Bulwark Takes - Will There Be ANY Consequences for New Epstein Revelations?

Episode Date: February 1, 2026

Sam Stein and Sarah Longwell discuss Epstein releases and other news.

Hey, everybody. It's me, not Bill Crystal. Where's Bill Crystal? Sam Stein. I'm here with Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark. We're here to walk you through Sunday morning. I wish I had a cup of coffee. Wish I had a bagel. But I'm willing to do this without those reinforcements. Sarah, how are you? You good? You have the coffee. Yeah, I give coffee. I don't know what you're doing, bro. I had my cups earlier and I forgot to bring one for the show. There's a lot to talk to. I have like five or six topics I want to get through, but I think the most pressing one for this morning has got to be the Epstein file.

So probably, I don't know if you're like me, but I've been sort of addictively scrolling through Twitter as, okay, as more and more revelating. We've been on earth. I have. I don't know. And part of it is just finding stuff through the bulwark feed and through your feed. But also it's just, there's just a, you know,

watching Elon sort of have this kind of existential meltdown yesterday over, over how insignificant these files really were. It just leads me to the first question, which is, you know, the scope of this is so massive. There's so many names that are caught up in this that part of me wonders if it's almost too big. And I can explain that in a bit. But it's just so massive, so big,

it's hard to kind of put your hands around it. And I'm curious what you have been taking away from the revelations. So first of all, the bigness is by design. Okay. You know, like in a world where they were, like you had a good faith effort to take the things that, you know, like you could put them out in tranches. You could put them out sort of thematically. You could do a lot of things that made it say like, all right, we understand this is in the public interest and whatever. Instead, they're doing these massive data dumps on Fridays.

and then basically as people unearth things that are too hot for it, they pull them back, right? They like take them out of the files as people on earth them, which, and like they haven't redacted them properly. Like the victims are all over things, but then the perpetrators are all, it's like anybody could be as heavily redacted. And so I just think that the bigness is impartment to, can be, you know, Fuse us to get through overwhelm us so that like you can't like settle in on one thing, which I actually think our job, what I've been focused on with my Twitter feed is trying to figure out like,

okay, let's really look at the people who after 2008 or 2010, which are the years where Epstein gets caught and convicted of child sex, procuring a child for prostitution. Right. And so the people who talk to him after that, to me, are all people who do so knowing that he went to jail for child sex, prostitution, and trafficking. So any, and that's where Elon comes in, right? Like, Elon has long held, like, well, I never went to the island, but you can see clearly in these emails that. post that conviction, Elon Musk is begging to come to a party on Epstein Island. And I do think that their hope is that because Bannon's all over these,

and it's very incriminating for him, because Elon's all over them, because there's like a number of people who come up over and over again who are made Howard Lutnik. Howard Lutlik. They're sort of hoping that if you can't go after, you can't go after one of them, if you have to go after all of them. Yeah, I think that's right. I guess it's important to kind of maybe summarize it for the people who are watching.

And this is why it's hard is it's hard to summarize it. But I think my main takeaway is this. It kind of echoes what yours is. You have a situation in which many, many powerful men from media, business, politics, philanthropy, whatever, knowingly sought to have an audience with this. deviant. They knew how bad he was. They knew what he was up to, and they didn't care. They sought him out. You have a number of those same individuals who spent the last, you know, five years or so, a portion of them, insisting publicly that there was a Epstein cabal and that there

was a great conspiracy to hide all this stuff, even though they themselves knew that they had been convording with Jeffrey Epstein, which is remarkable to me. You have people like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk who spent years being like, we must uncover the truth and they themselves were involved in it. And now you have a number of these people who are insisting that, well, everything you just read is irrelevant or it's context, without context and things like that. So that's the gist of it. What I struggle with is, will there be professional consequences for anybody?

So there are people like Elon who live in a consequence-free world. But like Howard Lutnik, for instance, was very public saying he had cut off ties with Jeffrey Epstein in 2005. He understood how horribly he was, never wanted to step foot in his house again and yada, yada, yada. And it's quite evident that that was just bullshit. It was a lie. So are there going to be consequences for Howard Lutnik? I don't think so. Do you?

