Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Epstein Scandal Won’t Go Away

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Sam Stein and Bill Kristol explore how the lingering Epstein scandal continues to haunt Donald Trump. Especially as parts of the MAGA base grow restless. They discuss the political fallout, the persistence of conspiracy theories, and whether Democrats can or should leverage the Epstein connection. Bring on the good vibes and treat yourself to Soul today! Right now, Soul is offering my audience 30% off your entire order! Go to https://GetSoul.com and use the code BULWARKTAKES. That’s https://GetSoul.com, promo code BULWARKTAKES for 30% off.

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Ben MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey guys, Sam Stein here, managing editor at The Bork. I'm joined by Bill Crystal, Professor Emeritus. Look at this, you know, cordial conversation. He's already making fun of me. Out of touch, academic, You know, I'm a little concerned about Epstein The political pros the pros like Sam, which is oh, come on. That's just in a day's work, you know It's a pleasure being in studio with Bill. We're gonna be talking about

Jeffrey Epstein as everyone is talking about but before we do subscribe to the feed we appreciate that. All right, so I don't think we're in total disagreement But there might be some interesting divergence of opinions about Epstein sailing to the scandal and whether Trump can maneuver around it. Our colleague Will Summer had about five factions of the Epstein universe and how they're approaching Trump. I'm not gonna go through all five,

but suffice it to say he thinks some people are gonna agree with Trump and just move on Right and I feel like that has you a little bit sort of I don't know panic but a little bit frustrated. Is that fair? No, no What do you make do you think Through this I think I will say last week I was I will say to the ones one of the few things I've gotten right in recent Months and years is that I thought Epstein could be bigger than people thought when everyone on Tuesday was just kind of laughing about

Trump at the at the cabinet meeting I thought this could be more of a problem and it did become a problem With his base certainly which he then tried to deal with on Saturday with that insane long To social post and so that's been the saga and then meanwhile there's the Charlie Kirk thing going on the turning point and let's just stop and say the Charlie Kirk thing is that Charlie Kirk had a call apparently with Donald Trump who told him move on. He runs that group which was having its big conference that weekend and everyone was showing up and and people like Roger Stone who were true Trump loyalists were trying to tell the crowd, cool it, don't worry about it. And he was getting booed.

Charlie started off, Charlie, Charlie Kirk. I knew him a little bit years ago before he was a total Trumpie lunatic. Started off by saying, you know, I'm very worried about this Epstein. We were all so concerned. We can't just shut it up. Trump called him Saturday morning, apparently,

by Monday, Kirk saying, you know, we just just gonna move on. So I'm assuming Trump... So on the MAGA fracturing and causing massive problems for Trump or Republican members of Congress really being upset, I hope it does cause trouble for Trump. I think it is causing some trouble and it has weak... it's not going away, but I suspect at the end of the day, he can bludgeon those people into mostly into subservience. What do you, do you, do you think so?

Slightly different interpretation, but probably the same end result. Um, and this is the basis for morning shots this morning, which is the issue with the conspiracy theory is you can't tell people, Oh, it's not true. Cause they'll never believe that it's not true. I mean, there's no rationalizing with a conspiracy theorist. What you can do is you can create a different conspiracy theory, sometimes on top of the existing conspiracy theory, or you can distract them into something else.

You just try to turn the page, more or less. And I think that Trump can do. He can do it through a different variety, different things. But mostly just by being Donald Trump. Like everything is just like there's always a new story that people talk about. We always move on to the next

story. You can always say, oh, my God, do you remember a week ago we were talking about this? Because you've forgotten that you were talking about that. And I think that's probably what ends up happening here. Morning shot this morning was about what a White House that did not know this and failed to understand the lessons of this.

And that was the Obama White House. So the basis of the story is that Trump in 2011 gins up, reignites the flames around birtherism. And I remember being in the White House at the time as a reporter covering it and they were trying to talk about the budget and this fight with the Republicans on taxes and domestic spending cuts. And they couldn't get any traction because everyone was talking about birtherism. So they thought, well, rationally, what do we do?

We just finally will put out this birth certificate and everyone realized that this is so stupid and it didn't do anything because Trump just said, oh, thanks for doing that. But is it real? And then everyone was like, well, where's the long form birth certificate? And truly the only thing that could get them onto a different topic was to essentially have a different topic to talk about. I think that's probably what's gonna happen here.

