109. Trump's Deportation Army

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katie Kaye, and not with Anthony Scaramucci because he's back on the yacht in the south of France or somewhere.

No, he's off today, but I'm very lucky to be joined by my friend and colleague Sam Stein.

Sam and I share the joys of covering the White House.

Actually, what we really share is the joy of getting up ridiculously early in the morning to go on MSNBC's Way Too Early programme, which is, as it says, Way Too Early, where Sam is an occasional host and a guest with me early in the morning when I'm on Morning Joe, but comes from the Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Politico, where he was political editor.

And of course, now Sam, you are at the Bulwark.

So thank you for joining me.

A reasonable hour of the morning, if I may say so, here in Washington, D.C., nine o'clock on Thursday.

I was going to say, joy is such an interesting way to describe getting up at 3.30 a.m.

to do that show.

I wouldn't know.

I don't know if I would use the word joy, but it is a duty and a responsibility, and I enjoy it.

But maybe also actually joy is an interesting word to use about anything at the moment.

Yeah, fair enough.

If we're going to get existential right at the top of the program, I'm not sure how much joy there is.

So today we're going to talk about ICE raids around the DC region.

In the first half of the programme, what I'm seeing, parents being kind of terrified to send their kids back to school.

And it's all getting pretty grim and tough if you are in this area of the country, particularly as an undocumented worker.

And then the second half of the programme, we're going to talk about the Epstein files and ask whether there are two Americas.

One where if you're rich and powerful, you get protected, like Epstein and perhaps Trump and other people, and another where victims suffer in silence.

But we heard them speak out yesterday on Capitol Hill.

So we're going to talk about what might change in the Epstein files and the political implications of that.

So, Sam, let's talk about D.C.

The reason I wanted to talk about these ICE raids is that I don't know about you.

I live in Washington, D.C., have done for 25 years.

And in the last week or two, anecdotally, I've just been hearing a lot more stories of people who have either been picked up by ICE or who are afraid to go to work, take their kids to school because of ICE raids.

There's just been a real pickup, and actually, we see it in the numbers as well, where the numbers of people who are being picked up has accelerated during the course of August.

But last week was back to school week here in Washington, D.C.

And a friend of mine, actually who had done some reporting, told me that he went and witnessed back-to-school scenes at one bilingual Spanish-English school in northwest Washington in a Hispanic area,

an area of the town where there are a lot of Hispanics living.

And it was this extraordinary scene of kind of local neighbors standing on street corners with whistles to blow the whistle to warn people if there was an ice raid or if there were ice vehicles coming.

I mean, it's just like anxious parents walking along the street with their kind of five and six-year-olds to take them back to school.

And I think these images of parents kind of having to dodge ice raids to get back to school is chilling.

And then I heard a guy who comes to our house to

fix some of our electric work sometimes said, I'm just not coming into Washington, D.C.

He's actually documented, but he says, I can't come into work because the people I work with are undocumented.

They're not coming into work.

A friend of mine who is a childcare giver says that in a park where she takes the little girl that she looks after, two nannies got picked up.

And then ICE just have to call the parents and say, okay, your five-year-old is with us.

That's crazy because we've taken away the nannies.

And I'm hearing this from Virginia too, but Washington, dc seems to be the kind of epicenter of people's fear about ice raids the city just feels not like itself at the moment we know that restaurant bookings are down federal workers been fired already and this is all just adding to that sense of anxiety around the city is are you hearing feeling some of that too uh yes 100 let me just start off by saying i think um you're describing it accurately as ice raids.

We've been talking about this, including on air, a lot as sort of a crime crackdown.

And certainly the administration has been presenting it like that.

But in reality, when you talk to people in D.C.

and when you watch what's happening, this is disproportionately targeting migrants and immigrants.

This is an immigration operation, predominantly.

What you mean described as a kind of crime crackdown.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, and I guess the administration would say, well, they committed the crime of overstaying their visas or being here illegally.

But they are taking the brunt of it.

And

there's a couple of neighborhoods in particular where if you walk around there, if you talk to people who live there, I'm talking about Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, which have larger Hispanic populations, you are seeing much more aggressive confrontations.

I had friends who were hanging out on 14th Street.

Some of these neighborhoods, maybe the listeners have no clue.

14th Street is a pretty bustling commercial area, very hip, or was, I guess, when I was there.

