The Daily Beast Podcast - I Know Truth About Why Epstein and Trump Fell Out

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles for part two, continuing their forensic account of Donald Trump’s long, combustible friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Drawing on years of interviews and firsthand reporting, Wolff argues that Trump and Epstein were not casual acquaintances but intimate allies, bonded by money, sex, models, and a shared outsider resentment of New York’s elite. The episode traces how that alliance curdled into rivalry and fear—through real estate betrayals, private planes, kompromat, and the moment Epstein believed Trump turned the authorities on him. Wolff details why Epstein obsessed over Trump even after their rupture, why other powerful men fell while Trump survived, and how Epstein’s arrest and death intersected with Trump’s presidency. If Epstein was the man who knew Trump best, what does it mean that this is the one story that still visibly unnerves him? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He was the best friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and their friendship was clearly over women. What we can say is that for over 10 years, Donald Trump lived the life of a sleazeball. Lived a life that I think, if people understood, would have disqualified him from the presidency. Michael. Joanna. For new people to inside Trump's head, We have no idea who we are. We have no idea who we are.

I was just going to say. We've just parachuted in. We parachuted into inside Trump's head. This is, I was going to say volume two. It's the second episode in a special we are doing on the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and our president, Donald Trump. And I am Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of The Daily Beast. and why don't you introduce yourself for anybody living under a rock who doesn't know who you are? I'm Michael Wolfe and I have written four books about Donald Trump.

So I have spent the last 10 years of my life inside Trump's head, a fearful place. I have also had a long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who I began interviewing in 2014 and continued things. through to when he was arrested in 2019. Do I know more about Jeffrey Epstein than anyone else on earth? I don't know if that's true, but it is possibly true. And I have been variously pilloried for this and sought after. But we are, I have always thought that one of the, of a, fundamental point here is that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, the president of the United States,

once, twice, who knows, were the closest of friends. Possibly, I believe, each other's closest friend in life. And I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. And I have told parts of this story. There's been a lot of resistance to telling this story. But finally, at this moment, in 2025, we are doing this, having this discussion the day before the Epstein files are supposed to be released. And the story won't go away, to say the least. Well, it seems to be the one issue that discomforts the president and no matter how much he describes. No, it is clearly. And I think it's an issue that discomforts a lot of people. And the New York Times just a few minutes ago dropped a story about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and the fact that they shared a bond, a deep bond.

largely about women. And this is, you know, kind of, I mean, I mean, let's, it's noteworthy that the New York Times is doing this story. It's a story we did here at The Daily Beast over a year ago. The New York Times has nothing appreciably new. We tried to do this story before the election. I mean, I have always thought that this is a key pillar if you want to understand Donald Trump. I mean, you can elect Donald Trump, as people did. But it is a key fact of his life that for more than 10 years, he was the best friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

And their friendship was clearly over women. What we can say is that for over 10 years, Donald Trump lived the life of a sleazeball, lived a life that I think if people understood would have disqualified him from the presidency. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Well, and I think when you say that their relationship was about women, it was about women and sex. I mean, I think we should say it like it is. And the man turned out to be a monster. He had a massive network of women, some of whom were trafficked, a lot of whom were girls. He had cars, ferrying school girls back and forth from school.

This was a monster of a man. Let's go. I mean, we don't know where Donald Trump, if he interjected with the. No, I'm talking about Jeffrey Epstein here, but who hangs out with someone like that? The bond was women and sex. We've discussed the pictures that I've seen of Donald Trump in around Jeffrey Epstein's pool with girls who are, who were topless and, and, um, And I don't know their age, but they were certainly young. Well, and I think we should just remind people of the other friends of Jeffrey Epstein

whose careers did not withstand that adjacency. So you have Jess Staley, who had to stand down as the CEO of Barclays. You had Joey Eto, who had to stand down as the head of the Media Lab at MIT. You have Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard, who's had to step back from all almost everything he's been doing. You have Leon Black who had to step down as the co-founder of Apollo, a massive private equity company. So you have very senior men being felled by their friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. And yet Donald Trump is still the president of the United States. And Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was much longer and much deeper

than any of these other men. And again, you know, this was, we discussed this before the election. We aired tapes of Jeffrey Epstein talking about his relationship with Donald Trump in detail about about women and Donald Trump, about about about Epstein basically characterizing Donald Trump as a, as a, as a, as a, bigger sleaze ball than he was. So, so, again. The imagination only boggles that the idea of being a bigger sleazeball in Jeffrey Epstein. I find it extraordinary that only now is the mainstream media coming with any real attention to this story.