Yeah, and as you and I discussed this early this morning, as we were editing and morning shots, which is worth reading today, and suddenly Andrew Egger has a very good piece on this aspect of it, I'd say. And I have a piece on a sort of slight, a different site, different aspect. But as we were saying this morning,

Obama did on the other hand get reelected in 2012. And so these things can be a pain in the neck for you as a White House, but not decisive. And so what I said, sort of supplementing Andrew's piece, I think, is that one interesting question that is, does it go beyond an internal MAGA world problem, Trump's supporter problem, to the Democrats are now trying to make it more of a real problem,

sort of a broader problem for Republicans. And again, that could blow it up a little more. One thing there, though, it has to, Democrats have to decide, is there a real, you can't just, you can play games for a while, of course, and say, you said this, and you said it was, you said it was, he was murdered, now you're saying that we can't even look into it,

and okay, fine, you get some, that's the kind of thing that lasts for a week or two or three, and then goes away. If Democrats are willing to say, the whole Epstein thing is kind of a disgrace though, honestly, which I think it is, and he got slapped on the wrist, and it shows you that the establishment did have real problems

before Trump came along and MAGA came along and totally demagogued it and invented other, you know, made it much more crazily conspiratorial than it needed to have been or than it is. We're willing to be the party that's anti-epstein, sort of anti-establishment, but also anti-Trump, MAGA craziness. That, I think, would be an interesting future for the Democrats and Final point is the lefties of course on the Democratic side They're happy to do this because they hate the establishment and so, you know, it fits into their narrative, right? Right. The question is if you're a moderate Democrat who's serious about governing but also has the sense a

That the F something really is a disgrace and B that you sort of need to be more of a Reformer you can't just be like defending the old establishment Yeah, I think there's a real Avenue there to do what we've all discussed this you meet him You know, can you be a moderate Democrat on sort of policy issues while being a fighter and a reformer and a change type? Temporamentally almost so I think that's a bit of an opening for the Josh Shapiro's and booty-dancers of the world. Sure. I see that. I think it's interesting because there's like the distinction between trolling, which

is what some of them are doing now, you know, a privileged resolution to unleash all and like, you know, votes to, you know, make it all public. And then a substantive argument around whether this is some part of something bigger, the elites who run the country and actually cover up for each other. And, you know, if, you know, if some of some in our tent get hurt by the disclosure, so be it. Right. I think the problem, if I had to guess for Democrats is probably that they

don't want to be associated with conspiratorial thinking. Right. And that's partially because they don't wanna be accused of being like Trump. I mean, Trump basically is birthed in this type of politics. Totally. And they've made themselves the oppositional party to not just Trump, but that type of politics.

And so if you feel like you're in the kind of mud, you don't like that. I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just saying I think that's probably the hesitation. No saying I think that's probably that's a very that's a very Good point and well said and I do think it look I think it's a correct hesitation. You don't want to be By Jowell with mega conspiracists. It's like how they always hesitate to like, you know Trump has all these stupid nicknames, right? And then when the Democrats like let's try to our hand with the nicknames and it looks so silly and stupid

But because the Trump White House isn't going Along this time. I do think they can be they can be anti Trump anti Epstein Anti conspiracy but anti and establishment that did give him its disgraceful slap on the wrist in 2008 and it took Julie Brown a year of courageous reporting to get him and died it again charged again and died it again in 2019 and so forth so I think they can maybe on this one, it's a little tricky, sort of have the best of all worlds. You've made, I think a pretty compelling case that Trump obviously is signing off on all this stuff,

that he's directing Bondi not to release these files and that he's probably talking to Cash and Bongino and saying, you can go out there and tell him. What is your theory of the case now about actual Trump culpability or involvement or vulnerability here? I mean, I don't know. It's gotten so distorted by all this talk

about the client lists and all these things which may not exist. I mean, Trump is in the files. We know that. Yes. We've seen the logs of the Airplace. I mean, the files are probably tens of thousands of pages of investigative records.

And of course, there is some truth to the argument. You can't just release these things. I mean, no one ever has an anti-criminal case. There's interviews with X who says something about Y is totally unconfirmed. X may be...and that's that. And now Y suddenly is a child pedophilia, I guess. Right. And it's really irresponsible.

I think it may be illegal in some cases to just release their stuff. Having said that, it's also the case that we had a massive conspiracy that was horrible and took advantage of, and that took advantage of two weeks almost, you know, just criminal, cheated in a criminal way, underage girls, maybe a thousand of them, and two people at the end of the day were indicted. One Epstein killed himself and the other, well, had a slap on the wrist and then killed himself a second time, and then the other was Maxwell who got a sentence. But these conspiracies do take more than two people.

And I'm not saying every person, the person who flew the plane to the island, okay maybe he didn't quite know what was going on, he shouldn't be indicted necessarily 20 years later. But there are a lot of middlemen, so to speak. There are a lot of people who took advantage of these girls to say the least, who maybe knew what was going on, maybe they didn't. I mean, I think we do deserve some at least clarity on what we know, what we think, maybe not individual names, maybe not more indictments even.