Maybe it's not hip anymore.

Because you left, you mean?

Yeah, exactly.

Once I left, it went downhill.

No, but it's filled with like nice restaurants and things like that.

I had friends who were sitting out having a brunch a couple weeks ago, and a delivery guy was confronted by like a dozen officials and slammed to the ground and handcuffed.

And, you know,

one of these anecdotes is enough to sort of send a chill up your spine, but this is happening repeatedly over the course of several weeks now.

And it's creating this kind of anxiety in DC that I think, I mean, I've never experienced before since I've been here since 2004.

So the city's already been on edge.

You were right.

Like, we, I'm sure you and I know tons of people who either have lost their job or are part of institutions that have been gutted and are thinking about leaving public service or just, you know, their businesses are suffering because the government's being hampered by the administration.

And then on top of that, you have this, and it feels to a degree like we are under siege.

What is interesting though, and I'm kind of curious what you think about is how the mayor has handled it.

I mean, she came out.

I guess she's kind of in a tough spot, but she's been overly nice to the White House about it, saying, well, we welcome the resources.

It's helping with carjackings.

And I guess it probably is because if you throw 2,000-plus

law enforcement officials into any city, it's going to help.

But, you know, two, three years ago, she was presenting herself as a thorn in the side of Trump.

And now she's playing footsie with the guy.

And it's causing some interesting conversations in the city.

I've heard different things.

I mean, I've heard people who I called up a friend who works with kind of Latino advocacy groups, and she acknowledged that, yes, Mayor Mural Bowser, who's the mayor of DC, has been more accommodating.

And people are often citing her on political shows at the moment as saying, okay, yes, we have a crime problem.

Please come and help us fix the crime problem.

She has said that she doesn't want the ICE raids to be happening around the city.

But DC is in this weird position where actually the federal government has a lot more power over the city.

And they acknowledge that they also have power over the budget, right?

She's already lost a billion dollars from the DC budget and what this advocate said for Latinas was she's sort of in a rock and a hard place.

She can't afford to lose any more money.

But I mean it's worth pointing out to people why there's it like so the area that I'm hearing that at the moment undocumented workers feel safe to go to is Maryland.

And Maryland, in theory, ICE is allowed to work wherever they want, right?

It's kind of they have free access to every state.

But Maryland is what's called a sanctuary state and so the local officials don't cooperate with ice in the same way and dc should was a sanctuary city but muriel bowser has not stood in the way of ice and these ice raids which is why it's in the city that you'd get undocumented workers like i've been told they won't go to church they're afraid to take their kids to school yeah that school thing was crazy Because that when there was a lot of rumors circulating right when back to school was happening that ICE officials were going to be just stationed outside of schools.

There have been some.

Yeah.

And that was causing a lot of anxiety among parents, being like, well, what happens if they just start snatching

nannies or, God forbid, a kid?

And there was questions about whether parents were going to send their kids to school, how teachers would react to it.

I think that's what's causing the uncertainty is that when there were clear lines about cooperation with ICE officials, you could have some sort of calm and peace of mind about it.

But it's been upended completely in the past couple of weeks, right at the time when people are sort of emerging from summer vacation, going back to school.

And the anxiety among parents is quite palpable.

Understandably, outside this Sacred Heart school, there were a couple of ice vehicles, unmarked ice vehicles parked, and it did make it made teachers and parents super anxious and kids, I imagine, as well.

We know that Donald Trump in the last election got a high proportion of Hispanic voters compared to previous Republican presidents,

except for I think George W.

Bush back in 2004, who got a higher percentage.

But anyway, he upped his numbers with Latino voters.

And there was a poll out by ECIS, which is a polling group for Latino voters, that came out a couple of weeks ago, showing that a third of

Latinos who voted for Donald Trump now say they won't vote Republican again.

A quarter of Latinos who voted for Donald Trump in competitive congressional districts say they regret their vote for Donald Trump.

And I wonder if you think this,

if there is a risk of ICE overreach.

ICE is hiring 10,000 agents and they've got this massive recruitment drive going on.

They're offering people to join ICE.

They're offering you a $50,000 signing bonus.

Right.

I've never had a signing bonus in my life.

Have you ever had a signing bonus?

No one's ever offered me $50,000.

Not $50,000.

Well, there you go.

You got a whole new career option for you.

$60,000 in student loan forgiveness.