And it has been hiding, to say the least, in plain sight for a very long time. Well, and we should point out that the VIX. Tims of Jeffrey Epstein have been banging on about their experience too for a long time. I don't want to pretend it's just us. There have been other people, Thomas Massey, Rokhanna, getting a cross-party support for the release of the Epstein files. And not least, actually, Cash Patel, the head of the FBI in his former life as a t-shirt hawker, full of conspiracy theories about the Epstein files and Dan Bongino, who yesterday announced he was stepping down as number two from the FBI,

who used to have a podcast which was full of conspiracy theories about the Epstein files, which may or may not be conspiracies at this point. We don't know. Well, I mean, I think that's what the New York Times or the mainstream press has kind of resisted because of that. I mean, this has been largely an online story. You couldn't separate what was true from what is fantastic. And I think it's still in many ways a difficult story to separate the true from the fantastic.

Was Jeffrey Epstein the greatest spy on earth? Was he... Right. Who was he working for? Russia. Was he working for Putin? Was he working for Mossad? Yeah.

All sorts of conspiracies. And then, of course, you know, another person who's been felt, well, two more British people who've been fell by this Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, who was the British ambassador to Washington, and only there about six months before he had to resign because of an over-effusive letter in the birthday letter trove that the Wall Street Journal revealed. And then, of course, Prince Andrew, who's been forced out of Royal Lodge, squeezed into a tiny little shoebox of a house, apparently, on the Sandringham estate, and forced to give up his title of prince. How small is this house? Oh, I think it's very, very small. I think it's like eight bedrooms small. Eight bedrooms small.

I think, yes. I mean, you have a lovely house. I wouldn't say it was small. Your house is a fabulous family house. I would say that wherever Prince Andrew is going to live is going to be 10 times bigger than your house. But small compared to Royal Lodge. I don't want us to weep for the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. But you almost have some weeping. I'm thinking of this. He's in a one room. You're thinking of the old woman with the shoe. That's not Prince Andrew. Actually, that's more akin to Epstein. An old man and a shoe with lots of children running around. Sorry, that's a bad taste joke. But I'm so disgusted by Jeffrey Epstein and I'm so disgusted with his friendship with Donald Trump and the fact that people haven't taken it more seriously because it's such a window into the president's character and it's felled other important men. No, and it is really, I think, goes to the heart of understanding who Donald Trump is.

You know, I mean, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were obsessed with women's sex and specifically models. And they were in the model business. They were in the beauty pageant business. Epstein was involved, obviously, with Victoria's Secret. I mean, it was a demimon of the 1990. and in which they were two of the chief protagonists. Well, Trump had Miss Universe. He owned a modeling agency.

Jeffrey Epstein invested in a modeling agency. And interestingly, Jean-Luc Bunnell, who was a friend of Epstein's, and also had a modeling agency in Paris, who Jeffrey Epstein then invested in another modeling agency of Jean-Lucs. John Luke also ended up death by suicide in prison. This is a very dark story that haunts the president. Let's continue this story. This is part two.

All right. So this is part two. And I will just, well, I hope we get on to the Steve Bannon quote, which when you introduce Steve Bannon to Jeffrey Epstein, he said to him, you were the only person I was afraid of. I'm giving it away. I'm giving it away because we've already said it on every other podcast we've done. But you might not know.

So, you know, never sacrifice a punch. Never assume people know the punchline. Absolutely right. So in today's second volume, we're going to go through the latter part of their friendship. But for those who didn't hear the first episode, we go through their relationship. We go through their first contact. We go through them being rejected from Manhattan restaurants. We go through them being outsiders.

These are very, very good friends. I mean, and that's what we are telling the story of these two guys in New York, interested in money and sex. And that's what they pursue to excess, to stay the least. They also had what Gen Z would call trauma bonding. They bonded sort of over their trauma of coming from outside. They both viewed themselves as outside. because they came from the outer boroughs.

They were rejected by respectable Manhattan society thrown out of restaurants. Donald's father was trying to make him buy real estate in Brooklyn, where he had no interest in being because he wanted to run Fifth Avenue. And now, as we know, he says he can shoot anybody in Fifth Avenue, and nobody will care. All right, so where are we picking up? We sort of dropped off in the mid-90s, really. Well, I think we dropped off. I mean, he is, we dropped off with the marriage to Marla Maples.

