The Opinions - Trump, Epstein and a Stinging SCOTUS Dissent

Episode Date: July 19, 2025

This week on the “Opinions” round table, the national politics correspondent Michelle Cottle and the columnists David French and Jamelle Bouie discuss the right’s implosion over the Trump administration’s decision to close the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and how the Supreme Court handed Trump another win.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Alison Bruzek. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Vishakha Darbha, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opin. And I'm here with columnists, Jamel Bowie and David French. Hi, guys. Hi, Michelle. Hello. Are we ready? Because we have a lot of ground to cover.

It's been a big week. It has been a week of ups and downs for the Trump administration. So I want to talk about an up, which is the huge expansion of President Trump's power this week, specifically the Supreme Court's order that he can effectively dismantle the Department of Education. But there's also been a serious and quite spicy downer. And that is the ripping apart of the MAGA right over the Epstein investigation. And as always, I should say that we are recording on a Thursday afternoon. So who the heck knows where things will be by the time we reach your ears.

So let's jump in with the Epstein uproar first. To recap for people who have not been following this drama, Trump has been telling his supporters basically drop it. Drop this obsession with the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Epstein is, of course, the financier who died in jail in 2019, some say mysteriously, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. So for years, Trump and many of his supporters have been fanning the flames and clamoring for the release of undisclosed Epstein files, including a so-called client list. But now, Trump has totally reversed course.

Now, Jamil, before I let David take us down the MAGA wormhole. Do you got a quick reaction to this backlash? Do I have a quick reaction to this backlash? I've just been watching it with real fascination. I wasn't following this too much either, and my sort of native anti-conspiracism led me to be like, this is kind of just a bunch of nonsense, but I am genuinely fascinated by two things.

The first is how this is the thing that seems to be fracturing the MAGA coalition. And I suppose it's a matter of live by the conspiracy, die by the conspiracy, you know? The second thing is that if you were to envision a response to any accusation that made it seem like you were guilty, I can't think of a more sort of like apt example of it than what, how Trump is behaving right now, right? Like, Trump is behaving exactly like someone who is trying to hide something, telling people that it's a hoax. He's called it, called it, like the Russia hoax, which for me at least is sort of like, oh, well, that it's true then, right? Saying, you know, it's the fault of the Democrats, it's the fall of Biden.

I mean, everything, the way he is visibly panicking just makes it seem as if, oh, well, maybe it's not a crazy conspiracy theory. Maybe there's like, there's like real stuff here. David, I know you've been following this. Oh, big a deal is it? Come on. Y'all. So here's the question. You say you want to go down the MAGA rabbit hole.

Oh, I want to go. Do you want to walk into the opening of the cavern and sort of shine a torch around or do you want to go actually spulunking? Because this thing is deep. Head first. Just go. Let's be a little bit, we'll do a middle range. So I think the way to think about this is to think about Epstein. in two contexts. We'll call them the little Epstein theory and the big Epstein theory. So the little

Epstein theory is, look, this is a very real crime, unlike a lot of the stuff you've heard of from before, like Pizza Gate and all of this other stuff, very, very real crime here. The grooming and praying on hundreds and hundreds of young women, including girls as well, teenage girls, there's a lot of very unanswered questions. So, for example, he died by suicide. How did that happen? How was that allowed to happen? He was heavily watched, right?

He was heavily watched. He was one of the most well-connected men in the world who a lot of very famous people flew on his jet, went to his private island, partied with him, including one Donald J. Trump, by the way. So what was the relationship between all of these very famous people and his predation? Was there any relationship?

So there's a reason for natural curiosity. So that's little Epstein theory. But in a lot of MAGA, it's really, what they're really focused on is what you might call big Epstein. And big Epstein theory is the thinking man's version of Q&on is a way to think about it. It is essentially that the Epstein story is the key that unlocks the whole globalist pedophile conspiracy. That if you really knew the whole Epstein story, story. It would be he was working as an agent for foreign governments, that he was blackmailing people at scale, that he has an enormous amount of information about world leaders, financiers, etc. And so this is sort of fits very neatly with an overall MAGA narrative that the rolling elite is so fundamentally depraved and corrupt that they would either participate in or excuse or cover-up massive-scale pedophilia. And so one of the reasons why this became so much of an urgent issue in MAGA is when you drill down for some people within the MAGA movement, this is why they've stuck by him for years is because they believe he's the guy that they

believe is going to crack open this whole thing. So if you actually believe that your political opponents are running a global pedophile ring, and Donald Trump is the man, some of them believe to be prophesied to break this apart, you're going to overlook a lot of stuff about Donald Trump. A lot of stuff is just going to be less important than breaking up the global pedophile regime. And now he's turning around and saying, essentially, if there's anything in there,

Obama planted it or Biden or Clinton or whatever, it is massive cognitive dissonance because this is the reason. He's disrupting the very reason that a lot of people supported him. Yeah, Jamel had a good point, which is that I've been on truth social reading his posts and then reading the comments responding to them. This is my hobby this week. Better hobbies, Michelle. You need better hobbies. And, you know, emotionally speaking, I'm not doing well in there. It's very dark. But Trump just set out to insult anybody who would have questions about this.