Well, this is where there's going to be different tiers of consequences. and different people can inflict different consequences. Now, the problem is that Trump himself, right, their boss is also all over these files. Not in direct communication because Trump doesn't email. He doesn't email. Yeah, he has people print things out for him and then he signs them or whatever. But Trump doesn't, this is why he DMs Pam Bondi things that accidentally go public.

It's like he's not putting things in email or send. people messages. So he's not in there that way, but he is referred to all the time in sort of like joking ways or ways of like, I didn't want, one of them is, is someone saying like, well, I didn't want to knock on the door because I didn't know if Trump would be in there getting a massage or, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of Trump jokes and references that like bring him into the whole thing, that make it clear he's around all of this. But. But those are what is different. And there's also a lot of references that make it clear.

Because I would say that one of the things about this tranche dump is that it catches a lot of people lying, as you pointed out. It just catches a lot of people who had statements that they made about what their relationship was with Epstein, where you have Lutnik saying, oh, I met him, you know, in 2000, whatever, seven. I never talked to him again. He was such a creep. And then, of course, these solicitations from like 2012, 2013, all the way up to like 2018, in Lutnik's case, where it was all well known. And so I don't think that the consequences that are going to come from Trump. The question is, is can they come from the media? Like, can they come from the family members?

Like, the problem is that Trump doesn't have any moral problems with these people. And actually throwing them under the bus is worse for him because it can't. it says that like there are consequences for people who've done things exactly like he has done. In fact, maybe quite a bit less than he has done. And so they won't come from the Trump administration. They can come from the public, right? And they can come from friends and family.

And they can come from communities. And like in Elon's case, he's got boards of his companies. And those boards should care that he was asking to go to wild parties. on a sex offender and child traffickers island. Like that in a normal world, in a normal corporate world, not in the political world. But in the corporate world, that would have immediate consequences because they would believe the public wouldn't tolerate it. Right.

And there's other apolitical tiers to this. So like Steve Tisch, who is one of the owners of the New York Football Giants, he's caught up in this. Epstein's like scouting women for him. The idea that the New York Giants could maintain a relationship with Tish after this is difficult for me to process. And yet I'm not totally sure what happens next. There's a CBS news contributor. I forget his name is a medical correspondent. Just hired by Barry Weiss. Yeah. Atia. Yes. That's the one. He's in there. I mean, grotesque. I can't even, I don't want to quote it exchanges with Epstein. Could CBS possibly continue to employ this person after that seems far-fetched to me.

And maybe I'm expecting action to happen too quickly because we're just a couple days into the revelations and, you know, it's the weekend and all its stuff. But there are a second and third tier characters throughout these files. And the other question is, and we don't know, we don't know, but like, what are they not release, right? Like, they only released like three million of however many million they had. What did they not release? Guys, this is the thing.

I mean, so Trump's DOJ is protecting him at every turn. Right. And the amount of Trump stuff that's in here, they were okay to release because they're clearly scrubbing it with an eye toward one thing, which is protecting Trump. Right. The stuff, like, what's in there about Trump is already really bad. And so, like, if they are holding more back, one assumes that it is. either it is either Trump himself, evidence of things with Trump himself or people even closer to Trump, maybe like, because Kushner is mentioned quite a bit.

Sam, I'm sorry, can I just, the one thing, I'm not sure if I want to say that like, this is something I got wrong or didn't understand. But I think that my initial sense of the Epstein files was that people were being a little conspiratorial. I just sort of like, I didn't believe that there was a elite cabal that had all sort of participated in child sex trafficking or sexual assault and all of those things. That just seems sort of far-fetched. And actually what's in here makes it clear. Like, it's the banality of the evil of it.

They were all friends. They all knew about it. They were all talking about it. Joking about it. And it is the way that the people talk about women in these emails, like where they call certain women knee pads in these texts with Bannon. Like, I can't imagine being a woman being willing to work for any of these people. Like, it is, it is, or anybody, any human with a conscience.