And he didn't want to marry Marla Maples. She got pregnant. He discussed this with his confidant in this matter was Jeffrey Epstein. And Epstein was horrified by the fact that he might actually have to marry Marla Maples. Thought Donald Trump, his friend Trump, was being tricked into it. but at any rate Donald Trump did marry Marla Maples. And so, and I think he marries her in 1993, I believe, and they separate in 1997. So it's a quick, quick second marriage.

Now, in 1996 or 1997, she can't remember, comes the attack on E. Jean Carroll. and that happened in a dressing room at Bergdorf-Gudman, a famous department store in New York. And I know that Epstein said that shortly after this happened, Donald Trump regaled him with the details. And can you remember what he told him? I can't, I can't, and I don't, I get it mixed up with now what she has testified to. So I don't know, but I know that this was a point of hilarity or jocularity between these two men. And, you know, 20 years later, Epstein would tell me about this. But again, that's an interesting moment.

Did that occur before while he was still married to Marla Maples after unclear? And there were, you know, with all, I mean, remember Donald Trump has been married three times. The confines of marriage did not restrict him. And in fact, at this point in time, Melania comes on the scene. Now, again, this is the world of. models. That's what both Epstein and Trump are obsessed by. Models, models, models. Models represented status. They obviously represented sex, but they represented some, some, a world that I can't, I can, you know, I kind of remember occurring. I mean, they were on the cover of all the magazines. They were all over billboards. And I think

it's worth reminding people, this was pre-digital, and it was a very different time. And the models, the supermodels, Kate Moss, Tatiana Patitz, Naomi Campbell, they, they were such aspirational figures. They represented glamour, sophistication, all these French and American fashion brands. I mean, they were, you know, the faces of beauty, young women wanted to be them, and young men wanted to own them. You had a hierarchy of models. You had supermodels, you had runway models, you had catalog models, you had girls who just dreamed of being models. And so this all created a culture which these guys fed on. Well, they fed on. And also worth pointing out that Eastern Europe was opening up at this point. This was, you know,

the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. So you have suddenly a corridor of young, thin, very pretty Eastern European girls flooding the model market and modeling agencies sprang up all over the place. And this, again, was pre-digital. And you have the intersection here of Russian money, too, Eastern European money, which certainly Trump was involved in, and this would come to haunt him when he became the president of the United States. obviously the first

time, but it's money. You know, you can't, with these guys, you know, it would be it would be missing something not to see that link between sex and money. Now, so at any rate, this is, at this moment in time,

Marla Maples, that marriage is ending. Melania comes on the scene. Now, in Maloney, Lonnie is telling she meets Donald Trump at a club in New York, I think called the Kit Kat Club, in 1998. But there's another interview in which she says it's 1997, which would be when he is still married to Marla Maples. And this was at a party, I think she says she was taken by her roommate, and it was a party hosted by Paolo Zam Paoli, who was a model agent. friend of both Epstein's and Trump's. And this is actually another kind of subtext of their relationship, airplanes. It is a kind of foundational identifier for wealthy men or men who want to

pretend that they are wealthy, that they fly only private. And Epstein would say, so we're We're also in a moment in time when Donald Trump really doesn't have any money. He's begun, his Atlantic City properties have begun to go bankrupt in the early 90s. He's in a financially uncomfortable position. Do people know this? It's curious. Does Melania, did Melania Trump know when she got together with Donald Trump that he was a deadbeat? totally unclear.

When you say Deadbeat, he still had buildings around New York with his name all over them. The illusion of prosperity was one which, of course, he carried on to The Apprentice when he started doing that show. And the illusion of success is something that he's always been good at. Right. So you had these buildings with his name on, and what they did not say is that they, They were, they did not announce his, they announced his name, not his indebtedness. And all of these buildings were basically underwater, and he would lose a lot of them. But one of the things about the airplanes is Epstein would always say that they used his airplane.

