The Daily Beast Podcast - The Dire Plan Trump Really Has for Legacy: Wolff

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles dissect the glossy Trump Presidential Library video that looks more like a luxury theme park than a legacy project. Wolff recounts a revealing private dinner with Trump, where even mentioning a “library” triggered visible discomfort—until Wolff floated the idea of a Trump theme park, a moment he now suspects helped shape the spectacle Eric Trump is promoting. They then zero in on a single, volatile question: what happens when Donald Trump declares victory in Iran while leaving a critical global oil chokepoint effectively in enemy hands. As the war drags into uncertainty, Wolff argues Trump is cornered between escalation and retreat, with neither offering a clean outcome, while Coles tracks the ripple effects inside a MAGA movement beginning to fracture under pressure. The episode exposes a White House operating in bursts of instinct rather than strategy, with key figures disappearing from view and others maneuvering for what comes next. It then pivots to Wolff’s latest Jeffrey Epstein installment, revealing a ruthless competition between Epstein and Trump for proximity to power involving Bill Clinton, and a deeper look at how media, money, and ego fueled Epstein’s rise. The result is a portrait of influence colliding with consequence at a moment when the stakes are no longer abstract. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the few questions I managed to get in was asking him about his presidential library. In his horror, he was silent. I rushed in to kind of apologize or to cover my faux pa. I said, a presidential library, it can be more like, and then out of nowhere it came to me. I said, a theme park. It could be, it could be the Trump theme park. the look on horror on his face passed and then a look of I would say something close to wonder crossed his face and then you might be responsible I might I very I very well might Michael

Joella I wish that we were together in the studio it's Tuesday and we should be this week you're coming in on Thursday that's two weeks in a row that you've messed with our real in-person conversation, which I much prefer. It's Passover this week. I'm coming in for Passover on tomorrow night, so I will be there on Thursday. Okay. Passed over. Should I explain that to you? No, but you could explain what we try and do three times a week. You're Michael Wolf. You've written four books on Donald Trump, two books on Rupert Murdoch.

I'm Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of The Daily Beast. I've been a journalist for years. And, well, you tell people what we're trying to do and where we're going. I still, but just let me know. I still don't know what a chief content officer is, a totally made-up title in this, I guess in this new social media age. I think of you as an editor-in-chief in old-fashioned, the old-fashioned way, boss. Maybe I'll call you boss, as we used to do.

Boss is good. We have a guy here who's been here since the beginning of the Daily Bees called Michael Daly. He's a very, very good reporter. He calls me boss. So, yeah, no, but I think it is important to say once again what we are doing, because I think we are doing something different from virtually what everybody else who is covering Donald Trump and every other journalist everywhere is covering Donald Trump and basically only Donald Trump because he is. is the story that has crowded out all other stories. But my feeling has been always since the beginning, and I've been doing this now for more

than 10 years, is that he is the most unique figure ever to take, to run the government or to aspire to run the government and to take our attention because he is a man who live solely in the moment. What he does, what he says, what he decides is all dependent on what is going through his head at any particular moment. And there is no pattern, no logic, no, in certainly no intellectual foundation for what goes through his head. But nevertheless, this is the thing that is the central to all of our lives. So to understand that, to understand that he works in a way and according to a theory, if you will, that no one in a position of this kind of leadership has ever worked.

And so to understand that, to be able to say, okay, this is the strange and peculiar thing that is motivating him at any given moment is a kind of a civic duty. And that's what we're doing now. Well, I like the idea of it being a civic duty. And I come at it from the point of view of character is destiny. He is a fascinating character. He's a stride, as you say, all our lives. and I've always found politics actually quite boring to read about and to listen about because it's always been about policy, it feels dry, we know that politicians are hypocritical,

they don't say what they mean a lot of the time, a lot of the time they're on the take, but it's all sort of going on in the background. And what I find fascinating about Donald Trump is not only that, and when I say we, I don't mean me particularly, but, you know, 70 million voters at the last election still bought the idea that Donald Trump was a successful businessman because that's how he'd been portrayed by Mark Burnett on the reality show The Apprentice. I think it's a huge part of why he got elected. And he's weirdly transparent. I mean, the thing that one has to remember is that, you know, if you ever wanted to get hold of someone in the Biden government or indeed the president himself,