And this is where the thing is like, we should not be so desensitized. from 10 years of Donald Trump's depravity, that we sort of shrug our shoulders by saying, well, other people are going to shrug their shoulders? No, we should be appalled and we should demand accountability and try to and create consequences. These people, because what they did was really wrong

and really gross, just the words. It's all grotesque. Yeah. Well, there's two levels to this. So there's the banality of it. And what's evident from all, these emails is that there was this kind of insane, deviant social structure that was, had Jeffrey Epstein at the middle of, the nexus of. And all these people who he knew who were talking to

him, who were partying with him, who he was scouting for, I put that in air quotes, things like that. And it's, as you say, it's grotesque, it's awful. It's way more expansive than I initially probably thought it would be. I mean, it touches on a lot more industry than I thought it would So that's one element. What we don't know, and presumably what's in the tranche that they haven't released, is like the actual trafficking element of it, where the crimes would be prosecuted element of it. Like, we don't know that. And you have to presume that that's what's in the unreleased stuff.

It doesn't make the first element less bad. I mean, when you have people talking the way they do and discussing underage girls the way they do and, you know, joking about it. And it's horrifying. It's legitimately horrifying. And it's also like, I don't want to diminish it, but it's really pathetic, honestly, too. Like, these are grown men who are, who should be, in theory,

happy in life. They're well off. They're titans of their industry. Presumably they can do whatever they want in the world. And they chose to spend their time with one of the slimyest, grossest, most depraved human beings on the planet to get their rocks off. I mean, it's just, it's really pathetic. It makes you wonder how these people got to where they got to.

It's honestly shocking in some respects. Yeah, I mean, this is where sort of like Larry Summers, who is now, he's suspended. But like, he's like asking Jeffrey Epstein, like, coming to him being like, give me advice on how to talk to these women. And like, I just, it does, it does betray a kind of. And this I guess is I don't understand this world of men where Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein are like the alphas. And all of these other people, these coaches, these businessmen and, you know, celebrities like want to be near them. Like, why does Elon Musk? Why does he want to go to a wild party on Epstein Island?

And they are like, we've known for a while that these are all these like broken men like Elon Musk. on and whatever's happening. I didn't realize. I did not realize how broken. I did not realize how broken these people are psychologically. Yeah, because this was like a, like, that's the thing is like how normalized it all is. Like the way Bannon talks to him, it's like they're all, this is how they talk to each other, it's how they think about women.

It's how they think about, it's fine to have women who are underage there. And in fact, it's like part of the, it's part of the fun of all of it. I hate them and I think that they should experience. And this is the thing. Have you seen this this weekend that there is some corners of the sort of release the Epstein files like MAGA right are dropping off this weekend, are saying like they were lying to us because the theory Q&ON was right about this like big elite cabal. that was doing this stuff. It just, it's not the left. It doesn't mean, and it has been funny to watch some of the broken-brain partisans

try to be like, here's one Democrat who's in this. It's like Obama's former legal person. Counsel, Kathy Rumler. Yeah. And guess what? And they're like, oh, well, the left has to reckon with this. And we're like, throw her in jail. I don't care.

No one cares, man. You're the only partisan-brained weirdo who thinks that somehow the left is going to try to protect anybody who is involved with this guy. That's not, no, that's not what's happening here. And I mean, Bill Clinton obviously is involved here. And, like, what we saw in Congress is a bunch of Democrats voted to hold him in contempt. Like, it's like not, people are not protective of Bill Clinton anymore. No one cares about Kathy Rumler and her future anymore.

Like Bill Gates, like, no one cares. I think people overestimate that. All right, before we close the book. They will these people to be held accountable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. before we close the book on this section, because I have like four other things I want to talk to you about. Oh, sorry. It's okay.

No. What's the next steps here? So obviously, Congress passed legislation to get these files out. We've been having some hearings from the oversight committee in the House. But where does it go from here? I mean, how much do you centralize this politically if you're a Democrat? Does Congress have an additional role that they could play? I don't know where you see this turning.