Donald Trump wanted to use Epstein's airplane because he didn't want to pay for an airplane. I mean, he didn't want to pay for the fuel or the maintenance or whatever, which was a kind of, nature of this, of their relationship, a kind of constant rivalry, one upmanship. And probably at this time, the late 90s, Epstein had more money than Donald Trump. So Epstein has more money than Donald Trump. He has a network of young women that he's somehow operating with the help of Gillen Maxwell, I think it's worth pointing out, who later gets sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking. These pictures that I have seen of Donald Trump would take place somewhere now, somewhere the very

late 1990s, the very early 2000s. And these pictures, which I've discussed many times, but there are about a dozen snapshots that Epstein would bring out. And this was much later. And so he brought these out as, you know, again, to make fun of Donald Trump. And the pictures were of Trump. And I think we've played the tape of him, Epstein, discussing Trump's way of...

Epstein says that Trump, Trump says that the thing that makes life worth living is sleeping with the wives of your friends. And then Epstein tells the story of how Trump did this. I think he would try to undermine the relationship between husband and wife, asking the husband what he thought of his wife while the wife was on the speaker phone. And I think Jeffrey Epstein also on those tapes talks about how he and Donald Trump would go to Atlantic City. They would target a couple, a male and female couple, and Donald Trump would swoop in and start talking to the woman. Jeffrey Epstein would pretend to talk finance to the

guy. They would separate the couple. Now, Galeen Maxwell is on the scene at this point in time. And the other component of this is social climbing. So all of these guys are always looking for sources of money. Big money. I mean, they're looking for, they're looking to finance whatever they want. In Trump's case, you know, it's real estate finance. And Trump is not and has never been a blue chip guy. You can't just walk into the bank. It's a much more complicated relationship with sources of capital. And one of their, one of the cards that they played was the then-Prince-Andrew card, no longer prince. And they both befriended Prince Andrew, and this largely was through Galane Maxwell, who was a person from, you know, grew up in London, from the British social scene,

knew Prince Andrew, knew various members of the royal family. But Prince Andrew interested in a match for Trump and Epstein because he was interested in women and more women and more women on top of that. and Trump and Epstein joked that they were Prince Andrew's Pussy Committee. In other words, so again, and I think it's, and I think we can't make this point enough that Donald Trump lived a life which would have, if known, excluded anyone, certainly anyone else from the presidency of the United States. And to a degree, all this was known at a certain points of time.

And it could have been, it certainly should have been a factor in certainly his second campaign for the presidency. Well, and the strange thing was it was almost a factor in his first campaign with the grab them by the pussy tape. You know, remember the conversation he had with Bully Bush on a bus as they were driving in to L.A. to do an interview with Access Hollywood, I think. And then, as we've discussed before on inside Trump's head, Steve Bannon had the idea of bringing the women that accused Bill Clinton of having abused them. to the debate with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Right. Let's go back to Clinton at this point. Because in the late 90s, Clinton is still the president of the United States, obviously involved in scandals of his own.

Both Epstein and Trump are in the Clinton camp. They are trying to get close to Clinton. They like Clinton. I think that they clearly feel a bond with Clinton. Clinton is, and now as the Epstein files come out, and as Congress tries to shift the attention from Trump and Epstein, there is obviously efforts to put it, to shift the emphasis to Clinton and Epstein. But the truth of the matter is, is that it's Epstein, Clinton, and Trump. Very much, you know, I mean, guys who.

who view the world in, let's say, similar terms. So anyway, just to keep the chronology here, we basically have, we're in the late 90s, and Trump is still in eclipse, really. I mean, Epstein feels that he is the dominant figure in this relationship. And, you know, the, I mean, it's interesting, the Atlantic City business. So, I mean, Trump is fully vested. I mean, he is the Atlantic City guy. And this is, I mean, it's a weird thing to be known as, because, especially because his casinos have regularly gone bankrupt in Atlantic City. And Epstein regards this as, as de class A. So he is richer than Trump. Trump is an Atlantic City guy. They, he looks down on Trump. I mean, they spend an enormous amount of time together.

But, but this is the nature, the nature of that relationship is, you know, they actually, I think you can look at this and say they really hate each other. I don't know, you know, we can. Why do they carry on hanging out together then? If Jeffrey Epstein despise Donald Trump's. of business acumen and his business is slowly declining and then going bankrupt. Why did he carry on hanging out with him? Girls, I think.

Girls and sex. I think they're both motivated by this, by the same thing. And they're probably, you know, I don't know. They probably have a certain amount of self-loathing for it. Self-loathing for hanging out with each other. Well, self-loathing for hanging out, self-loathing for their obsessions, their fetish fetishes. I don't know. It's hard to think of Donald Trump as self-loathing because that would indicate some level of self-awareness, which I have never seen any evidence of.

