The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump's Vile Rants About 'Fat Black Women': Wolff

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

Michael Wolff, author of four bestselling books on Donald Trump, joins the Daily Beast’s executive editor, Hugh Doherty, to dissect the former president’s expanding enemies list. From the FBI raid on John Bolton’s home to Trump’s fixation on Black female prosecutors and judges, Wolff lays bare how Trump’s hostility toward Black women has become a defining and pathological theme of his politics. They also dig into the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files—what’s inside, what’s missing, and why Trump’s allies are scrambling to contain the fallout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Epstein is a problem. It could in fact be a mortal problem. So we have to do anything to frustrate that story continuing on. Where we are in that story is that Congress has insisted on seeing some aspects of these so-called Epstein files. So the question is, there's two questions. What are they going to get? And actually, a continuing question never answered is, what? what is in these files. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. I'm Hugh Doherty. I'm back sitting in for Joanna Coles here at Daily Beast HQ in Manhattan.

I'm executive editor of the Daily Beast, and yes, this is my Scottish accent. For anyone struggling to understand, I will be in the comments later to translate. So, happy weekend! And what a week in the life of America? Dominated, of course, by who else but Donald Trump. There's so much to talk about in cover.

and today we are going to go full law and order, special presidents unit with the incomparable Michael Wolf. He is not just the author of four bestselling books but Donald Trump, but also twice every week he guides us into that very dark place he knows all too well on our new must listen podcast inside Trump's head. Michael, welcome. Thank you for taking time away from bringing light to the dark interior that is Trump's head to be with us now. Michael, thank you for joining us this morning, taking time away from that dark place that we know as Donald Trump's head, where you are twice a week. You are inside Trump's head, but you're taking a slight amount of time out to be with us this morning. I'm visiting others in the neighbourhood. I wanted to start this morning with a really dramatic development that the home of John Bolton, Donald Trump's former national security adviser, has been raided by the FBI.

Michael, how much does Donald Trump hit John Bolton? Well, quite a bit, but Donald Trump hates a lot of people quite a bit, which is actually the larger danger here. It's not just John Bolton. It's anybody who Donald Trump hates. So anyone who has crossed Trump is now, and I think that this sends a signal, and there's so much about what's going on in the White House now,

about sending signals. Who's being sued? Who's being investigated? Who's being searched now? And so the FBI went in with a search warrant to John Bolton's house. And basically that's the message is the FBI can go into anybody's house.

I mean, so far in this second administration, I mean, what we have seen on a steady basis is an escalation of, and then we can whatever name you want to apply to this. I hesitate to apply these names because they're so overused, authoritarianism, despotism, fascism. Let's not go there, and let's just say that we are in an utterly unique moment. The President of the United States is using the power of his office to intimidate, to punish, to investigate, to investigate, to chill. I wanted to talk not just about John Bolton, because the Fed's turning up on the doorstep of a formerly very senior national security figure is one thing. But there's been all sorts of enemies gone after this week. And one was

Tish James, who is pretty well known. She's the Attorney General of New York. And she led efforts to investigate Donald Trump when he was out of office. But another one is Lisa Cook. And she's a member of the Board of Federal Reserve governors. And she too has been investigated. And tell us Michael, what do they have in common? There's kind of a double thing going on here. I mean, he has chosen to focus his ire on the Federal Reserve because they have been reluctant to lower interest rates. Now, just understand where the Federal Reserve fits in in this.

The Federal Reserve has rightly had a remarkable amount of independence because its job is not political. its job is economic. And that has been a very, very, very crucial distinction. We don't run the economy on the basis of whatever partisan issues. We run the economy on the basis of economics, numbers, of the complicated formulas that are necessary to maintain economic, stability. Trump clearly, in everything he's done, has been out to change that. He wants the

Federal Reserve under his thumb, under his dominance. He wants to dictate economic policy. So again, we're back into the words, authoritarianism, fashion, whatever the words are. The words you were trying to stay away from. We are outside the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the bounds of traditional good government. And at any rate, the Fed chairman has been subjected to almost daily insults from Trump and in an obvious effort to get him to resign. And now he's focused his ire on this other member of the Federal Reserve Board, this Lisa Cook.