you would have to go through 30 layers of people to get there. A lot of journalists have Donald Trump's cell phone number and he picks up. Right. There would be no there there. But Donald Trump calls reporters. You can call Donald Trump and he will pick up the phone if he's not in the middle of bombing Iran and perhaps he would even pick it up if he was in the middle of bombing Iran. So that's what makes him so much more fascinating to cover. And the people around him are interesting too because as you're frequently pointing out, none of them would get a job in any kind of regular cabinet. This is not a regular time and the entire world right now is in full to what he will do next. And he doesn't seem to know what he's going to do next. Anyway, for those of you who haven't listened or watched the podcast before, that's what we're trying to do here. We're not trying to cover it in a New York Times or Wall Street Journal way. Though we obviously we read them and we appreciate what they do. No, no, I don't appreciate what they do.

Quite the opposite. I knew you were going to say that. I think we're partly in this mess because The New York Times does not have the wherewithal and specifically does not have the language to, you know, to call a moron a moron. And so it continuously weaves an essential rationale for what he's doing when there is no rationale. So that's what we're here to remind everybody that this has happened, this enormous historical moment has happened on a totally random basis. What's going to happen? What's going to happen? Today in Iran or tomorrow in Iran, random. No rhyme nor reason. So the New York Times can't have a headline.

No rhyme nor reason in the White House. President is nuts. I mean, all of these kinds of things, which would be more accurate than what the New York Times says. They can't say just because, They don't have that language. Well, and the New York Times, I think, never took his campaign as seriously as they should have done. And they seemed astonished both times when he won. Anyway, we don't need to worry about the New York Times. I need to make a huge apology for something I got wrong last week. When we were discussing Michelle Piper and you said, where she come back from, what do you remember her from?

I foolishly said Casino. And I think we probably got 2,000 comments pointing out. that, of course, she wasn't in casino. That was Sharon Stone. Michelle Fifer was actually in Scarface, another Mafia movie. I've not seen Scarface. I'm assuming it's a mafia movie. What can I say?

All blondes, they look alike. No, Scarface is not a mafia movie. You're going to get it. Okay, what is Scarface about? What is Scarface about? I don't watch violent movies. I don't watch violent movies. Oh, my God.

I'm not even going to address this. This is. What is it about? Well, it's about cocaine dealers in Florida. Oh, it's about cock. I didn't know that. I thought it was, it sounded to me like it was about the math. I mean, in Miami, it's the great, it's the great Miami drug film.

Okay, well, I haven't seen it. I have seen Casino. I totally got Sharon Stone confused with Michelle Fiverr. Brian DePama, by the way, who I know, happened to know is a faithful listener. And a faithful listener of inside Trump's head? Yes. Oh, good. Well, shout out to Brian.

And Brian, I'm sorry. I haven't watched stuff. He lives down the street. Okay, cool. Well, there you go. So, anyway, I'm sorry I got that wrong. And I have seen Michelle Fifer and lots of things. I hesitate to say The Witches of Eastwick because that wasn't a great movie.

But she was in that with Cher and Susan Sarandon. Are you sure? Have you checked this? I actually did watch that. I watched it like 40 years ago, though, I think. Anyway, I apologize. And thank you to everybody that pointed it out was a lot of people. And just to say, don't forget, we are in.

independent media. So we appreciate your support. Feel free to press the subscription button on your wherever you get your podcasts because we're, hopefully, we're about to hit 600,000 subscribers, actually, possibly by the end of the week. And I think the week after next, Michael, we hit our 100th episode of Inside Trump's Head. So I feel like we should do something special for it. Do you have any ideas? If anybody has any ideas, please suggest. It could be some more limerick, some more poems? You would have think in 100 episodes we would have gotten to the heart of this man. Well, maybe we have, and it makes no difference.

Maybe there isn't a heart. Maybe there isn't a heart. But I tell you what we are going to do. We are going to now play, and this is complicated for the people who are listening, although you will get a blast of music. So last night, Eric Trump released a video which he says he has sped. the last six months putting his heart and soul into this project. So please, let's take it away. Oh, magnificent music, which in fact we discovered is called Limitless. It's by Aleko Romia and it's a royalty-free song.