But, I mean, you know, clearly they were, they were, I'm. Or perhaps codependent. Yeah. You know, I mean, they were... I mean, I have never known anyone who is so devoted to this idea of, you know, the post... The personal playboy ideal. I mean, I think they both, you know, venerated Hugh Hefner. Well, and I think it's very...

to say that the media at the time venerated Donald Trump, right? He was constantly on the front of the New York tabloids. Well, I think that that's... I actually think that that's incorrect. And in fact, I got to know Trump for the first time at this period. So the late 90s, I was at New York Magazine and he would call, I'm sure he could call many people at the magazine, but he would also, he would certainly call me at the magazine because I was the media columnist and that's he was interested in media. And he would call me to complain not so much about what the magazine said about him, but when he was not in a story. And that was a moment in time that Trump was a real. You didn't want to put Trump in a story. I mean, it was a cliche. He was over, done with. I mean, he had gone

bankrupt. He was a kind of a New York joke. and I remember in many conversations, anybody who had had a Trump story, you would go, oh, Jesus, yeah, not another Trump story. Okay, so this was post him being on the cover of the New York Post and the New York Daily News. He was a tabloid joke, but he was still friendly with Jeffrey Epstein, and they were shuttling between Manhattan and Palm Beach.

Yeah, no, and that was another thing that Epstein made fun of Mar-a-Lago. You know, I mean, Epstein had a big mansion there, but he would say, you know, Trump lived at Mar-a-Lago, and he would say it's not a house. He has to take in borders

because he has no money. Interesting. Interesting. And that's really actually, actually what happened. I mean, remember, he bought Mar-a-Lago in the 80s, could not afford it.

I mean, he bought it to live in it. Couldn't afford it and had to turn it into a club with rooms that he let. Well, quite a smart business decision, actually, to buy it for $10 million at the time. I'm sure it's worth a lot more now. Anyway, so where does their friendship go?

How does it end their friendship? Well, just let me, there is a moment in this, this goes back. So there's a story in New York Magazine in 2002. And this is about Epstein. And Epstein suddenly gets partly because of his relationship with Clinton, suddenly gets a lot of attention. You know, he's ferrying Clinton around in his plane at this point in time. Although as Susie Wiles pointed out this week, he didn't go to the island.

Bill Clinton didn't go to the island. He was taking rides to go, I think, to Africa for the Clinton Global Initiative. Yeah. I mean, Clinton, I mean, Clinton is one of the, I mean, the attraction of private planes is a, is something worth studying. This is what rich guys, this is the rich guy marker. Do you have a private plane? And the second best thing to having a private plane is knowing someone with a private plane. At any rate, this gets. Can we just establish that neither of us have private planes? I think it's important for people to know. Yes, but I'll bet you've been on more private planes than I have been on. Well, I'm not going to get into a pissing match with you here about that. But I think it's fair to say that we're not in the private plane league.

And a word from our sponsors. And Michael, Wolf and I are back inside Trump's head, examining his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. At any rate, there are two big pieces, magazine pieces, about Jeffrey Epstein at this, at this time, one in Vanity Fair and one in New York Magazine. The one in New York Magazine, 2002, contains a quote from his friend Trump, in which he says, I mean, it really haunts Donald Trump because this quote follows him. He says Epstein is a terrific guy, and he likes his women or girls young, even young,

than I do. Something like that should have been a red flag at the time, which it was not. But they are still, I mean, they are very, very good friends. And especially between New York and Palm Beach. And one of the things that Trump discusses with Epstein at this time, and remember, Trump has no money. So he says to Epstein, you know where you can make a lot of money, by renting your name. Now, that's an interesting, interesting thing. Now, of course, Donald Trump has always done this. All the names on all these buildings are often on buildings that he doesn't own.

It's just a Trump building. He's rented his name. But he also does this in Palm Beach. He uses his name to front for other people. So he's not buying real estate. but because he doesn't have the money. But other people are buying real estate in Donald Trump's name. And he makes this pitch to Jeffrey Epstein.