I do think so. I mean, I think that there's a couple things. One, and this is why you have to worry about the elections in 2026 is that Donald Trump is petrified of oversight. Like, petrified of not having Mike Johnson there running interference with him and Thune running interference with him for exactly this reason. So it is important that Democrats have the gavel and are able to lead investigations. And I think that they can do that where they get Elon. Musk back in front of Congress to talk about the information that they took when they were running Doge and also the Epstein stuff. Right. But the main thing I want to see happen is that right now, I was very shocked. I don't know if you were. And I haven't looked at the New York Times homepage today, but there was nothing yesterday about Epstein on the homepage. Okay.

Yeah. I'm looking right now. Here we go. on the main page, on the top. Okay, keep talking. I'm looking. So here's the thing. This should be the biggest story in the country.

And it's all over Twitter. So, like, if you're sitting on Twitter, it is just us unearthing the files, talking about the files. And, like, but it is not, like, we are going to need everybody else in the journalistic world to, like, start reporting these things. out, getting Musk on their record. Now, he's tweeting about it. And I presume people from the Wall

Street Journal and the New York Times are calling him up to say like, hey, so you said this, and this is in the email. But like, they have to feel the pressure of the public scrutiny that comes with things like this. And so that's the next step. The next step is like make them answer for this. Don't just shrug about it. So the Times has one piece. up. It's below the top of the website, but it is up there. It's from Nick Confessori. And it gets at the hypocrisy, but also

the lying about how they weren't people claiming they weren't close to obscene documents show otherwise. And it goes after Musk and Lutnik on top. But yeah, that's about it. They got one piece. I agree. It's huge on Twitter. It's everyone on Twitter. That might be algorithmic. Okay.

Two stories that are semi-related. We're going to start with Trump and the IRS. And I know we have some video clip to play for this one. But basic gist is Trump this week decided he was going to sue the IRS for, I kid you not, $10 billion. It's like a comically large number. That's our money, guys. That's our money.

A comically large figure. You couldn't be more villainous. It's like you might as well just, you know, do the Dr. Evil thing while you're saying it. It's for the release of his tax records, the leak of the tax records, I should say. of course Donald Trump can instruct the IRS to settle with Donald Trump for $10 billion

and this is, he was asked about this on Air Force One yesterday and I want to play the clip of him talking about what might happen here, so let's play it. It's very interesting. I have another one where I've virtually won the Mar-a-Lago break-ins soon.

And I have to work out some kind of a settlement. I'm supposed to work out a with myself. Because, you know, when the FBI broke in, we sued before I was present. And I sued. Obviously, it was a very good suit. And I have that one, and I have to work out the settlement. Well, I think what we'll do is do something for charity.

You know, we're thinking about doing something for charity, where I'll give money to charity. We can make it a substantial amount. Nobody would care because it's going to go to numerous, very good charities. Okay, this is ridiculous. This is just ridiculous. What charities are going to be? The Donald Trump presidential library? Presidential library, sure.

It's absurd. He's just taking taxpayer money. Have you seen the story, this just broke, I think, this morning, about the 500. That was my next related story. These are all intertwined, yeah. They are intertwined. You just tee that up so then we can talk about them together. So the other story, yeah.

The other story, which broke from the Wall Street Journal this morning, and it's like pretty shocking when you think about it. Basically, in Abu Dhabi Royal, quietly put about $500 million, I should say, million dollars into the Trump family crypto currency right before, or right early in the administration or right before the inauguration. I forget which one. And lo and behold. Donald Trump sold American AI chips to the UAE several months later, these very sensitive chips that our national security apparatus was saying, hey, these are important, like we don't want to get into the wrong hands. This is not maybe the best deal.

But if you just connect the dots, it was a $500 million payment to the cryptocurrency run by Trump's sons in exchange for this incredibly lucrative chip. And it's a level of corruption that I think is like, again, we talk about vastness here. With Epstein, we talked about vastness. But like, it's hard to wrap your hand around this. That combined with suing your own, the IRS that you run for $10 billion so that you could take the money and then do whatever you want with it.

It's nuts. This is what is happening in this administration that I think we all knew like it would be corrupt because Trump is inherently corrupt. But the level of Trump is selling out America. Like the reason that our government said don't sell these chips to Abu Dhabi is because they're going to turn around and sell them to China. And we were trying to keep them out of the hands of the Chinese. Now, Trump is for investment in his crypto, he's sold out. He is selling out America or national security. He's selling out NATO.