And do we think he just doesn't have a different playbook? I mean, he just, he's going to go to the same sheet music he's always sung from. And he just, he assumes it's going to work. I mean, I think you're right to suggest that he really only does have one playbook. I mean, kind of the remarkable thing about Trump after all these years is that he really is very predictable, right? He's not, he isn't this enigma of a human being with a lot going on internally. You can predict what he's going to do very reliably. And in this case, he's accused of something.

He denies it. He tries to turn the accusation around. He tries to discredit the accusation. And he's just following the typical playbook. I think the issue, as David points out, is that this is one of the rare instances for him where he really is directly going at kind of a core set of assumptions, beliefs, suppositions among his supporters that they can't simply square it with their support for him. And so if they see him as this avatar of vengeance against the global pedophile ring,

and he's refusing to act in a way that is commensurate with that, I think the response, which makes total logical sense on their part, to say, well, well, okay, what's up with Trump? I will say one thing I find strange about all this is that part of the reason I kind of have been ignoring all of this is that I thought they'd all priced in the fact that Trump is publicly, was publicly, very close to Jeffrey Epstein publicly has been accused of inappropriate behavior. All this stuff is just like known fact about Trump. So my going, they already kind of know that he's iffy.

But what I'm beginning to realize is that like maybe they don't. Maybe they have no idea that, you know, this guy is, um, a sex past. Well, the thing that has been fascinating is how, especially among Republican Congress members, they're framing it as not whether or not Trump did anything or was aware of anything, but this is all about accountability. It's all about transparency. They're arguing that, of course, the administration should put some information out there

because that's what the Republican Party and the Trump administration has been promising, is transparency, which, I mean, I find that amusing in and of itself, but sure, whatever gets you through the day. David, how do you see the people, like the MAGA faithful, justifying standing by Trump in this moment? Are they just saying, it can't possibly be true? That's a really good question. And I would say this is the first time, look, Trump has lied to MAGA a lot. It's lied to MAGA a lot. a ton. But generally when Trump lies to Maga, he's telling them something they want to hear. So,

for example, if he's lying to them about there's nothing to the Russia investigation, they want to hear that. If he's lying to them and saying the election was stolen, they want to hear that. This is the first time, really, that I can think of, that he has lied to them and contradicted core elements of their worldview. But it isn't just that they have a defeated worldview. It's that they are now faced with just two terrible options. One, the whole conspiracy is correct and trumps in on it. Or they were lying to us all along. So what's going on here?

And so how are people reconciling themselves to it, Michelle? I think it's a, the answer is really, really simple. At the end of the day, MAGA is going to turn to all of its people and just say, whatever you do, you can't help the left. You can't undermine Trump because if you undermine Trump, That's what the media wants. That's what the left wants. So you're going to begin to see a lot of this.

Well, whatever else Trump is, the left hates him, so you have to stand by him. And a lot of this is going to drill down to ultimately why did people support Trump? Why have they been with him? And if the ultimate answer is because he hates Democrats and fights Democrats, then they'll probably keep on clinging to Trump. If their ultimate answer is, I genuinely really thought he was going to be God's angel of vengeance against the global pedophiles. then you might see some cracking in that support.

And so let's not forget this. He is a lame duck president. He's not eligible to run in 2028. There's going to be a successor. This could be some of the early jockeying that you see as to whose true MAGA after Trump goes away. So you're going to see some internecine fighting over this as well that's very much related to sort of the order of succession

in the royal court, so to speak. So, Jamel, it's also been interesting to see what has been stirred up on the left. People talking about maybe there is something to see here and a little bit of joining the conspiratorial thinking, I guess. What have you been looking at with interests on the left of this whole discussion? I mean, I think it's interesting that elected Democrats, really some are treating this like a legitimate scandal and not just waving it away as a distraction. the usual language Democrats have adopted for kind of not doing anything. You know, I think AOC made note that there was no surprise that someone who is a rapist would be hiding this stuff.

I think Gavin Newsom has said things. John Ossoff, Georgia Senator, has said stuff along these lines. I mean, you're beginning to see, you know, mainstream Democrats kind of treat this as like a lie of political issue, which I think is the right thing to do, right? You're being given a clear opening to fracture your opponents. coalition to make the president who you were opposed to be very uncomfortable. You know, it would be political malpractice not to indulge this, not to kind of fan the flames of conspiracism here for the sake of hitting at your opponent.