This is great, you know, you make tons of money. So right now that we intersect with this, because in 2004, Jeffrey Epstein believes he is the top bidder for a property in Palm Beach. It's a $36 million property. And he takes his friend Trump with him to give him some advice on how to move the swimming pool. Have you ever moved the swimming pool? I've never moved to a swimming pool, but there have been properties I've rented where I would have moved the swimming pool had I owned it. Okay, well, he could. Jeffrey Epstein could afford to move the swimming pool.

and he actually valued his friends, his friend Trump's construction acumen. So he brought Donald to see this, give him some advice, at which point Donald goes around behind his back and bids $40 million for the property. Okay. Epstein fully familiar with Trump's final. finances understands that he doesn't have $40 million. So where does this $40 million come from? Epstein is furious about this.

You know, these guys, I mean, they're devoted to their private planes, but the thing that really makes them crazy is real estate. Their quest for real estate, and if they get screwed in a real estate deal, that breaks up any rich guy relationship. Epstein threatens Trump because he knows that this is not his money. I'm going to reveal this. I'm going to go to the press. At that point, and this is 2004, Epstein's problems with the Palm Beach police,

who are now investigating him for allegations that he has, that, that, of, of. So he's having sex with schoolgirls. at this point in 2004, after this real estate, this real estate conflict happens with Trump, Epstein starts to be investigated by the Palm Beach police for this stream of girls and sometimes quite young girls who are in and out of his house. What's happening there? What is, what's going on? which curiously, he was never hiding.

So why did this take so long? But what Epstein believed was that it was Donald Trump who went to the police, because Jeffrey Epstein threatened to strike out at Donald Trump for his activities. So the two are now saying, you're the worst. And forever after, Epstein would believe. that it was Trump who started this his long legal, the long legal journey for him that would end up in prison one time and then prison again and then his, his death. And this was their, they're falling out. And Trump, Epstein for the next quite a number of years, between 2004 and 2008 when he went to jail, Epstein was certainly preoccupied by these legal woes and was certainly blaming this on Trump.

At the same time, curiously, he kept a lot of relationships within the Trump circle. Tom Barrack, one of Trump's closest friends, advisors still to this day in the White House, remained a very close friend of Jeffrey Epstein's, other people within the Trump organization. And that kind of reminded me of what goes on now in the Trump White House. All of these people who work for Donald Trump, nevertheless have a need to talk about him, to describe the weirdness of him, to dis him, to dis him to somebody else. And Epstein was always a very good, you know, you could call Epstein at any time and he'd talk at any length about Donald Trump.

You said that in previous podcasts that Jeffrey Epstein was afraid of Donald Trump. You know, I think that particularly happened as it became clear that he might. might be the president of the United States. I mean, these guys, I think that there was a deep, deep enmity between them at this point. They both had dirt on each other. Yes. I mean, I think that that was part of it. There may be other reasons for this.

I mean, clearly, Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with Donald Trump, spoke about Donald Trump often. and was the first person I knew who in 2015 said if Donald Trump is running for president and if he's serious about this, he will be the president of the United States. I'm something I entirely completely discounted. Although as I started to write more about Donald Trump and started to cover the campaign, Epstein became of more and more a valuable source. and then certainly as soon as Donald Trump got into the White House, where his obsession became even fiercer. And now this is the point just before he gets into the White House,

where Steve Bannon kind of comes in that Steve Bannon is aware that as Donald Trump is running for the presidency in 2016, 60 minutes is, preparing a segment about Donald Trump's relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. So this is back in 2017. 16, before he becomes the president.

Yes. And why this never runs, I don't know. Steve Bannon expected it to run. Maybe Steve Bannon had something to do with it not running. But when Steve Bannon first met Jeffrey Epstein in, I believe it was December 2017, literally the first thing he said was, you were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign. Do you think Jeffrey Epstein was jealous of Donald Trump? Because also at this point, Donald Trump had been on 14 seasons of The Apprentice.

I mean, you know, in the time that he managed to go forward. from being a joke, as you said, in the early 2000s, to suddenly playing a successful businessman on television in The Apprentice with his friend Mark Bennett. I think that he was still up until he became the president of the United States, I think he was still a joke. And that's always one of the remarkable things about this story, this transformation of the joke into the most consequential person on earth happened overnight.

surprising, by the way, no one as much as Donald Trump himself. I remember you saying that, but television confers a charisma and, in his case, validation on someone when he's playing a successful businessman at Trump now. I mean, I think it clearly did with much of the country. It did not ever, however, at any point in New York. So the same people, the same insiders continue to see Donald Trump as an outsider. I mean, he was a reality television star. Can you get any, certainly in terms of stardom, can you get any lower than that?