So people put a billion dollars into his, you know, whatever of peace, his board of peace that he's selling for a billion dollars a thing to Putin. and other dictators, like, they are selling out America. They are selling off America. I mean for money. I don't mean selling us out for, in the colloquial term. I mean, they are literally selling out America for their own personal enrichment of them and their family and their friends to make them more powerful. And they're using it.

They're doing it through the boardroom, through the, or not the boardroom, sorry, the ballroom, which, by the way, some of the big ballroom. donors also in the Epstein files. They're selling out all there's Donald Trump's just the whole thing's got a for sale sign on it. And the scale of it. And this is where, I mean, we're just, we're underreacting by such a degree. Like you want to say we have TDS. Like you guys, we can't get mad enough about what's happening right now.

We've never seen anything like it. And the DOJ is under the control of the Trump administration. And so there's nobody to hold them. accountable. We have no independent agencies. Sorry. Well, no, it's okay. I wonder about it because like the only reason we know about this, obviously, is because the Wall Street Journal put together some incredible investigative reporting. And like with the Epstein files, again, we don't know what we don't know, right? Like, there's just no way that this is the extent of the amount of profiteering they're

trying to do off the government. You have to imagine that all these ballroom donations, they're disclosing the ones. that are donating. I'm sure they're not disclosing every single ballroom donation. How much is Trump taking off the top? Like, there's no transparency around any of these processes. That's not just Trump in this Wall Street Journal story. It's also Steve Wickoff and his family got in on the action. Sure. They got a cool $31 million, it appears, from this. And, you know, it's a secondary component of this, but it does need to be stated. The big charge against Joe Biden and Hunter Biden was that Hunter Biden was being hired by these foreign business entities to influence his father's

foreign policy. This was the entirety of the Hunter Biden Ukraine scandal. And Joe Biden wasn't even president at the time, or vice president at the time. This is that, but on steroids. This is that, but at a magnitude that is incomprehensibly larger. And, you know, it kind of, it does piss me off a little bit that people who complained about all this stuff just go quiet on this stuff, right? It's just so annoying. There's an amazing amount of strategic silence happening on the social media platforms right now that couldn't shut up about the Epstein files, about Hunter. Like, part of what's happening right now is that, and this is where having a right-wing media

ecosystem where they just don't care about- It's called the hack gap. You're aware of the hack gap, right? No, what's that? That's a long-standing term. Hack gap was always used. I mean, I come from the lefty media, but it was always sort of, it was coined to say that the right-wing media ecosystem

is way more hacker than the left-wing media. 100%. The left-wing media loves nothing more than to, like, go after Democrats when they're in charge. Like, that's what we love to do. And I shouldn't say weeks, I'm not there anymore. But the right-wing media, that's the hack gap, is that they are willing to turn and turn a blind eye on this stuff.

they are but what's incredible though is that right now we are at the nexus of a bunch of stories that they were obsessed with a bunch of issues that that the right has long churned up lots of content on whether it's second amendment rights whether it was the hunter Biden which was really about whether or not there's like corruption and self-reumeration out of the presidency by presidents and their families. All of these Epstein, like that, sorry, I think I've already said Epstein, but like, oh, sorry,

this is just one point I wanted to make, which is on the FBI. Because part of the Hunter Biden thing, too, was like independence of GOJ, which, of course, there's no independence of the DNJ right now. I'm going to get to that in a second. Oh, but Cash Patel, too. This is another one.

Oh, yeah. Him going in front of Congress and saying there's no evidence. that there's like nothing Right? We've looked at it all, nothing to see here. It's like, wait a second. What did you mean? Obviously, there's something to see here.

Holy shit. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. That's great. On DOJ, though, because this actually segue was pretty nicely, in normal times, independent justice department would, in theory, look at some of this stuff, right?

They launch investigations. we might not know about it. But like, you know, it's funny, Ilhan Omar, like in the corruption allegations against her. It was an interesting story. I didn't get much attention. But that the Biden, DOJ, had actually launched an investigation into Ilhan Omar and whether or not she was profiting. And so, like, that's how it normally works.