You know, I'm not sure anybody has spent enough time on the effect of of everybody in the world being able to make a cheesy video. The whole world is just cheesy videos everywhere. Can you just explain what Eric Trump has spent the last six months in his heart and soul on for people who didn't see it? Because it's... Yeah, well, it's the... This is a model.

This is, I mean, what you see in the video is a tower. It actually kind of looks like the Freedom Tower in New York City that replaced the World Trade Center. But this building does not exist. This is just a model of the prospective Trump presidential library or the Trump post-presidential library. So in a way that is good news, which is to say that it is, it does acknowledge, there is an acknowledgement here on the part of the Trump family that there will be a post-presidency.

there will not be an eternal Trump presidency, in other words. He leaves office and he will do what other presidents have done is to build a library. And I actually have a story about this. In after he was defeated in 2020, in the spring of 2021, when Trump, for reasons that will always astound me and bewilder me, invited me to have dinner with him, in Marlago. I went down and before dinner, we had a long conversation, very long, like three hours. Some typical Trump couldn't shut up, kept going. And at one point, one of the few questions I managed to get in was asking him about his presidential library. Remember, he's out of office. He is no longer the president.

He's in this moment of post-presidency when presidents, former presidents, turned to thinking about their legacy and their library. So I brought this up and he looked at me with horror. And that was, to me, the first indication and the strongest indication that in his mind he was not at all finished with being president. So do not bring up a presidential library, which means you are finished with your presidency. But there, I suddenly, in his horror, he was silent, which was really rare. Well, that's really unusual. And I was kind of discombobulated, and so I rushed in to kind of apologize or to cover my faux pa about the library. and saying, you know, a library doesn't, a presidential library doesn't have to be a library.

Because suddenly it stuck in my head that that's what he was objecting to, library books. I said a presidential library, it can be more like and then out of nowhere it came to me. I said a theme park. It could be, it could be the Trump theme park with all kinds of, you know, they can experience the Trump world. and the look on horror on his face passed and then a look of, I would say something close to wonder crossed his face. So you might be responsible for his own strategy. I might.

And then we had certainly a five or six minute conversation about what a Trump theme park might be like. restaurants, hotels. It was a... Casinos. Yes, it was a vision. Things going bankrupt. Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump champagne.

And I think what is happening now, what they are building, I might have played a significant part in this. Michael Wolf. It's sort of a remarkable building. I'm assuming it's, as they say, a mix of residential and office units. And it's got those funny little people that architects videos always have now,

imagining people using this space. There's a big garden. There's a huge American flag that's rolling down the front of it. Enormous Trump name. It feels to me like something you would see in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, very tall, towering over the Miami skyline.

And, well, it doesn't look like, it would have a single book in it. No, but it will be, and I'm sure that this is part, that whatever is going on here, whatever the legacy proportions of this are, I'm sure they are also attentive to the Trump family money-making opportunities. Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay

with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of good? The best conversion of the world. The incredible system of of Pago of Shopify facilitates the companies in your website, in the radio and in whatever

that is music for your ears. No, you'll be more whiltas. Your business will be a super-exito with Shopify. Empezae. Start your period of time per year in Shopify.es bar records. Of course, because they've immediately opened

the Trump Library, the Presidential Library Fund. People can I think the lowest number that you could give was 10,000. And I'm sure there will be plenty of sponsorship opportunities. I almost wonder if we should avail ourselves of a sponsorship opportunity and do the inside Trump's headroom. Okay. We can podcast from there when it's built.

I mean, who knows? It's going to be built faster, I'm sure, than the Obama Library, which opens this summer and has been a hideous journey for the Obamas. and frankly, it's not a very attractive building. You know, I would like to see some reporting on that. What happened here? Well, the swamp has done a lot of reporting on it. David Gardner, our chief Washington correspondent, has done a lot of reporting on it, actually.

Well, tell me. I mean, it's been, well, it's been delayed. Well, what are the, the delays have been caused by construction, by what? Construction issues by lawsuits inevitably. It's complicated. I now, of course, can't remember the details because my head's full of what's happening in the war in Iran. But I will find the details and we can discuss on Thursday. But it's not been by any means an easy process for them.