Now, it is also impossible, speaking of Letitia James, also speaking there, to ignore the fact that Lisa Cook is the first black Fed governor. First black female Fed governor, we should say. Yes, sorry. I spent the last two years, more than two years, deeply involved with Trump's campaign. This is reflected in my book All or Nothing. And one of the motifs that was pervasive in the campaign was Trump's, attitude toward black women. And this was partly had to do with all of the, all of his legal

difficulties. Leticia James in New York, Fannie Willis, the prosecutor in Atlanta, Tanya Chutkin, the judge over the January 6th case in Washington. These were all black women. And This became, for Trump, this had particular and special meaning. Black women were coming after him. And that shortly became in his rendition of this as fat black women. I mean, that was almost connected. You couldn't. the animus, the personal animus here, the personal revulsion on Trump's part, the personal

fear, I suppose, that he continued to express. And this was essentially on a daily basis. You know, people around him would call me up and say, up, up, another. fat black women tirade on Trump's part. So again, we're in an entirely new world here. I mean, this is obviously racism, but this is obvious, you know, I want to go beyond that and say this is an obvious pathology. It's an obsession of his.

It lives, you know, we know, one of his staffer said to me, he must dream about fat black women. So again, and you know, this is inside Trump's head, there is something going on there that is deep, sinister, dark, pervasive. And we might not. that long ago have thought that it was something eliminated from American government. This is, we had been cured of this disease, which for so long infected American government and

many, many, many American politicians. But for three generations now, it had seemed like, well, that we were, we, we had had that was a central American accomplishment. We were over that. We had cleansed ourselves of that. And we are back to that, back to this to a profoundly, and in some sense, strictly racial point of view. I just point out to those who have not listened to the last edition of Inside Trump's head, you rightly pointed out that Roger Ailes had described the viewership that he was seeking to read his people as before the Voting Rights Act. And I just urge everybody go back to inside Trump's head, subscribe. It is a really important point. It's worth repeating because I think that it is fundamental.

Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, the leader of Fox News for 20 years, and someone I knew very well, once said to me, which actually in 2016, as Donald Trump was running for president, he said to me, you and the people you know, you live today. You live in this year, 2016. He said, my people, the people who watch Fox News, they live in, he said, 1965. And then with a kind of wink, he said, before the Voting Rights Act. And he went on to make a further point, which was that, you know, that culture moved at different speeds. And the people I knew, or the people lived in New York or however you might describe us, we were at the forefront of culture's speed.

but that a great deal of the country was in, for a great deal of the country, culture moved at a much slower pace. And that was for him a programming point of view. I'm making programming television for people who think like this. But at the bottom of it, it also contained a racial point of view. that here was a population that was not, had not participated or had not much participated in this historic, great historic achievement, certainly from our point of view, of the last three generations.

And I think it's worth talking a bit about, as you rightly pointed out, the first Trump administration, these instincts managed to be toned down or at least not acted on quite as actively because people around Trump were less prone to following all his demands. But this time we've got this kind of odd squad that's out there. We've got Cash Patel who apparently ordered the raid on John Bolton and is certainly taking credit for on social media.

We've got going up against Tish James, Ed Martin Jr., who wears a, Burberry Raincoat inspired by Colombo, who rather bizarrely, his great-great-uncle, was an actor who played Colombo before he died, long before this guy could possibly have met him. And at the root of the mortgage fraud allegations for both Tess James and Lisa Cook, you've got Bill Pulte Jr., who's a construction nepo baby, who has become the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Let's understand that there is no policy here. what is going on here is just the effort to please Donald Trump.

There is. This runs only from one way. What do we have to do to please Donald Trump? Everyone in the Trump administration exists. Their careers are dependent on their daily wives ruled by what Trump wants. nobody has any independence here, zero, zero, zero, and which is an issue with the Federal Reserve. From Trump's point of view, no one should have any independence. He runs the place. Michael, hold that thought.