They don't talk about it. It happens. It is supposed to be nonpartisan. Now, obviously, there are some considerations that go into it all the time. yesterday we got a great indication of how corrupted and partisan the Department of Justice has become because the guy who was the former chief of staff at the Department of Justice, guy named Chad Mazzle, put up a tweet and I'm going to just read it because it's so, it's so blatant, it's so ridiculous that I had a number of lawyer friends just be like,

text me about this, this is shocking. It says this, if you were a lawyer and are interested in being an A, USA, that's an assistant U.S. attorney and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me. We need good prosecutors and DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for the country. First of all, soliciting AUSAs over DM is ridiculous and hilarious and pathetic. But secondly, it's just blatant. We want people who support Donald Trump to be the AOSAs, not the U.S.

attorneys, the assistant U.S. attorneys who are supposed to just take cases and, and go about it dispassionately. It's wild. Ideological litmus tests in our legal, it's not even ideological because this is just pure. It's not a litmus test. They're just scouting. As it over talent and credentials and, you know,

professional seriousness. Yeah, no, they're not hiding what it is that they want to do. And what they're every day for them, they're playing a kind of chicken with the public. Like, will they get mad enough that like we get on our back foot? And they're basically betting no. Donald Trump's, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, is really being tested through this administration. It's like, apparently your ice agents can shoot someone, right? Like, and murder Americans in the streets.

I do think, though, we can wait and see, but I think there's going to be a new round of polling this week, maybe next. And you're going to see, I think people are starting to get upset. Like, this has been one of the worst new cycles for Trump, probably since January 6th. And but I don't want people to sort of rest on their laurels. Like the thing that you can do, every person is go demand accountability. Say, just, say like Elon Musk, everybody should tweet right now. Elon Musk should be held accountable. Ask Elon Musk. Yeah. Go ahead. For Trump, though, it's like kind of interesting to your point. You know, you see the, like, the influencer crowd that kind of saddled up with him in, in 2024, really turn now. I mean, they're just like, wait a second. You know, we have like ice agents killing people in the street. This is not. I don't want this. And then the Epstein stuff, wait a second.

Like you told me it's a Democratic hoax. Like, come on, this is mess up. And then you have like, you know, pretty tried and true conservatives who, I mean, there's always going to be Trump diards. They're always going to apologize. These people, but you have like people who are really shocked by this. So back to the DOJ story. I mean, Andy McCarthy, who's like one of the most outwardly conservative legal minds,

rights for the National Review. I never would have imagined him turning on a Republican administration. He responded to this news. He says if support for the president is now a condition of enforcing federal law, Congress should defund DOJ. DOJ should only exist if it's nonpartisan. I mean, having Andy McCarthy say defund the DOJ, along with Bill Crystal saying defund ICE, we're in like some weird universe here where there's a huge shift happening.

Now, I don't know, you know, you would know better than me, but like, he'll always get that like 35, 38%. Yeah, it does feel like a shift's happening, though. Yeah, although I think we should be careful always about shifts because I do think people come home often times when things sort of go back down, you know, the temperature lower. Or when the election years, right? Yeah, that's right. I have watched a lot of the conservative influences, and there's still. I mean, I saw Andy McCarthy suite, but I've also watched Eric Erickson.

most of the right-wing influence types, Megan Kelly, everybody else, like they are happy to smear Alex Prettie as a domestic terrorist or a left-wing agitator, along with the administration. They're happy to defend ICE and what they're doing right now. I think, though, the American public is increasingly

against them on that. But, like, the corruption stuff has not broken through to the American public. Why not? I think that, I just don't know that there are voices on the either, like let's just call it, the big, broad pro-democracy community who are hammering this as relentlessly as they need to. I mean, it goes back actually to where we started, which is volume. This has always been part of Trump and Bannon's understanding of public sentiment in the new communications environment, which is when you flood the zone with shit, it overwhelms people's nervous systems.

it makes it more difficult for people to sort of pull it apart. And it all becomes a white noise of corruption. And people lose the ability to properly calibrate the asymmetries between what Trump and his administration are doing and like Hunter Biden. Right. Like they start to treat those things. They treat those things the same. Like, well, they're all corrupt. Here's the other.