And eight years on, it should have been opened. They've settled on a phenomenally ugly structure. I don't know. I think it was supposed to look modern. You know, it was supposed to represent the digital age as opposed to a library stuffed full of old moldering books. Maybe in the end the Obama's turned out not to have any taste either. Well, that's possible, actually.

Anyway, let me come back to you with that because it's an interesting story, the Obama Library, but it does in theory eventually open this summer. but it's been wrought with lawsuits, as I'm sure Trump's will be too. And dare I say, because it's not exactly on the horizon, the Bush and Clinton libraries, where are they? Do they exist? Well, the Clinton libraries in, yeah, in Arkansas, in Little Hope. And is it a big building?

Is it a? I don't know. It's a great question. I've never been. I haven't knowingly been to Arkansas. And I'm sure you probably went there with Bobby Kennedy, didn't you, back in the day? No, no. I know you went to Alabama.

We were in Mississippi. Oh, I thought you were in Alabama. Oh, maybe it was Alabama. No, Muscle Show. No, it was Mississippi, actually. Okay. I promise you, you said Alabama. I might have.

Anyway. But the other thing I forgot, okay, the other thing I forgot to mention is the will, of course. It was Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. But I will, I know close observers of this podcast would remember that, I think. But the other thing that the Trump Library will have is a golden statue of Donald Trump, waving at people.

So a bit like, do you remember those huge statues of Saddam Hussein that got pulled down very early in the American invasion of Iraq? It sort of reminded me of one of those hand sort of waving. You know, I'm going to propose a different outcome here because I think it is possible, certainly as possible, that we are now in the midst of things going incredibly wrong for Donald Trump, that when he exits this presidency, which he will exit, it will be in. in some form of disgrace and of massive unpopularity and of, of, which will surely limit his post-presidential, the post-presidential awe that he is expecting. Okay, well, that leads me to read his Trump, the truth social, which he fired off this morning in a sort of weird schoolboy rage. And this is obviously about the straight of Hormuz, which is still closed. And the Americans are, as we understand it, trying to decide whether or not to call victory, pull out, but leave the strait of Hormuz in an

uncertain position. Okay, and this is him sort of tweeting out, I think, to the European countries. Build up some delayed courage. Go to the straight and just take it. You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil. Okay. So actually, the key thing that is obviously wrong here is that the hard part is not done. The easy part is done. And what he is saying and what they are now laying out is that we will declare victory, go home, and we will leave the Strait of Hormuz under control of the Iranians. Now, that is, understand, the Iranians have now claimed this as part of their territory, which is entirely new.

That did not exist before the war. So what the war will have accomplished is to give the Strait of Hormuz to the Iranians. They have control of that. They did not have control of it before, but that's what the war will have accomplished. To let the Iranians control, have absolute control over 20% of the world's oil, to keep the world in effectively a stranglehold. That's what Donald Trump will have accomplished. And just to remind people, 20% of the world's oil flows through the straight of Hormuz,

which, of course, most people had never even heard of before the Americans started bombing five and a half weeks ago. So Michael, you know, what's going on inside Donald Trump's head as he looks out over this thing? He's alternately said he wants the Iranians to declare unconditional surrender, which they're clearly not going to do. Hegs, he's already declaring it a victory. Pete Hegzeth is going around flapping his pecks, saying it's all marvelous. What actually is happening in Donald Trump's head? Well, you know, I mean, I think that he went into this with, I was going to say the best of intentions, but that seems weird. the best of military intentions.

That is to say, Donald Trump, the asymmetric president, has now waged, is now waging a perfectly traditional war. So he is doing, there was a famous book written about the Vietnam War called The Best and the brightest. And essentially what that said is that all these smarty pants guys, these Harvard guys, and and these corporate chief kind of guys were unable to fight this functionally rag-tag band of guerrillas from North Vietnam. And ever since, basically, we've understood that that was, that war had significantly changed,

The idea of bombing your way to victory, of bombing your way to victory, of bringing heavy troops in to clear the field ahead of you was a way that didn't necessarily work anymore. So Donald Trump's dumb and dumbists have are so dumb as to. I love the juxtaposition of dumb and dumbest against the best of. as to imitate the best and the brightest who we have long since understood were, in fact, dumb and dumbest. So the cycle here is kind of extraordinary. But I think that's what gave Donald Trump the confidence to go in and bomb, as he kept saying, the hell out of people, because brighter people had made plans before.

all this in Baghdad and it didn't work. Again and again. So they're just doing what doesn't work. And now, in that there's there's this other added thing here that no one had told Donald Trump about, partly because he didn't pay attention to the war in Ukraine. I mean, he kept brushing this off. I'm going to solve it in a day. Pay no attention.