They've lowered the recruiting age from 21 to 18.

They had a big recruitment drive in Arlington, Texas a couple of days ago.

And literally.

That was a wild story.

That was wild, right?

That story about, I mean, hundreds of people showed up, including Hispanics showed up to that recruitment drive.

And some of the people applying were really, I mean, the reasons they were applying, we can get into, they were deep and dark.

To your point about what does this mean for the Hispanic votes?

That's why it's interesting because if you've got Hispanics turning up to join ICE.

it's not like they're

all Hispanics looking at this and saying,

this is terrible.

I hate Republicans.

I wish I hadn't voted for Donald Trump.

I don't think you are.

I mean, I don't know.

I kind of told myself after 2024 that never to get too predictive about a certain voting blocks and how they would react to Trump.

And of course, the lesson, I think the conventional wisdom that came out of it was that Hispanic voters actually are fine with immigration enforcement.

They think they, and many have, play by the rules and that the people who didn't deserve to be deported.

So, you know, they don't vote on immigration specific policies.

I think what's happening, though, is that the ICE raid stuff and the mass deportations, the detentions, it's having these kind of compounding effects probably that are turning the Hispanic voters off.

And by that, I mean, and we've reported about it a lot.

It's not just that like communities are seeing like people who they thought were upstanding citizens deported.

That is happening, but I'm not sure that's totally what can explain why a third of these people say they regret voting for Republicans.

You're seeing a lot of like economic ripples around this stuff.

So, you know, restaurants are closing, you know, churches are shuttering.

Um, one of the pieces we did that I thought was kind of interesting was that

the Latino music scene in America was

really suffering because of this stuff.

Artists weren't coming in and performing anymore.

And when you're not selling out these shows, you're not having local restaurants and communities benefit from it.

And so, you know, on an election that was driven so much on, you know, getting the economy moving, getting costs under control, things like that,

to then be nine months in or so and have the economy kind of sputtering a little bit, costs definitely not under control, and then have that concentrated to a large degree in Hispanic communities.

I think that's really the vulnerability for Trump.

Like, you know, he's making it harder for that community on the economic grounds,

in addition to, of course, all the sort of psychic terror that he's putting on on some of these communities through the ice raids.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine who owns a restaurant here, one of their chefs got picked up, has just disappeared.

They have absolutely no idea where they go.

So what do they do?

What do they do at the restaurant then, right?

Like they got to find someone.

So they've got to find somebody else.

And they've got to find somebody else who is not working somewhere else.

They've got to find somebody else who is not afraid to come into the restaurant, right?

So who has papers?

Does that drive up labor costs amongst immigrants who have papers compared to immigrants who do?

I don't know.

I mean, it's not easy at the moment.

I mean, also, I think, to your point,

more than a half of those who have been removed from the country since January the 20th don't have a criminal conviction.

So Hispanic communities are starting to see this.

Do you know who Mike Madrid is?

He's written great books about Hispanics, the Latino century.

And I spoke to him yesterday for this, and he said Latino voters, the big difference between Latino voters is between those who've been in the country a long time and those who

came into the country and those who were born into the country.

And the biggest growing group, actually, and which is why this whole anti-immigrant thing is a bit crazy, the biggest group of growing group of Hispanics in the country are those who are actually born in America, who are kind of born Americans.

They didn't come into the country.

But he said that the Hispanic voters were becoming not identity voters, but they were becoming class voters.

So it was, it really was, as you say, it's interesting that you raised that, was really about economics.

And if you look into that poll, that Ekki's poll, the reason that a third of Hispanic voters no longer like Donald Trump, it's not about the ICE raids.

It's about inflation.

It's about affordability.

Their number one priority is economics.

He thinks, Mike thinks that the ICE raids are not helping.

And what's happening with the ICE raids is that it's pushing this group of voters who are starting to see themselves as economic voters back into some kind of identity because they're starting to feel that their whole community is being targeted.

In other words, you are suspect just because you have brown skin and you speak Spanish in a way that you weren't if you're not.

A friend of mine who's Hispanic was walking down the street with her son the other day and they were speaking Spanish and suddenly this cop car opened a window and the guy just leaned out the window and maybe it was random, but he was definitely staring at them.

And she suddenly felt, wow, that's so weird.

I suddenly feel that just speaking Spanish and having brown skin on the street makes me feel like I'm being targeted.