Here's the thing, though, that I believe very firmly is that voters better or worse, they will forget. they will forgive Trump a lot of his BS, including probably corruption, as long as their lives are getting better. This was like how we saw it play out in the first Trump administration. Today, their lives are not getting better. And so they are quicker to be angry about these other things. But I think that the information, like the fact that like the New York Times doesn't even have this on their wrong page or at the top of the fold and it wasn't even in there yesterday. like, you know, the way that the information works right now is like, it's like if you drop a stone, like a big rock in a placid lake, people like us, we're the first ripple.

Like, we are following it closely. But as you get closer to the shore, those ripples are really small. And they depend on the size of the rock to begin with. You know, they depend on how to be. I look at it differently. I'm going to extend your minifar. Please. I think, and I'm just, look, I'm groggy.

I maybe had a couple too many glasses of wine last night. So forgive the metaphor. But I think the media ecosystem is a lake, but there's like rocks being dropped all over the place. Some are big rocks, but there's like rocks everywhere. And like you and I are in the middle and there's a bunch of people. And like we're getting hit from different ripples. And so to me like, you know, the New York Times not covering this. Like I know it matters.

It should matter. I know it's important that they cover this because it's going to set the agenda for other people. because influencing elite opinion matters on the secondary and tertiary level. But I think a lot of people in that lake, so to speak, are getting it from different ripples. Like Twitter, Twitter, you know, YouTube podcasts, influencers, things like TikTok. I know TikTok's another piece, but I feel like this will break through because it's just going to be covered in a million different ways. It's going to find its way to your social media feed. Now, I mean, the shootings are.

Yeah. Everybody watched it with themselves, but go ahead. Yeah, no, no. That's it, though. It's like you can see video of the shooting from your phone. You don't need the New York Times to cover it. The Epstein files, you can scroll through your feed and you can see excerpts of them. And so, like, you're going to get it.

I am with you a little bit on there's going to be a rally around the flag type element here. That happens all the time. it's why I've been a little bit hesitant to say, all these special elections, they really matter because they're occurring in a vacuum. That said, there was a special election last night. Yeah, there was. And it was in the biggest county, very red county.

And there was a 30-point shift in the state senate race to the Democrat, who won. I'm not going to pretend I have any idea who these people are. I wasn't, this race was not on my mind. radar. But a 30-point shift is not something to sneeze at totally, right? Not at all. I mean, in Deep Red Texas, look, I think you can both overread these things individually. But I do think that this is where a collection of whether it's the 15 points that Abigail Spanberger won by and the 15 points Mikey Sherrill won by, which is funny because

Trump just with this week said, well, the only way Democrats win is if they cheat. I'm like, they won by 15 points, man. What are you talking about? But this is, we're getting a lot of different data points. And so I would put this in the bucket not of this alone matters a great deal. However, this with all everything else that we're seeing, I think, look, it shows two things that we know. One is Democrats have a massive structural advantage in these off-year elections because the most highly educated, highly engaged voters show up for them, which now tend to be more anti-Trump.

They're more college-educated suburban voters who are more likely to read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And I don't know. And that, like, that, well, that actually is just like the biggest factor. Like, that is what's happening here. And so I guess that raises the question then if they, you know, as we get close to the midterms, like, will that advantage become diluted, right? if more people plug in.

But that, again, now I'm thinking out loud, but this is why I think the Epstein stuff and the ice stuff and the economics really matters. Not is it just going to depress their side of the equation. Like if you are a sort of informal voter and, you know, you decide to vote in 2024, you might have voted because you felt like, you know, Trump would, you know, expose the cabal that was behind Jeffrey Epstein or, you know, there might be another reason that because he, you know, he seemed like he knew what he's going to be

doing with immigrants and like get them out of the country? And then you look at this stuff and you're like, wait a second, they're shooting people. And the cabal was real, but it involved like all these people in Trump's orbit. You're not going to go out and vote. You know. Sorry, that was the other half of the equation that I meant what I was talking about, which is like who turns out and who doesn't turn out is basically what happens in these particular races. And I think you're right that a lot of the people who, you know, turned out specifically to vote for Trump, A, don't like these other can. I aren't attached to these other candidates the way they're attached to Trump. Right. Or, and they simply are like, I'm pissed off about everything now.