We are just going to take some messages. And we are back with Michael Wolfe. So do these people, this, as I say, odd squad of Cash Patel and Ed Martin Jr. and Bill Pulte Jr. and so many others, Bondi, obviously, is somebody who's had to authorize the Department of Justice to move on each of those people. Do they take orders or do they... But there is no authorization. The authorization comes from the President of the United States. So that idea, an idea that was well-grained in American government,

that the Justice Department was at arm's length from the West Wing and from the President. It was independent, the whole idea of independence in government. You know, a foundational modern premise has gone, has been wiped out in the seven months of the second Trump administration. Just as a practical, do they go to Trump with these plans or do they execute them and seek to please him? How much? Well, it's both. It's both. He is literally on the phone. Or they may well get their own idea and then we'll, and then we'll go to him like a dog with a bone. And he'll say, yeah, that's, that's great.

Now, we were talking about the theme of, at the top of the show, I introduced it saying it was a Law and Order Special Presidents Unit. But in the other flip side of law and order, the John Bolton raid was just in the morning that the very first of the Epstein files were due to be transmitted from Pam Bondi's Justice Department to the House of Representatives. It looks a bit like a distraction. Isn't that simple? What exactly looks like the distraction? To raid John Bolton's house. Oh, yes. But I don't anticipate, I mean, no, actually, I don't think we should look at it just like that.

I think this is part of a concerted effort to intimidate all perceived enemies of the president. If you are perceived as an enemy of the president, then the policy is we're going to make your life difficult. That's it. That's the policy. Additionally, yes, it has the cream on top, I suppose, of being another headline to counter the Epstein headlines. I mean, that is also a foundational premise at this point. Epstein is a problem. It could, in fact, be a mortal problem. So we have to do anything to frustrate that story continuing on.

Now, where we are in that story is that Congress has insisted on seeing some aspects of these so-called Epstein files. Now, so the question is, what are, there's two questions. What are they going to get? And actually, a continuing question never answered is, what is in these files? So why don't we just spend a few moments actually trying to parse that? Because that's going to be germane to what Congress gets. So these files will, the files, and let's do this in a broader sense, the material the government holds on Jeffrey Epstein will consider,

of the following. There will be depositions supplied by the many, many women who have accused Epstein of sexual abuse. And most

of that material has already been made public. Then there will be the FBI's own investigation of those women. And And it's not all of those women.

It's the women that they have chosen for whatever reason to investigate or vet, you might say. I don't mean to suggest that investigate they are looking for any issues with these women, but they are looking to further delve beyond their own depositions into what they might know, into what kind of witnesses they might make. And from the MAGA point of view, that aspect of this could be problematic because many of these, the FBI may have found issues with some of these women to challenge their credibility.

So from the MAGA point of view, to complicate the story in, any way is something that the administration, and a box that the administration does not want to open. The next aspect of this, which is to me one of the most interesting aspects, is the internal communications in the Justice Department about why they made the decision in 2019

to forsake the non-prosecate, agreement they entered into with Epstein in 2007. So this is a complicated deal, but a big deal. Never before in the history of the Justice Department, a non-prosecution agreement is a common method used, either to get people to testify or in Epstein's case, the agreement was put in place because the Fed said, we won't prosecute you if you plead guilty to a state charge. There is. Signed sealed, that was the agreement. These agreements are never broken for obvious reasons because who would, if the Justice Department breaks them, who would ever agree to them. But they did in this instance. And the question is, is what caused them to do

that? Why? What pressure was brought to bear? Because he knew Epstein was out there. He was obviously talking to you. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Epstein had started to talk, yes. But the other consideration might well be that it was the Southern District of New York, part of the Justice Department, but with a long history of its own independence. Well known as the sovereign district. Exactly. If people have watched billions and other shows, they've seen it's one of the most powerful prosecutorial jobs in the country traditionally has been the Manhattan federal prosecutor. And we know that the Southern District was at that time investigating Donald Trump. As a matter of fact, many people in the Southern District have been fired in the second administration because of that reason. So did the Southern District, did they break this non-prosecution agreement in the hope of getting leverage of leveraging Jeffrey Epstein to deliver.

evidence about Donald Trump. So that's just another aspect of what's going to be in these files, and quite likely a key area that the President Trump White House does not want exposed. Then the other aspect of this would be Jeffrey Epstein's emails. The FBI went into his house, took his computers. Obviously, the emails are there. Those emails will likely implicate a vast number of other people who have not yet been connected to Jeffrey Epstein. They will also expose who Jeffrey Epstein was talking to on a frequent daily basis in the Second Trump administration. and also what Trump friends Epstein was talking about

and of course what are the things that he was talking to them about was Donald Trump. And we will be right back after these messages with Michael Wolfe and we are back with Michael Wolf talking about who else but Donald Trump. One of the things that we all remember what became known as Epstein's Black Book and it was this collection of phone numbers that really is, stopped in somewhere around, I believe, 2007 or eight. I used to have a copy on my desk. It was actually a very useful resource for finding numbers for famous people.