Not, not, not, not interested. And I think, I think from a, from a. A distant perspective, we will look back and say, what was the important event of our time in it? And one of those important events will be the war in Ukraine because it changed the nature of war. It's suddenly the war of the war in Ukraine began inaugurated the age of drones, cheap drones. So, so. Well, we've used drones in Afghanistan. No, well, not not not remotely at the level that they are being used in in Ukraine and not remotely in the in the way that they can be assembled by almost anybody.

I mean, this is this is entirely, entirely a new, a new, a new factor in waging war. I mean, a factor so great that it is that is destabilizing the very nature. of the power of the U.S. military against an enemy which has no power except cheap drones, which the Iranians do, in which they have clearly paid attention to what the Ukrainians have done. So in this situation, in the paradigm here, we are Russia and the Iranians are Ukrainians. Ukraine. So we underestimated the enemy and Trump is now trying to figure out what to do. And he probably, as you say, he may just sort of move from moment to moment without any clear indication of what he's going to do.

Well, right at this moment, I mean, he has, I mean, he has this, you know, there is his deadline, which people keep coming back to, although the guy has never stuck to any deadlines ever, of four to six weeks. we are now at week four, slightly more than week four. Well, Saturday will be week six. That would have been six weeks. So we come up to the deadline. What is he going to do?

Now, remember, at the same time, we are amassing all kinds of troops in the region. What is he going to do with them? The truth is, he has no idea. He just doesn't know. But he does, I think, increasingly have an idea that this is a significant problem for him. How does he solve this problem? Well, he only has really two alternatives, more or less. And we don't know. I mean,

everybody can sort of shrug at this point. What will he do? Will we invade the country, or will we retreat from the country? But in any of Any event, if we retreat from the country, we leave the Iranians in a, you know, in a, in a, you know, I'm trying to, I mean, it's a complicated position that we lead them because, leave them, because obviously the leadership has been decimated. The, the infrastructure, 11,000 targets that we have, that we have bombed. But at the same time, the leadership stays in place and they now have this lock on the world's oil. So what have we accomplished? I mean, that is going to be the question afterwards. And the question Donald Trump, one would hope, is going to have to answer. Well, and perhaps because it's an existential fight for the Iranians, they also seem to have figured out that Donald Trump says a lot, doesn't always

mean a lot. You can push back on him. And every time he says, well, we're negotiating with the Iranians and it's going well, they issue a statement saying, no, we're not negotiating. It's not going well, which is also pretty amusing. And nobody seems to know who we are negotiating with. Nobody knows who's in charge. Yeah. So what happens? I mean, what, I mean, the larger question is, what price does Donald Trump pay for this? This is obviously a mistake to have waged this war. Having made that mistake, the war is obviously not producing, not achieving the goals that he outlined for it to achieve. And we are still yet on the abyss of not knowing what to do, which way to go. So how is this, Michael, how is this impacting Maga? When you talk

to people from the MAGA world. What are they saying? Because I'm hearing two things. One is that MAGA is coming round to this and one is that MAGA is splitting over this. I'm trying to see if I can reconcile those two things. Maga does not have any place else to go. So there's a certain kind of of necessary begrudging acceptance. At the same time, MAGA is going to have to find someplace else to go because Donald Trump is not going to be here forever. So you have a significant group, MAGA group, that is positioning itself against for the future. And I think that was one of the things you saw at CPAC, enormous.

disgruntlement with what's going on and in great uncertainty about how to handle it, but also a great deal of doubling down on the maga of it all. So there was an interesting thing at CPACS where Paxton, who's running for the Senate in Texas. And there's a real who would be the candidate, the Republican candidate most easy to beat for the Democrats. And he is running against a much more traditional Republican, a, you know, a rhino type. John Cornyn. Right.

and who Trump has basically concluded he ought to back because the seat otherwise may well be imperiled. But the MAGA people, the MAGA base, are insisting on Paxton and booing Cornyn, really. So again, it's doubled down. We are MAGA. We are pure. We have a future beyond Donald Trump. And it should be pointed out that Ken Paxton is almost more MAGA than Trump. I mean, he's a crazy candidate.

