, I really mean like,

Speaker 1 does he lack the political capital to have the agenda setting power, the juice to get things done?

Speaker 1 In addition to this Epstein stuff, There are now more Republicans ignoring him on redistricting. Indiana, where there are two Democrats, seems not to want to redistrict.

Speaker 1 I think some of these Republicans have been spooked by Democratic success in New Jersey, Virginia, and so forth.

Speaker 1 You know, you can have districts that are R plus 10, meaning voted for Trump by 10 points. Those aren't necessarily safe in a blue wave year.
And so they might be worried about that.

Speaker 1 They might be thinking, okay, well, actually, Democrats have shown in California that we can have this kind of mutually assured destruction where nobody wins, right? And so the game theory is

Speaker 1 interesting.

Speaker 1 And we'll be right back after this break.

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Speaker 1 If you look at the ratings for approval ratings for presidents in their second term, they're much less resilient. And there are cases like

Speaker 1 Bush in particular, where it was just a downward trend.

Speaker 1 You know, Nixon

Speaker 1 also, because of Watergate, where it deteriorated very fast.

Speaker 1 You know, Truman surprised people by defeating Dewey, despite headlines in the 1948 election, was very unpopular in his second term, kind of a straight downward arrow. And so like, once you kind of,

Speaker 1 you know, you don't necessarily have your party coming to your defense if you don't have to run for election again.

Speaker 1 In fact, you have Republicans maybe positioning themselves for what does life look like post-Trump, right? We've written or talked a lot in the show about how Democrats are still a mess.

Speaker 1 It's certainly a very valuable nomination to have in 2028, right?

Speaker 1 Assuming there's not a constitutional crisis, then they have to nominate somebody else. And

Speaker 1 the jockeying for that starts now. It's definitely occurring among Democrats already.
And so and so, yeah, I think the base case is always that,

Speaker 1 you know, Trump is a high floor, low ceiling, high floor. But you never know.

Speaker 1 There's enough history of second-term presidents actually going in this downward spiral where first-term presidents tend to have this U-shape or swoosh, Nike-shape recovery.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll be very curious to see how this plays out. And I think a lot of it is going to depend not on the Epstein files, but on economic indicators, right?

Speaker 1 On what is happening with the economy, what's happening with inflation, basically, how is the American public feeling?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 are they what's going to happen with SNAP benefits?

Speaker 1 You know, with Trump asking everyone to reapply for SNAP benefits, with all of these different elements, you know, this is a puzzle right now that is, you know, Trump has a lot of different things that he has to manage correctly in order for there not to be a downward spiral.

Speaker 1 And we've talked before many, many times on the show how, you know, nothing seems to matter, right? Like he, he happens, he it seems like he can rebound from from anything negative.

Speaker 1 This is the first time, Nate, that we're actually seeing

Speaker 1 in since he became president in term number two, this is the first time I think that we've seen cracks in, you know, this monolithic Republican support for Trump.

Speaker 1 in the House, right? Before, like, basically whatever he wanted, they were rubber stamping. They were getting, they were basically even

Speaker 1 not doing what they were supposed to be doing, right? They were abdicating their powers of the purse. They were letting kind of Trump pass this legislation.

Speaker 1 I realize that Trump isn't passing legislation. That's what Congress does, but they were really letting Trump pass this legislation, tariffs, all of these different things.

Speaker 1 And they are finally starting to kind of crack a little bit. At least that's what it looks like right now.
It's certainly, I mean, it happened with the 218 signatures, right?

Speaker 1 You actually did have the breaking of ranks. So I would really,

Speaker 1 you know, I'm very curious to see how this ends up playing out and what happens in the Senate, right? Is the Senate going to fracture as well after, in the wake of what happened in the House?

Speaker 1 Is Trump going to,

Speaker 1 is the fact that he said, oh, fine, go ahead, you know, vote for this thing, we have nothing to hide, is that actually going to

Speaker 1 propel this through the Senate as well? Is he going to backtrack yet again? How is this going to play out?

Speaker 1 And what does that mean for his ability to pass everything he wants to pass in the next two years, right? To actually have that monolithic support. Is he still going to have it moving forward or not?

Speaker 1 Obviously, you know, a betting person would say he probably will because he's always managed to regain it. But I think that it's a question mark for me for the first time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look, I don't know that Trump has... that much more of a legislative agenda, really, apart from like appropriations bills, which as always, Republicans will try to

Speaker 1 lower taxes for rich people and corporations and

Speaker 1 starve the welfare state a little bit. But I mean,

Speaker 1 yeah, look, so you have, you know, it would be subject to a filibuster in Congress. It seems like a kind of a bad look to

Speaker 1 if the House votes overwhelmingly for, I mean, I guess you're kind of hoping that like, if you go to polymarket, which I consult for, then there's only like a 40% chance implied that the Senate passes the bill by the end of the year.

Speaker 1 Now, we don't have that many weeks left and things in the Senate are slow, right? So they might kind of slow walk it and hope that people forget about it. You know, I mean, the fact is that there are

Speaker 1 entire, you know, like MSNBC has now been rebranded to MS Now,

Speaker 1 which sounds like a multiple sclerosis charity.