So one of the things that you have always pointed out is that these two men were the best of friends. They tooled around together. they were constantly hunting for women, various modeling agencies and all sorts of excuses and filters to get to know young women. One of them ends up dead in one of the most notorious prisons

in the whole of America and the other ends up as president of the United States. It's the most remarkable polarized friendship. You know, And the interesting thing was, so Jeffrey Epstein spends much of the first several years of the Trump administration, obsessing about Trump, talking about Trump on a constant basis,

retailing information about Trump to lots of people, to me, for instance, as a journalist, and to leaders around the world. I mean, I think this kind of became part of his currency. He could tell people around the world how Donald Trump thinks and what he would do and how to anticipate what he would do. And he spoke both eloquently and outrageously and comically on the subject. I believe that he had, sometimes you have to pull back and not entirely accept what Jeffrey Epstein says. Yeah, I'm sure he was an unreliable narrator in many ways.

Well, the difficult thing is that he was often so reliable. I mean, that you were shocked. He would tell you what is going to happen well ahead of when it happens and then it happens. But there was a moment that he represented. He told me that he had gone to see Putin, to give Putin advice. And part of that advice was how to deal with Donald Trump. Perfectly possible. And he would have been a good person.

I mean, he was remained right up until his death, a person, one of that inner circle of people who I think knew Donald Trump as well as anyone. And his relationship with Steve Bannon, which really flowered after meeting at the end of 2017, had largely to do with talking about Donald Trump. They both were obsessed with this guy. Now, I think the question is, and I certainly don't know the answer to this, but to what extent did that lead to what happened to Jeffrey Epstein in 2019? In terms of his arrest.

And then a month later, his death. And I think it probably, well, I mean, it occurs, you know, he's arrested by the Donald Trump Justice Department. So what does that mean? And there are two theories. The one theory is that he had started to speak publicly about his relationship with Donald Trump. When you say publicly, where? Where was this showing up? Well, in, you know, and this is, I mean, I come into the story at this point because that story of the breakup of their relationship.

he tells in my book Siege, which was published in June 2019. So that was the second of your four Trump books. It was. And he knew I was published. He gave me, he told me this story and seemed perfectly comfortable with me using this story. But as soon as he read this,

he was in Paris at the time, he got the book in in Paris and read it. He called me up and he said, I think I might have said too much. This is the first time I'm hearing this. I have read Siege, but I haven't read it for eight years. When you're talking about the story of the end of their friendship, do you say Donald Trump was laundering money for the Russians? Yes.

So this is all. And it's sourced to Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein is on the record. Exactly. So this is told through Epstein's eyes. So he's talking publicly, and I think this is the first time, about his relationship with Donald Trump. It's also possible that Trump knows at this point about his relationship with Steve Bannon, who Trump is... It's fallen out with at this stage, right?

Yes. I mean, they are antagonists at this point. And let's take a commercial break. And you're back with Michael Wolf and me, inside Trump's head, a place you may never have expected to be. But here we are. And we're examining his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. So Stephen, from Donald Trump's perspective, if you're inside Donald Trump's head, his campaign sort of guru in Steve Bannon has gone over to the really dark side by hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Possibly, yes. Now, it's all quite possible that Donald Trump has no idea about this, that Donald Trump lives in the split-second moment, and this is of no concern, or not more than a moment's concern. But it is one of those things. And when Epstein is arrested in 2019, and remember, the circumstances of Epstein's arrest are, you know,

are complicated to say the least. You know, he's entered into what's called a non-prosecution agreement with the federal government that happens in 2008. They say we're not going to prosecute you. You're going to plead guilty to state charges, and that acquits you of any federal jeopardy. This is where he pled guilty for, solicitation of a minor for the purposes of prostitution. Yes. So, and prosecuted by, we should say,

Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney, right, in Florida, who became Trump's labor secretary, briefly. Right. So there is, but that is, you know, the, the Justice Department has never abrogated a non-prosecution agreement before. So Epstein certainly doesn't mean. He's aware that things are closing in on him and that, you know, and then he has all these civil lawsuits against them. I mean, things are pretty complicated for him by 2019, but he never for a minute thinks that the federal government is coming after him

because they've agreed not to. But that does happen. He's in July 2019. and this is just a sort of the context, you know, a few weeks after my book, whether my book is involved with this or not, it really occurs a few weeks after my book is published. He's arrested. He's arrested by the federal government. And we should point out that Julie Kay Brown of the Miami Herald was busy writing about the victims in sort of 2018.