No normal person, I think, would vote for him, which is why Trump finds himself in the position of having to probably support John Cornyn because otherwise they could lose the Senate. Right. And he cannot now do this because the MAGA people are lined up so. They are so dedicated in their opposition to Cornyn and for Ken Paxton. Yeah, it's a really interesting corner of the world. So Maga is certainly a thorn in Donald Trump's side, and I think that will grow.

I mean, we're, you know, and it will, you know, the, I mean, there are two things there. I mean, the war is not helping things, but also the fact that Donald Trump is a lame duck. And if MAGA is going to have a future beyond this administration, and I tend to believe they will not have a future beyond this administration, but they certainly recognize that in order to have this future, they have to double down on their own purity. So we had a very good story in The Beast pointing out that almost no member of the cabinet had been on television recently. We know that this is a cabinet that loves to talk to the press and berate the press and attack the media and say everything's the media's fault, but they've been missing in action since the beginning of the war. What's happening with Stephen Miller? We've got a new head of Homeland Security in Mark Wayne Mullen. Stephen Miller seems to have gone quiet.

You know, I mean, I think Stephen Miller is just taking cover under the war. I don't see any indication that there is less Stephen Miller in what's going on in this White House. And in fact, the push against birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is being led by Stephen Miller. And that is now now before the Supreme Court, I think, this week. Yeah, I think we get a decision tomorrow so we can discuss it more in full hopefully on Thursday. I mean, but Stephen Miller is one of the, if not the leading, well, certainly one of the leading voices in this, in this White House. And it's an interesting thing because, I mean, let's characterize this. I think that you can safely, without fear of much contradiction,

say that at the highest levels of the White House, there is a kind of official white supremacist. And, you know, one of the things I remember, especially in the first administration, but still going on, is that he had this, he would go around and really nobody wanted to quite listen to this. he had this theory about about about the white majority in the U.S. and that that would go away. And then he had a kind of numbers matrix of what would have to happen in order to white people to still remain the majority in America.

And that was a combination of immigrant. of immigration that had to be stopped and of and of the level of deportations that had to happen and it was a kind of weird a weird math that disguised what what one person in the White House

described to me as as Stephen's masturbatory white race fantasies so this is still This is who is the person who is at the, you know, one of, certainly one of the most significant voices in this administration. And that goes to all birthright citizenship is a major thing. I mean, they do, they do see that. Now, this is, this is something that, that the country is overwhelmingly in favor of. It's a fact of life that we have lived with for, um, for, um, for. for for years. Yes. 150 years.

Yeah. It is what so many people, you know, I mean, a significant portion of the American population has, in fact, counted on. And now these people are talking about getting rid of it, gone. And one would think that, I mean, the language, the constitutional language is so clear that one would think the Supreme Court would say, yeah, yeah, you know, fuck you. But, you know, this is Donald Trump's court. Yeah, although they all have their own immigration stories too. I still don't understand how J.D. Vance, who's married to Ushah Vance, whose parents came from India and who, who are. has three children with Usha and has another on the way can sit at the same table as Stephen

Miller. What has happened to J.D. Vance? He seems to have just vanished. You know, well, I think that he has, I mean, apparently he's going to take a role in a, in the negotiation with the Iranians, if there is a negotiation. But isn't that only because the Iranians have said that they don't want to discuss anything with Jaros. and Steve Wittaker. Well, who knows? Who knows? But I think it's, I think it's, I actually, I think it has a more political a basis here.