Speaker 1 It does. It really does.
It's not. It's a cable news charity.
It's such an awful, what is it? Sorry, this is neither here nor there. But what is it with all these horrific media rebrands?

Speaker 1 What's the problem? So it was like MS Now, like the partnership with M Microsoft Network lasted, ended, what, like 15 years ago or something, right?

Speaker 1 It's just that, you know, the news streaming MSNBC is teaming with NBC News. It's like doesn't really, or MS, it doesn't really make sense, right?

Speaker 1 But like, it made sense in the early aughts, I guess, and the name has stuck. But like, you know,

Speaker 1 basically, they're just going to be talking Epstein, Epstein, Epstein on MSMB, MS Now. It's a new kind of Russia game.
So if you're hoping to forget about it, then they won't, right?

Speaker 1 But like, look, maybe Trump figures that like, what's the scene from A Christmas Story where the kid gets the BB gun? Like, don't, don't shoot your eye out. Am I, am I getting that right?

Speaker 1 I don't know if I've seen that whole movie. I know that scene.
I'm sure I've seen the movie. Oh my God, I don't remember Nate.
I don't remember.

Speaker 1 But the kid gets a BB gun and of course he like shoots his eye. I don't know what the fuck's going on.
But it's a little bit like, you know, you have Democrats with this BB gun on Epstein.

Speaker 1 And like, they're so giddy about the story, which by the way, I say

Speaker 1 open up fucking everything, right? I don't like these political elites. I think they're fucking weird social circles and parties are fucking weird, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I hope as many people as possible are tainted for this and we get a better fucking set of elites, to be perfectly honest, right?

Speaker 1 You know, by the way, I, you know, I think that it's not irrational for someone to ask whether Jeffrey Epstein really killed himself, right? I don't care. I don't think, I think that should be

Speaker 1 a normal thing to ask. If you go and look at what the fuck is going on with this, right? How is he doing all this stuff? And I think there are lots and lots of open questions.

Speaker 1 I would love to see every single file on this released to the public and debated.

Speaker 1 At the same time, when you have kind of the MS now partisan Democrats, right, there's a risk that

Speaker 1 instead of having this kind of moment of cross partisan crossover, that it goes back to kind of a he said, she said,

Speaker 1 people, I think, already have kind of low expectations for Trump. And so, and so I don't know, right? You know,

Speaker 1 but it would be an absolute like Epstein-Palooza for three months if the file, if the files came out, which again, if I were Democrats, I'd say, okay, this is a pretty good story for us, but there is an opportunity cost, right?

Speaker 1 And the opportunity cost might be to drive home a message about the economy. That's actually what I was just about to say.

Speaker 1 Like in the grand scheme of things, like right now, you've got the economy, right?

Speaker 1 You've got inflation, you've got SNAP benefits being cut off, you've got the healthcare stuff, you've got all this stuff going on.

Speaker 1 It seems like a good moment to release, however, tens of thousands of emails and whatever else,

Speaker 1 all of this just insane amount of information,

Speaker 1 and try to kind of

Speaker 1 bury it all, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Trump is really, really good at the politics of distraction, right? He is very good at getting people to pay attention to things that make them

Speaker 1 not deal with the issues that are actually important at the moment. Like, he is so good at attention hijacking.

Speaker 1 And he's, I mean, to be clear with the Epstein files, he's been trying to avoid this, right? Because there is, we already know that he's in the files.

Speaker 1 We already know that there's damaging information. The question is, how damaging is it?

Speaker 1 But I think he might be making a gamble now that like, if they're going to come out, might as well like just have this barrage and try to bury everything else.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, people will stop caring or stop paying attention to the things that they really should be paying attention to in terms of the welfare of the American people.

Speaker 1 No, and look, there are sure to be other Democrats

Speaker 1 implicated. Yeah, absolutely.
There are sure to be,

Speaker 1 I don't know, you can, you can, it's a little bit morbid.

Speaker 1 you can bet on like who's going to be named in the upstein files and like i'm not going to for sure yeah for sure and we can and you know i can i'm willing to bet that we are going to be seeing a lot of news headlines and we're going to have a hijacking of the conversation about everything every single democrat right who's mentioned however peripherally in the files so so i think that that that will be another great opportunity for attention redeployment shall we say extremely

Speaker 1 To some extent, the notion that you have like a

Speaker 1 cabal, a bipartisan cabal of like

Speaker 1 rich elites who are behaving very, very badly and think that money can buy you anything you want, including access to underaged women, right?

Speaker 1 Children. If they're underage nate, they're children.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, in some sense, that kind of is part of what like sparks populist narratives, right um

Speaker 1 now if trump is caught up in this

Speaker 1 then he is hardly a populist savior obviously at the same at the same time like

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 you know look there's been people recently who so trump has pardoned a bunch of like january 6th

Speaker 1 rioters protesters whatever you want to call them right people people that were convicted of crimes um

Speaker 1 and i saw some article it's like, well, people who criticized Joe Biden for pardoning Hunter Biden, you know, this is so much a bigger deal. And I'm like, no, fuck you, right?