Well, if before you were voting as an as a kind of average American on economic grounds, that is the kind of thing that might make you think, oh, actually, they are talking about me.

They are targeting me.

Yeah.

I guess the question that comes from this is like, well, just because they're sour on Trump or souring on Trump doesn't mean that they'll vote Democratic, right?

Like,

that's the problem.

And I think that's such a great point.

I don't know what Mike would say about this, but I sort of am confounded by just like, how do you reach that community?

Like, what kind of like,

what kind of media are they getting the news from?

How are Democrats even even conceiving of reaching them?

What are they doing in terms of messaging?

You know, I don't see anyone talking about comprehensive immigration reform because it would be silly right now.

But

is there an immigration platform that could be more sensible and economics focused that would appeal to that community?

And I don't know.

And even if you had one, could you reach it through traditional media or do you have to do things differently?

Again, I don't know.

I'm smiling because you might ask, what are the Democrats doing about

those things?

We're looking.

I'm looking under the desk to see if they're there making a noise about anything very much at the moment.

I don't know.

I think

they do something about it by not just showing up.

Certainly, this is what I've heard from Hispanic voting groups.

Don't show up every four years and say, please vote for us because we're not Donald Trump, which seems to be part of what they say.

The other reason I want to talk about this this week, you know, I kind of see this disconnect between the economy that is still booming.

We keep getting told there's going to be inflation.

It hasn't really happened.

Is it still booming then?

Do you think it's still booming?

I don't know.

Well, stock market is still booming.

Okay.

Stock market.

Let me phrase this colour.

Let me get out of here.

Stock market is still booming.

Inflation has not gone crazy, right, with tariffs.

And you could add yet, right?

Sure.

Unemployment has not fallen through the floor because of tariffs yet.

So there is not a there's not a crisis in the American economy of the type that we had anticipated there might be by now because of the tariff policies.

So you have, and there is a kind of frothiness around the market, which makes a lot of Americans, not just rich Americans, but anyone with money in the stock market and their 401ks in their pension plans, feels better.

And Trump loves that.

When does that start knocking up against, if you deport, as they are hoping to do, half a million people this year, a million people next year, and we know that 50% of you know, the labor market's growth came from foreign-born workers since the recovery from COVID.

And we know that they contribute whatever it is.

I've got the notes.

47% of agricultural workers are undocumented.

23% of construction workers are undocumented.

7% of child care workers are undocumented.

Your point is...

I know.

Look at this.

I actually did

have a little bit of refugee.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I need numbers.

That's kind of post-prorogative.

Yeah.

Pull some out of somewhere.

So on the economy, it's kind of interesting.

This is like, it's not the same conversation, but it's, it has echoes of the Biden conversation where everyone's like, ah, the economy is doing great.

What are you talking about?

Stock market record highs.

You know, we're fair, inflation's coming down, things like that, because it was at 9% at one point.

And yet no one felt it.

And I feel like

we're kind of still in that place where it's, everyone has got this great uncertainty.

If you look at the stock market, too, it's like so much of the growth has been driven by, I think it's like six companies.

So much of it's like AI related.

And like you take out those companies and it would be really flat.

And so

the vast majority of people aren't benefiting from that that growth.

And then you look at like the underlying elements of the economy to your point.

It's like

how much of this just we're waiting for those costs to keep going up because of the tariffs.

How much are we going to see a real labor shortage because we're eliminating so many people and taking them out of the labor market?

And then you have like the really sort of existential things.

Like I was listening to Justin Wolfer's The Economist

who goes on all these shows.

And his life.

My son loves him.

He's great.

I don't know what it is.

It's like the the Australian vibe,

slightly Australian surfer vibe, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And he was talking about crypto, and he's like, I, it's just gonna blow up at one point, and we're gonna have like you know, people are oh, don't tell Anthony that he's sorry, I know

I broke it okay, but okay, so we can say it, we could cut it out if you want, but I, but like, I, even if you believe that crypto is like solid as hell, there's a lot of uncertainty around it.

I think that's fair, and um, you know, I think that gets at a larger picture, which is nothing feels quite so certain right now.

Um,

Everything feels a little bit shaky.

The status quo

is not, you know, it's not a fun status quo.

And so I think that the economic vibes are not particularly great.

I think polling is very evident that people don't feel very good about this economy.