I mean, Vance represents the MAGA, no forever war's view. So best to put him into this situation to theoretically represent MAGA and also to, from Marco Rubio's point of view, involve him in this, make him complicit, this word that is frequently used, in what's going on there. So they don't want J.D. Vance out on his own as representing Maga Purity. Okay, so let's talk about your part two of your Epstein diaries, which I really enjoyed reading. You're getting lots of comments on them, lots of people really engaged with them. And this is where you talk about his trip to Africa with Bill Clinton. And his decision, brilliantly using his plane as bait for Bill Clinton,

to become one of Clinton's post-office, post-presidential friends, which actually Donald Trump is furious about, because he wanted to become the dominant friend of Phil Clinton. It's a kind of interesting thing. I mean, one of the things, and this will be, so anyway, this is a series that I am doing on Substack on a weekly basis, telling the story about what I know about Jeffrey Epstein from the beginning, when I first met him in 2000, through to his death in 2019.

And I'm going to be doing this on a weekly basis. like an old 19th century form. I'm Trollope or Dickens. Well, it's a cliffhanger. It's a cliffhanger series. And the, but one of the interesting things is this, the incredible competition between Trump and Epstein, I mean, beginning in the late 80s and running through to 2004.

But part of this was, this competition they had over who would be best friends with Clinton. I mean, they both had a big crush on the guy. You know, he was both because of his incredible political talents and because of flying so near the sun. This was their kind of guy. And it was, and it was Epstein who managed to insert himself with his plane, in the Clinton entourage and much to Trump's annoyance.

Well, and you have the trip to Africa with Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, and Kevin Spacey. Again, another man that's lived very close to the, I wouldn't say son, but certainly close to the edge, repeatedly accused of all sorts of things that he's never been found guilty of, we should say. And then your own visit to Epstein's house and your, and Epstein's, it should be said, apparent seduction of you because he just talks to you about yourself for an hour. And you leave a journalist who, a man who asks questions all the time. And I've certainly sat in many rooms where you ask a question, the room goes silent. And then everybody feels obligated to answer and give you stories.

But you leave his house the first time thinking, gosh, I haven't asked him a single question. And then it becomes apparent a year later when he's trying to figure out how to get people to write about him in the way that he wants to be written about. So in New York Magazine and Vanity Fair, that he really is trying to solicit your advice to get the best possible kind of profile about himself. And he's pretending he doesn't want press. Yeah, well, I mean, that he does want press. Yeah, I mean, that was the interesting thing because it was like these people, these report, you know, because he suddenly, it's because of the Clinton flight that, that he suddenly becomes noticed.

The New York Post writes a story about him, who's this guy we never heard of with a big plane ferrying Bill Clinton around. And then other, because the, you know, the presses are lemmings. So suddenly Vanity Fair and New York Magazine are saying, okay. this guy must be important. Let's write about him. And so he calls me up. And this is, you know, this was sort of, I mean, he had called me up once after the, the trip to, that I, that I talk about in the first, first chapter, he had taken a group of, a group of people out to a tech conference in California. And then he had called me up after that for a cup of tea for a reason that I couldn't quite figure out. except to ask me about what I did and to talk about the media. And then about a year later, calls me up again and for advice. So what should I, the media is calling me. I don't want to be in the media.

What do I do? And I gave from the advice that I always give everybody who says they don't want to be in the media, which is to say, don't return the media's calls. But of course, he did return their calls. And precisely what he wanted was to be in the media. He wanted to be famous. He wanted his moment of notoriety, which was extremely strange, if you think about it, because here's a guy who lived a shadow business life and a nefarious sexual life.

So he was just effectively exposing himself. But I think at that moment in time, and this would have been in 2002. So before he'd done any jail time in Florida, which was 2008. So this would have been, and I think that there was this moment in time when all of these guys, when media currency was among the highest, publicity was the occurrence. of the time. And I think he wanted that, like they all did. Well, and of course it was pre-social media. So you have more control over the media.

And a piece in Manity Fair or a piece in New York magazine meant something and wasn't likely to be torn apart and distributed clip by clip all over social media. I think people are much more wary about it now. But back then, as you say, it was a currency of the time and something that Donald Trump had really mastered. It's always slightly depressing seeing who presidents hang out with when they leave office, isn't it? I mean, I remember being slightly disappointed when the Obama's left the White House and then the next thing you knew they were kite surfing in NECA with Richard Branson.