So the whole story was coming back into. Very much. the story is the story is alive. Although I also remember that in not long before he's arrested, Steve Bannon says, and Steve Bannon is trying to help him advise him or essentially just being a friend to him and says, and says, you know what you should do,

we should put a pole in the field and find out what people think about you because and then Abandon says because I'm going to guarantee most of the people in the country don't know about you. So that will shortly change. But even after the Miami Herald series and all that, Epstein is still a, he's certainly not the figure that we see, that we see him now. So it's very shocking when he is arrested. Shocking for him. I think shocking for a lot of a lot of people in the legal community. The Justice Department, they just have never done this before. So is this at the behest of Donald Trump? Or another theory related to Donald Trump, which is that the Southern District has is also investigating Donald Trump

at this time. Remember, there are so many investigations going on, Russia, et cetera, et cetera, Mueller, around Donald Trump and coming from the Justice Department. And now they've just arrested Jeffrey Epstein, one of Donald Trump's closest friends. Can they squeeze Epstein for dirt on Donald Trump? And then how long is he in his... A month. And then he's dead. In one of the most suspicious deaths in a prison.

I don't know, ever. So in federal prison, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. This is his federal prison, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Do you think Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide? My position on this is always that it makes no sense. The description of how he would have had to have killed himself makes no sense. makes no sense. I don't see how anyone could kill themselves that way to break your own neck. At the same time, the idea that the most famous, at that moment in time, the most famous

in the federal prison system, the focus of, you know, certainly a half a dozen, maybe a dozen assistant U.S. attorneys, an equal number of FBI agents, and gets, is murdered and no one knows anything. Seems as implausible as the way he would have had to have killed himself. Didn't you speak to him shortly before he died? I got a message from him, yes. He died on Saturday morning, early Saturday morning on that Friday, I got a message from him that was just, I had sent him a note that said something like, you know, how are you? I mean, just, how are you doing? And he said, still hanging around. And he would obviously, within a few hours, be dead with a sheet around his neck. Which might suggest that he had been thinking of doing that. He'd be on suicide watch before. He also changed his. will in the last, in the several days before he died. So yes, you can certainly make a case for that.

Well, he may have died in 2019, but he has lived on in the popular imagination. He mean, he's become, as you have said, frequently, one of the most diabolical figures of the modern age. And he has, from the grave being one of the few consistent themes that unnerves our current president. Very clearly their friendship is something which unnerves Donald Trump. And it pursues him. It continues to pursue him. It could catch him. Who stood to gain from Epstein's death? I don't exactly know how to how to answer this. I mean, first thing we get into, you know, the world of conspiracy, which I think is a dangerous place to go. And the online world is filled with nothing but speculation about this. Well, we're recording this for the holidays on the day the Epstein

files are due to be released, whatever they comprise of. And at the moment, they still haven't been released. So we don't really know. Do you want to take a guess? No, I think that there's going to be tons. I mean, it's just going to be, you know, pieces and pieces and pieces and pieces of a puzzle to be assembled. Well, Michael, no one knows more about this than you do. And it's just a remarkable story. I mean, you couldn't make it up. The Epstein of it all is a remarkable story, but at the center of it, the Epstein and Trump friendship. relationship is certainly it's central to understanding the man who is the most consequential person in the world at this point in time. And as you've always said, one of them ended up dead in a jail in a prison cell and the other ended up as president of the United States. And I have, in so many ways they are the same person.

Well, thank you for that insight. And we will be back. If you have been, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to leave us a comment on YouTube. Please subscribe to our channel on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to subscribe to The Daily Beast, where we are chronicling the Trump presidency with enormous energy and enthusiasm. Are we covering it with enthusiasm?

and perhaps that's not right, but we are covering it with enormous energy and zeal, I would say, and zeal. Michael, what are you planning to do for the rest of the holiday season? Jesus, I don't know, I'm stumped now. I mean, after all of this, I mean, it really is to go through this, you really think, Jesus, it is, it is dark and it's a scary story too. It's a dark and it's a scary story. I mean, the implications of it, well, I don't even want to go there because it is Christmas. Well, we'll go there in the New Year. For now, people should hug their loved ones close and enjoy the holiday season.

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