Trump's numbers are horrible,

especially compared to his first term when they're pretty good.

across the board.

Add to that that we might get a government shutdown in a couple of weeks.

And, you know, you know, you're looking at like

uncertain times uh going forward it's a very scary time if you happen to be living in the washington dc area and you're an undocumented immigrant we'll come back and talk about jeffrey epstein stay with us

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Hello, welcome back.

I want to take a moment to tell you about the latest series that Anthony and I have recorded for members of the Rest is Politics US, and it's all about Ronald Reagan.

We are digging into the real Reagan story.

It's the rise, the drama, how his world has been turned upside down, and his philosophy has been turned upside down in the age of Donald Trump.

Across this five-episode series, we're going to trace his rise from Hollywood to the White House, from his role in ending the Cold War to reviving the American economy.

But we're also going to confront some of the scandals.

Iran contra, of course,

the attempted assassination against him, and the way that he failed to show leadership on the AIDS epidemic.

I've loved doing this series because it's taught me a lot about Ronald Reagan, the sort of rather enigmatic character that he was, full of bonhomie,

charm, great communicator, but also surprisingly reserved.

People felt even those who knew him very well, including his children, feel they really never got close to him or never got to know him very well.

It's a great look at the man,

his role, of course, in ending the Cold War.

Was it really him or was it Mikhail Gorbachev who was, we should owe a debt of thanks to for that?

And we've got a couple of people as well who we've interviewed for the series, one who worked in the Reagan White House and one who wrote an amazing biography of the of the president himself.

So take a listen.

I think you're going to really enjoy it.

The first episode is out on Friday, the 5th of September.

Just go to therestispoliticsus.com to become a founding member.

The link is in the podcast episode description box.

Okay, back to this week, and we are going to talk about the Epstein files.

So quickly, here's what's happened.

There was a press conference yesterday.

A group of Epstein survivors, girls who had been raped by Jeffrey Epstein and potentially by other people, met with lawmakers.

They then gave a pretty harrowing press conference, all of them together on the steps of the Capitol, demanding that the Epstein files be released in full with the names of survivors redacted so that victims are protected.

And there's a bipartisan group of lawmakers, pair of lawmakers,

Thomas Massey, a Republican, and Roe Khaner, a Democrat, who are pushing for a vote on Capitol Hill that would potentially lead to the files being released to the public.

At the moment, they don't have enough enough votes from members of the Republican Party to get those released.

But anyway, that's the kind of machinations that's happening.

And Donald Trump was asked about this press conference while he was in the Oval Office yesterday, and he called it a democratic hoax.

So I don't know that we've learned anything particularly new on this program.

A few weeks ago, we read out some of the testimony of some of the victims

from the Ghillene Maxwell trial, original Ghillene Maxwell trial, and it was unbelievably harrowing.

It was clearly took an amazing amount of courage for these women to stand up.

Many of them had not actually spoken out in public before, to stand up and talk about what happened to them at the hands of Ghillaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

There has been a document dump that came out a couple of days ago, but 95% of that had already been made public.

So that hasn't really appeased the calls for people to get more documents.

But how much pressure does this put on Donald Trump and Republicans, Sam, do you think to get this information out in the public?

I mean, it's one thing to be taking on Democrats.

I would have thought if I was playing political strategist, I would suggest it's another thing to get into a fight with survivors of sexual abuse.

Yeah,

I find Trump's behavior so perplexing through all this.

I mean, why?

Talk about that.

Well, he's acting guilty, right?

Like, it just seems weird to me.

Like, why would you, he's protesting too much?

I forget who I was talking to.

Maybe it was George Conway for a separate podcast where he was like, you know, the sort of normal thing you would do if you were president in a moment like this where you just wanted to not talk about it, which he plainly doesn't want to do, right?

Would be to be like, you know, this is a matter that the Justice Department is taking point on.

They're organizing the disclosure of these documents.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating it.

I'm going to let them do their work, and I'm not going to be coming on an ongoing investigation or legal matter.

Boom, done.

It's like so simple, right?

It's like, just say that, and then you could just get it out of the way, or at least try to.

And instead, he's like, oh, it's all a hoax, and it's all made up.

And they're just trying to damage me.

And, you know, they just want this in the news.

And they want to, you know, prevent me from talking about how great I've made the country.