I was thinking of other examples of this. I'm sure you can think of a whole bunch too. What Comey decided not to prosecute Hillary for the emails to take him out of this kind of political, very different situation. But you know, he decided not to prosecute, may have been the right decision, maybe now it's kind of messed up the way they handled it. But he also had a press conference and they issued a real statement which gave you a sense, here's what she did.

And nothing ever came of that. Yeah, well, that's the thing. Yeah, that's the thing. Well, maybe that's, which way does that lesson cut? No, but I mean, at least it was an attempt, I think, sort of in good faith to say the public deserves some sense of what you did that may have been wrong, inadvisable, but not criminal and so forth. And you can think of many, many other instances where we've gotten some notion of what happened.

This does seem like an unusual case in that we know so little about what was a massive criminal conspiracy run by an extremely prominent person, which involved a lot of other prominent people. We don't need the details of Prince Andrew did this or whatever. I wouldn't mind the details. Well, some of it might be legit, incidentally. But anyway, I do feel like the... So this is...

Yeah, but it's a problem. The MAGA people turned it into a crazy conspiracy. And then I've one... And I felt this personally, I think you may have felt that... It it's like well, I don't know. It's some crazy conspiracy I'm not paying attention to it and it really took me a while to focus on what was happening this Well, I think this last two three four weeks and it took me actually a conversation with Julie Brown the Miami Herald reporter who did Such courageous work on this to really think you know what there's kind of a scandal here Bullwork takes is sponsored by soul

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it's like, oh, if these people are going off on this, then surely it's nuttiness. Right. And then maybe, you know, you look into a little bit more in your opinions change. I will say I think the the just to circle back to the original point, which is, you know, can Trump kind of put this genie back in the bottle or just move on from it? Maybe so. But I do think there's a whole host of people who kind of aren't politically involved per se, but are attracted to these types of outrageous stories.

And that has in turn brought them into the political system who will look at us and be like, wait a second, like, I thought you said you were going to expose all this stuff. And you drew me in because I thought there was an actual cabal. And like, yeah, so some of them might say, well, I mean, there's one in the Will Summer piece, some of the stuff that people

are resorting to is insane. Like Scott Adams saying, well, no, the pedophile cabal is actually more powerful than Trump. And they're like, some of this stuff is really out of there. But there might be some semi rational people who just say this is a deception and this is, you know, I can't forgive you for this. No, I think that's right I also think just get to double back to that original point I think you're right to think that this is a trickier thing for Trump to handle than a typical attack by Democrats on Trump you know.

Right because that's easy. That's like he's got to use that. Yeah. And once you've won two general elections you sort of people discount an awful lot of those attacks at this point. Whereas I do think this one, because some of it comes from space, it has to do with what is undoubtedly

a truly grotesque situation. He was- You know, something just weird about it, right? Like it's very uncharacteristic. And there are these photos of him and Jeffrey Epstein laughing. But just the way he's like, oh, why are you focused on this scandal?

We have really important policy stuff. Right. Like that's not Trump. No, it's- When did you care about policy stuff over the Salacious scandals? I don't you think the Saturday's you know tweet or true social where he starts screaming about how this these could have been I couldn't figure it out and that shows a kind

He's doing what he instinctively knows he should do which is blame the other side sure you know I think even when that when the tape came up of his own voice the Billy Bush tape the Hollywood tape did it with the first thing they said is, I think this is right. That it could be, it could be fake. No, no. At first. No, what happened was he first apologized for it because his people made him do it. I see. And after that, he said, well, I don't know, did they doctor that thing?

Yeah, I mean, that's always been his instinct. It's it's of course, from his point of view, like a reasonable thing to toss out. There was why not? Maybe some people will believe it. But I agree. But there was a not. Maybe some people will believe it. But I agree. But there's a kind of desperation on that Saturday thing. So I'm very open to the view that I do believe that it's a more difficult thing for him to handle than most things he's had to deal with.

And I'm open to the view that it really could be very damaging to his political well-being. I also am open to the view that he's pretty good at controlling. Well, here too, I think the birtherism storyline is instructive because back then when Obama did produce the burst of getting Trump said, Well, I'm grateful that he did it. I take credit for him doing this. But is it real? In fact, he then up the ante. And he said, well, can we see his college transcripts and his passport records?

And I will give five million million to a charity of his choice if he does produce it. So it's always about upping the ante. So that's why, and that explains, I think, the true social post, which is actually no. Obama and Hillary wrote these files. And so he'll figure some way to up the ante in the conspiracy.

All right, Bill, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate this. It's a pleasure being in the studio with you. Thank you guys for watching. It's a pleasure for your viewership as well. Subscribe to our feed so you can get more content like this. And yeah, we'll talk to you soon.