Speaker 1 Because like Democrats are running on the, we are the party of the rule of law and democracy and the moral high ground, right? And Trump is running on, everyone's a fucking hypocrite.

Speaker 1 So do what you want. Yeah, maybe I like, maybe I like younger women.
I don't drink. I don't smoke.
Right. I like to hang out.
We talk about women.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, like, that's kind of, you know, Trump is reveling in his hypocrisy, in a way, kind of his like

Speaker 1 degeneracy almost. So I guess isn't like smoke or drink or things like that, right? But he's kind of like a proud degen in a way.
And that's, yeah, that's different.

Speaker 1 They're not trying to like claim, it's like, yeah, everyone's a hypocrite, so we got to look out for our own, right?

Speaker 1 And so when things happen that discredit quote unquote both sides of the establishment, that plays into cynicism of political institutions and that plays into the hands of populists, including outlimited to Trump.

Speaker 1 We'll be back right after this.

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Speaker 1 I'm just curious, kind of, what is the line, right? Like, what, because it seems to me that, you know,

Speaker 1 that Trump is able to withstand most accusations

Speaker 1 better than most people, right? So if we have the Epstein files released and there's bad stuff on Trump, but also bad stuff on you know a bunch of democrats he might be able to kind of

Speaker 1 waltz through it um if there's you know that nothing like nothing ridiculous but they won't right so so it's one of these things where it may be asymmetric risks no i think yeah and i you know i don't know you know you know listeners you'll be hearing whichever version of this the question lawyers have litigated because the president is right but like no look i agree that like it's a little binary in terms of like

Speaker 1 look, he's not been afraid. I mean, he talks about walking into

Speaker 1 in the locker room at Miss America pageants, right? It's always kind of been like a

Speaker 1 running

Speaker 1 shtick or joke that, yeah, he likes

Speaker 1 women, right? Maybe he likes women that are a little bit younger, and that's kind of like priced in, right? Um, so I think it would have to be like

Speaker 1 pretty definitive, pretty salacious evidence, which is possible. But I think it's like,

Speaker 1 yeah, to me, it's a little bifurcated between like either really bad or gets swept up, brushed aside

Speaker 1 into the previous narrative, right? And there probably are some, probably is some middle ground.

Speaker 1 Yep. But yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, it'll be, it'll be very interesting to see how this process moves forward, what happens in the Senate and whether we do end up seeing a sustained fracturing of the base where

Speaker 1 Congress becomes a little bit less of a

Speaker 1 rubber stamp mechanism for the state.

Speaker 1 So, or whether this is a one-off and it will just go back to kind of to see to doing exactly what Trump says.

Speaker 1 And I think that the repercussions of that are actually potentially much wider because as you've pointed out, Nate, and as we've talked about, a lot of Trump's agenda has been accomplished through executive order, right?

Speaker 1 Through kind of just saying, okay, this is what I'm going to be doing.

Speaker 1 And a lot of those are now making their way to the Supreme Court, right?

Speaker 1 In front of the Supreme Court, will be in front of the Supreme Court soon. And the Supreme Court has also shown itself to be very pro-Trump.

Speaker 1 But if there's a sustained fracturing of kind of the Republican support base in Congress, I'm wondering whether we might actually see the Supreme Court also become a little bit less rubber stampy and a little bit more willing to strike down things.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure. I don't know.

Speaker 1 But like for sure, the Supreme Court is sensitive to public opinion, right? And sometimes we'll kind of be honest about that, sometimes less so. But like they, they are a

Speaker 1 political actor. They're not supposed to be, but they are.

Speaker 1 Maria, do you have closing thoughts here?

Speaker 1 My closing thoughts are I am, you know, whatever's behind the pivot. I do hope that all of the Epstein files are released.
And

Speaker 1 I do hope that they are released in a way that actually has a lasting effect and helps clean up the elites on both sides of the aisle. You know,

Speaker 1 let's be very clear. No one should be,

Speaker 1 what was happening on Jeffrey Epstein's island and his mansion. All of these things are completely unacceptable and people should be held to account.
So I hope that we're actually able to see this.

Speaker 1 And I'm very curious to see what's going to happen in the Senate and whether the American public and Congress is able to maintain their focus and their attention on more than one thing at a time and keep the kind of eye on the prize when it comes to the health of the economy, the health of SNAP benefits, healthcare, all of these things.

Speaker 1 Like, let's multitask people. We can do this.
Two things at once don't focus on the same thing.

Speaker 1 What was the island called?

Speaker 1 Little St. James Day, Little St.
James. I keep thinking of like the island in Jurassic Park, like East Lad New Blar or whatever it is, right?

Speaker 1 Why not

Speaker 1 Jurassic Park 8 Epstein Island? Why not let the dinosaurs be the good guys for once, right? They eat all these child pedophile

Speaker 1 rapists. Like, that would be good, right? Wouldn't it?

Speaker 1 Alleged child molesters.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, but I'll watch that Jurassic Park.

Speaker 1 Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Speaker 1 Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kanakova. And by me, Nate Silver.
The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Speaker 1 Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit. Lydia Jean Cott and Daphne Chen are our editors.
And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Speaker 1 If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people

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