And maybe that's just because he's incapable of

deflecting in a way like that is is more sophisticated and normal.

I thought you were going to say he's incapable of empathy.

Well,

I think that's true, but it does invite more and more questions, right?

It's like, what is it that has you so riled?

And didn't you and your people say that you were going to have disclosure of this information?

Wasn't this your cause?

Like, I think that's where the problems lie for them is that if they, all of them, like almost, or literally all of them, I should say,

at one point called for full disclosure on this.

And then to do a 180 like this now is obviously a problem.

And it seems to me like the hope that they have is that in some way, either attention drifts elsewhere, which it did in August, but now it's back, or that they can kind of confuse their own people.

And

keep in mind, this is really their own people that they care about.

Confuse their own people enough by putting out these document releases that are 95% old rehashed stuff.

And just be like, look,

we're doing what you asked for.

We're doing these disclosures.

And I guess that's the plan because um they're going to continue to put out these documents the oversight committee is uh going forward and you know the idea here is that the maga right and and right-wing media specifically will say okay you know we got what we asked for yeah but okay what i think was interesting about what the women were saying yesterday um was that they were kind of framing it as a response to maga almost first of all you had one very powerful woman saying i'd say to donald trump this is not a hoax i mean it was almost like she was replying directly to him.

He was saying, This is a Democratic hoax.

And she's saying, I'm actually a Republican voter.

Not that that matters.

It's about surviving abuse.

But I can tell you, Mr.

President, this is not a hoax.

And the other thing that you heard from these women, I think, was this framing of almost MAGA language that there are two Americas, that there is the America for the rich and powerful who are protected by the system, and then there is the America for the weak and vulnerable who are not protected by by the system.

And that was the whole point of the kind of Epstein outcry in MAGA world was that it got to this idea of the establishment, that the world is run by a cabal of rich and powerful people.

They took it to an extreme, right?

They took it to an extreme, but these women tapped into some of that in the press conference yesterday.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that.

And I think it's obviously much more powerful when you have the actual victims being like, no, we need the transparency.

Totally different.

And now there's talks about, well, you know, they were floating the idea that they would put out their own list, which could create some legal problems for them.

And then Tom Mass, who's one of the local Republicans leading this,

was like, well, maybe we could just say it on the floor of Congress because we have this protected speech and debate clause.

Spell that out a bit more, Sam, because I thought that was very interesting

when one of the women said, keep watching because we are going to compile a list.

So how would that work?

They would come up with a list of names because a lot of these women know who the powerful people were.

And some of these women, according to their lawyers, were parceled out to powerful, rich friends of Jeffrey Epstein.

So my sense of how it would work is that,

of course, these women knew the clients because they were abused by them.

And

they could come together, they could create a list.

They could say, we are putting out this list of people who we know

who we all had direct experiences with.

Let's just, this is all hypothetical, obviously.

And they publish it.

Obviously, the downsides to that are.

Or they give it to somebody.

Sure.

Either way, the downsides to that are

one of the people on the list could sue the hell out of them.

Say, you're wrong.

You have no proof.

You're defaming me.

And that would be, you know, that would bankrupt the person

and potentially be a huge problem for her.

So why is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was at that press conference, saying, give me the list?

So there is, I mean, the Constitution does protect members of Congress who go to the floor of the House

to basically, whatever they say on the floor of the House, they do have some protections around speech and debate clause.

And I believe Nancy Grace used this earlier this year when she was talking about her own personal experiences with sexual assault.

And the idea here is that if you just say anything on the floor of the House as a member of Congress, you have some protections to say it.

And so Tom Massey or Marjorie Taylor Greene, whoever could, in theory, I suppose, go to the floor, go to the well and just be like, these are the names of the people that we were told are on the Epstein list.

Now, I don't know if that's where we're going to head because that seems extraordinary.

I mean, extraordinarily aggressive.

And,

you know, maybe it's just a threat, right?

Maybe it's one of those things that you hold out there and say, well, if this doesn't get produced by the Justice Department, we might take a more cavalier approach, right?

But it's hanging out there now.

So, and that's stepping back a little bit.

Over August, obviously, the Epstein story died down a little bit.

It had been sort of white hot for a while, and then it died down.

But this is where it gets, starts picking up again, which is if you have if you're this close to a discharge petition, by that I mean two votes from forcing a vote that would basically require the Justice Department to release all the files.