But that's the last we knew. And this is like a whole new treasure trove. You know, as I have tried to point out many, many, many times in the cascade of Epstein information and the truths, in quotation marks that have developed, that black book was not Jeffrey Epstein's black books. That was Galane Maxwell's black books. Anyway, but the emails will be a black book. And he was, one assumes he was a prolific emailer because he was well connected.

Well, yeah, I mean, everybody is a prolific emailer, it turns out. Except Donald Trump, who is a prolific on social media. He doesn't even need to email direct. Exactly. No, good, good point. But then the other category would be just what is on Epstein's computer, just his hard drive, which would give a roadmap to many of the financial questions about Jeffrey Epstein. And also likely, certainly from what I know about Epstein, to connect him and his financial dealings to various regimes around the world,

which might be compromised or even destabilized by this connection to Epstein. So to come back, and I apologize for the long digression here, but I think it is helpful to have an idea of what the government has in its hands. So to come back to what Congress will be getting, I suspect that all they will be getting is a rehash of the depositions supplied by the many women who have accused Epstein of sexual abuse, much of which in some form or another we have already seen. And which we know, because we have seen them, contain really very few ticking time bombs. No, no, no. Mostly we will rehash the information. we have already had about Jeffrey Upps.

And we should say that, of course, that information is horrific, and it's a systematic and predation on women. But what it is not... Even that, that would be part of the distraction. Yes, and I would say something that's priced in. Look at this, and this is so... And this is, you know, we'll rehash, again, it's the rehash. We're going to replay what we know

without going on to what we don't. know which is the point of this exercise. Yes. And I'll just say from the point of view, the Daily Beast first ran stories about this back in 2011. And those stories were about the abuse that Jeffrey Epstein committed. It was by a very report. Those, those stories also were based on these depositions. Exactly. And the point about these depositions, I mean, one of one of the points is that they were their depositions. So they represent necessarily, nobody is cross-examined here. This is lawyers make a case.

And these lawyers who got paid an enormous amount of money to make this case have made it well. But at this point, it becomes a distraction to learning about, the significant other mysteries of Jeffrey Epstein. Now, I just want to kind of wrap up on, you mentioned the significant mysteries of Jeffrey Epstein, but there are significant mysteries this week about what happens next with this attempt at revenge.

Can John Bolton be prosecuted? I know that's a question that nobody, neither you or I know the answer to, but is Trump cognizant of the Pandora's box that he opens up when he orders or at least suggest this revenge? Well, you know, it's very hard to say what Donald Trump is cognizant of. You know, self-awareness certainly is not something that he possesses, or even a broader global awareness is probably not something that he possesses. What he focuses on in these situations,

John Bolton, anybody else he's filing lawsuits against, is the immediate pain, inconvenience, public humiliation. Donald Trump lives day to day. So what happens to this? Is this, is Donald Trump setting out on a course to put John Bolton in jail? I'm sure he would love to put John Bolton in jail, but that's not really the, that's not how he has, how he is looking at this. He is just looking at this as, as I'm going to make life difficult today for John Bolton. Michael, we don't need to make life difficult for you today, but you will be back next week bringing light to the darkness of Trump's head. Michael, thank you for joining us.

Hugh, thank you for having me, and I will see you soon. It's been a pleasure, thank you. So we end on a cliffhanger who is next on Trump's revenge rampage. Are the Epstein files a ticking time bomb or a rusted dud? What will be the next distraction? Stay glued to The Daily Beast for minute-by-minute breaking news. It couldn't be easier to subscribe at the Daily Beast.com and come back for the next thrilling episode of the Daily Beast podcast

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