Like, I don't feel that, like, hope in voting. And this is why when Susie Wiles said she wants to put Trump on the ballot. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah. Well, Trump can't help but be on the ballot. Like, he's going to go out there. He's going to make himself the center of the election, I presume, right?

he's just not capable of doing it. I guess the one thing that does sort of linger over this is just money. Right. So Elon put in $5 million, the Senate and House Republican super PACs. You have this crypto pack out there with insane amounts of money, like $90 million or something in cash on hand. Money could swamp this whole thing in ways that I don't think people are really prepared for. There could be more money spent in this election, midterm election, than we've ever. seen in a mid-term cycle. Actually, it's guaranteed pretty much. Yeah, guaranteed. There's a bunch of

things that are building up that are part of like a new conversation that we're all going to have to start having. I think for Democrats who talk about money and politics, they are thinking about it from like corporations and, you know, that's not where we are anymore, really. Like the money in politics now comes from Trump is basically handing out favors to his rich friends who then in turn spend enormous amounts of money to try to keep Republican control of things. And some of those friends aren't just billionaire rich. Some of them are almost trillionaire rich. And Elon Musk can spend like the GDP of a small country on this race. And they will work to try to turn out their base.

Um, that's why they're, what Susie Wiles really means about putting Trump on the ballot actually is she says Trump's going to lead a get out the vote effort. Uh, right. For these Republicans in the midterms. I'm not sure. I think that works. Um, but that is that is their plan. And yeah, I think you're right that they're going to flood. I mean, probably with like, look at all the, like, raping, murdering immigrants.

We've gotten off the streets and like, look at all the trans people. We stopped from doing things. Yeah. that's not like, that's the thing is, what is their play at this point about, if the election were a month for now, it's not. So let's say we're a month for now. Like, what is the cards that they play here? It's not going to be economics. I mean, no one's feeling really great about country's economic trajectory. That might be able to say we brought inflation down. But like, I don't think people feel that. So they'll be cleaning up the streets and crime getting rid of criminals and crime going lower. And I think it's just going to have to be real sort of fling whatever dirt you have against Democrats. That's it. It's just going to get dirty. Yeah.

We'll see. All right. Last thought, because I have to go. You're going to go see the Maloney documentary? Yeah, man. Of course. My whole day is blocked around it. You too?

I've got a whole family. I bought three tickets in a row. I'm going to see it back to back to back. Yeah. What a way to spend a Sunday. Don't go to church. Go see a Maloney. Melania.

Did you see, so it's done $8 million in sales, which for a documentary is not nothing. I will say our boy, Jeff Bezos spent like $70 million making it and promoting it. So it's worth it for Jeff. I'm glad he did that. Yeah. Real good investment for him. No, I mean, look, hey, $8 million is nothing to sneeze at. I'm happy for Melania.

She got a good movie out of it. The critics reviews have been brutal, but that's just because the critics are a bunch of elitists, you know. Yeah, our own sunny bunch who. An elitist, true elitist here. He said it's real bad. It seems real bad. I'm not going to see it today. I'm probably not going to see it at all until it comes out on streaming.

All right. I do have to run. I will never watch this movie. You would have to clockwork orange me to make me watch this movie. No. Keep me to a chair and hold my eyes open. That's not true. You'd take one of those 15 milligram souls.

That's right. The super gummy. The super gummy, the high dosage, we sell souls on the podcast. And then you would get a nice little wine, a glass of wine, some popcorn, and just see how long you could last. That's true. It would be like I'd have to set my clock because if I did that and you put on the Melani movie, I would either go into like a rage fit that. did keep me up or I just immediately passed out. Oh, you just giggle. No, you'd start giggling. He'd be like, is this real? Is this real? Am I live? All right, Sarah, it's been a pleasure.

I think Bill will be back next Sunday. But, you know, the show goes on with or with Adam. So thank you for doing this. And for those who have been watching, thank you for watching us on your Sunday morning. Hope this was informative. Hope you got more coffee than I did. We'll talk to you soon.