Including things like they were calling for the flight logs.

Yes.

There would be small redactions to protect the victims, but it would be everything, basically.

And then if you have Trump being asked about it again and then complaining the way he does, if you have the women holding press conferences outside the House that were, by all accounts, some of the most attended press conferences there in a long, long time, and if you have threats that Tom Massey and MTG might go to the well of the house to read names, like that's the type of grist that keeps this story in the news and makes it harder for Trump to just dance around.

Okay, so then do you think this gets back to the kind of what you described as the white-hot fever pitch that it was?

Well, it's competing with a lot of stuff.

Government shutdown.

Yeah, government shutdown.

What else?

Anything else going on?

RFK taking away all our vaccines, that type of thing.

The Chinese having a massive meeting, you know, with all of America's enemies.

It is competing with a lot of stuff, but I do think

having the voices of the women is a game changer.

It's just, and the fact that the women are standing together as a unified group, I mean, often in these kinds of cases, my understanding is the victims would be separate from each other and kept separate from each other.

And these women have now organized themselves into a unified group.

I would just say the only thing I'd add, though is that part of what made it such a remarkable story in july

was that it was like one of these rare cases where the mega universe was turning on trump right it's like wait a second you promised this what the f like you have to follow through and um

I'm not sure if they're going to do that again this time around.

I think this is why Trump and the House Oversight People are doing what they're doing is they're kind of like, you know, drips and drabs of information and in hopes that Magami doesn't have a freak out over it I find it hard to see MAGA splitting with Donald Trump over this in partly because when Ghillaine Maxwell was removed during the course of August from her high security prison to that what do they call

prison camp

low security where you can work out and there's kind of no wires and that kind of stuff

you didn't see a MAGA freak out over that.

These women are freaked out over that.

They're very unhappy about that because they put Ghillene Maxwell, clearly, as they said yesterday in the press conference, in the bucket of the people that have been complicit and actually abused them as well.

But I didn't hear a huge MAGA freak out over August around Ghillene Maxwell being moved.

Up on the hill, do you think there are Republicans who might be afraid to vote against Trump, who are squeamish about what they're hearing from these women?

Oh, yeah, 100%.

It's like such a, it's such a classic Republican story here where in private, all of them are like, this is grotesque.

You know,

who knows how many of them have actually called for the release of the files in prior time.

But you see it already.

It's like that discharge petition has lost support from July to now.

A number of Republicans have said, well, we're going to hold off and see what the House Oversight Committee's process is.

And so they all find,

they almost always find a way to figure out how to get on the right side of Trump.

And I think that's that's his kind of like, that's his expertise, right?

Like it's he, he has figured it out that like, if you can just keep people in line, he might be polling in the low 40s, the economy might be like kind of teetering, you know, the midterms might be looking bleak as hell, but he's still managed to keep all these people in line by threat.

And I think...

And I guess in some cases, carrots.

So like, you know, you want to get his endorsement if you want to run again.

And to a degree, it's like maybe like one or two of them are willing to buck him and don't care.

And like, it's like Tom Massey and I don't know, someone randomly at any given time.

So that's it.

And

I don't know about you, but like that's been to me the defining,

the defining feature of the past nine months is just how much these congressional Republicans have been willing to suck it up for the guy.

And, you know, that goes across everything.

It's this Epstein stuff.

And then, you know, we're recording here on Thursday morning.

In like an hour, RFK is going to be on the hill.

And, you know, I know I talk to people on the hill, Republicans who are like deeply squeamish about what he's doing at HHS and with the CDC.

I'm very curious if they dare to make a show of it when he actually talks to them.

So we'll see.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, I think there's one thing and one thing only that will spell real trouble for Donald Trump and cause those Republicans to suddenly speak up.

And it's not, the word is not Epstein, it's affordability.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I do think that's right.

But even then, I come back to the idea that like my historical reference is Democrats in 2010, 2009, 2010, who were all running away from Obama at this point in time.

They're freaked out.

Like his poll numbers were better than Trump, but they were bad and things were going south and the Affordable Care Act was kind of this albatross and all these things.

And like they were just running as fast as they could away from Obama.

And this go around,

you just see them hugging the guy.

And there's so many more scandals that are so much more important to their own political futures.

And they just seem to be unable to create distance with Trump.

The mystery of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Sam Stein, thank you very much.

That was a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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