Well, you know, I mean, it's a kind of, I mean, first, yeah. I mean, all of these guys together seem, um, seem always unseemly, but I'm trying to think it is now at this moment in time where I think that that's, that's, that is, that is much more of the case. I think then there was still, we still lived in an age of reflected glamour. That has gone away entirely. Actually quite the opposite, in which everybody who you know of, everybody whose head is above the, above ground level is tainted and suspect. And it is entirely new, unexpected, and, and in the situation that still, I think, people in public life have not come to, come to grips with. And a, a, a,

situation obviously affecting people who go into public life. Right. Tainted and suspect. Well, tainted and suspect, I found it a very good read and I can't wait for next week. And I like the cliffhanger. It's a bit like sort of HBO releasing its shows once a week. Yeah, well, you know, the interesting is to be able to write this from inside to tell this as a story and not look at this as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, a set of revelations. I mean, this is, I mean, Jeffrey Epstein happened to be a real person, living a real life as disreputable as it might have been. It is, it is in that 19th century Trollope Dickens kind of way, a life in the city, a life of power, a life among other people who are also grasping for power. I mean, ultimately a story about, about, um, about ambition and successful ambition and thwarted ambition.

Well, and about sex and about an industrial-sized network of young women. It is a very, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what everybody, that's just the obligatory thing that you have to say. No, no, no, that's the undercurrent of the whole thing. I mean, that's why it's interesting as it is. I don't think it's the undercurrent of the whole thing is, is power, a more. moment in time when power was being seized by a whole new set of people, you know, I mean, I think our world was being remade at this, at this time. And yes, Jeffrey Epstein was doing

all kinds of nefarious things on the side, but in the main, he was trying to make himself part of this, of this new world of power. I mean, there's a kind of of thing, even in this thing, you know, I mean, he talks to me, as he's telling me about, at one point, he's criticizing Trump's media strategy and says he has no message. And I say to him asking the obvious question, and your message is. And then he brings up a book and he has the book there. It's a book by Walter Isaacson. And it's about a set of people after the second. World War, super establishment people, in and out of government, from important families who basically made, you know, remade or helped remake the world order after the Second World

War. And it was suddenly like, whoa, he sees himself as this kind of, this kind of person, this kind of person operating in the in the in sort of the back rooms. So it was a time also of, it turns out, incredible delusion. Are you still there? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here. I'm still thinking. I don't like the way you dismiss the whole women thing. I think the women thing is much bigger than you realize.

And it's also how he baited a lot of guys, a lot of, a lot of rich. man who would come to his house and Jeffrey would set them up with women. I am just trying to see this story in in much broader terms. And I'm trying to see it, see it from inside, from in a sense, the way he saw it. So it's not to at all, at all, at all downplay the women and the women who have been victimized in this situation. but to offer a different way of seeing this. We don't have to see one story the same way.

And there's an enormous amount of pressure. Of course not. Enormous amount of pressure to see this story the way from a particular political or ideological or or the social media sees this in one way. I'm able to see it in a different way, and that's just the contribution I'm making, you know, better or worse, a different view. Right. And I find your version incredibly interesting and incredibly readable. And I urge everybody listening and watching to read it because it really is good. And I noticed you were number one on substack this week because people are enjoying it. Epstein is getting away with anything in my version.

I think it actually probably explains, helps explain why he did what he did in a way that is, that I think has been difficult to understand. Well, and I think, you know, another way of looking at his life is the Virginia Juffrey book. That gave me insight into him and into Maxwell, who's gone quiet now. I mean, who knows what's going to happen to her, whether or not she's. She serves her sentence in her prison camp in Texas where she was removed after, or where she was moved to after Todd Blanche, you know, as we've talked about, went to interview her for two days last summer. Anyway, I think if you read the Virginia Drew Frey book and you read your excerpts or your cliffhangers side by side,

you get an interesting perspective on a very strange guy. But I can't wait to read next weeks. And if you have been, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe to The Daily Beast. We're independent media, so we really appreciate your support. Feel free to leave us a comment on your favorite part of this conversation. What do you think Trump is going to do in Iran? I wonder if we should have a, we should crowdsource some solutions for him, Michael.

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