And although it does seem quite unseemly, I think one thing that's always worth remembering as an American politics has never been a particularly seemly place to begin with. And so if you are of the view that Democrats should be more aggressive, in their opposition. This is basically what that looks like. One of the most fascinating responses that I've enjoyed. So there have been conservative lawmakers, like Marjorie Taylor Green, who, you know, has a reputation for loving her, some conspiracy theories. And Lauren Bobert, same, who have been very outspoken about this being a problem. And I think it was Bobert, in fact, who wants maybe Matt.

at Gates to run a special investigation? I was like, okay, okay. Fox meet Henhouse? I'm speechless in this regard, but that would, I have to say, it would be interesting. There would not be a dull moment. If we're looking at who might have an interest

in keeping this alive, have you, has anybody popped up that you think, hmm? Oh, I can think of somebody whose initials are Tucker Carlson. Oh, there we go. I hadn't even thought of it. Meg and Kelly. There are a lot of people

with very, very, very large followings who hope to continue to have very, very large followings after Donald Trump has gone, who want to position themselves as more or less independent voices. And so what we're going to actually see here is an interesting breakdown.

We've often used the term influencer to describe a MAGA influencer to describe a lot of these people with big voices, that's the wrong word. They're more like famous followers than they are like influencers because the instant that they depart from Trump, traditionally, these quote unquote influencers find out they had no influence at all. But somebody, you can go through name after name, who's kind of calling for answers in this circumstance. And look, the charitable explanation is

they just want answers. That's the charitable explanation. The less charitable explanation is there's also some jockeying for position going on. So look who folds and look who doesn't fold. And the people who don't fold either, maybe they have some integrity about this matter or some combination of they also want to be more independent of the rest of MAGA. They want their own following. Yeah, the strategy here goes to be. Strategie, yes. All right. So now let's go ahead and flip it. We've talked about the administration's very bad week. Let's talk about it's win, which is a pretty interesting victim. in the Supreme Court. I'm sure a much more popular topic in the White House than the Epstein

Files. Trump made clear from the start that he has no love for the Department of Education and wants to access it, which is not, to be fair, it's not an uncommon Republican dream. He's not the first presidential contender who wanted to do this. Now, he signed an executive order saying as much. Project 2025 called for this, and this week, The Supreme Court said, Eh, sure, why not? The president can unilaterally abolish a federal agency that was created by an act of Congress.

Are either of you surprised? Am I surprised? I don't know. I sort of surprise, shock, these are no longer feelings and emotions that are relevant to me anymore. You're burned out? Yeah, you know. When I read the news, I was struck by two things.

The first is that, you know, the core. The court had lifted an injunction on basically like mass firing at the Department of Education. And it did so without any kind of explanation, no explanation of why this was appropriate. And my immediate thought was, I don't understand the rationale. Like, if I'm looking at this, if I'm assuming the court is acting in total good faith, it does not make sense to me to allow the president to move forward with a radical and expansive assertive. of authority, right?

It's actually contested whether or not the president has the authority to unilaterally remove civil servants without any kind of congressional authorization. And secondly, typically when the president is trying to advance a policy unilaterally like this and they're sued, it typically you let the lawsuit, you let the entire legal process play out from, you know, fact collecting and a district court judgment all the way up to the Supreme Court for the simple reason that while you're waiting, you just have the status quo. And the status quo isn't some intolerable offense. It's just the way things have been working. And I don't understand, if I'm looking at this, if I'm saying the court is acting in total good

faith, I don't understand the rationale of not letting the status quo stand while you let this kind of play out in the courts. Okay. So, David, before we get into further into this, I want to step back then for a second and talk about this so-called shadow docket, which it's a term used to describe this court's emergency docket when urgent decisions are made much more quickly than in regular court session. And they can come with little or, you know, in this case, really zero explanation. What is your thought on what the rationale for this being on the shadow docket would have been? And it kind of, do you buy the argument that this was needed to be there? Yeah, there's a very live debate over what to call this thing, that you're calling the shadow docket. I think a word, another word, some people have chosen as emergency docket. In other words, what do you do when cases are unfolding very quickly and they're of great importance?

This is not something that for a long time the Supreme Court was known for doing is taking up cases that were emerging in real time that were very, very important, that the Supreme Court docket was known for a long time to be pretty slow. Well, that has changed in recent years, in part because the combination of the total collapse of Congress as any sort of, like, effective lawmaking body and the expansion of presidential authority to sort of fill that gap has meant that we've had a lot of litigation that erupts immediately from executive actions. So, for example, nobody contests that Congress could say pass a law tomorrow doing a reduction in force of 50% of the Department of Education. Congress can absolutely do that. Right. The question is, can the president do that? And that leads to immediate litigation. Litigation that gets really important. And from that standpoint, I like the emergency docket. And I'll tell you why I like it. For a long time, the Supreme Court was so slow in taking up cases that you would often just hit these slam on both feet of the brakes when you would get to the Supreme Court, when you would actually need the Supreme Court to rule. You would actually know, for a fact, for example, the Supreme Court's going to rule on this. Like, why aren't they taking this now?

And so there are circumstances where these emergency rulings or shorter term rulings, I think, are completely in keeping with the urgency of the moment. Now, where do I have a problem? I have a problem in this instance, for example, because there's no majority opinion. So here you have a very important ruling. You have the three liberal justices in dissent, and they have a stinging dissent. and you're left sort of filtering through what could be the majority's reasoning because there's a small version of this ruling and there's a big version of this ruling. And I can articulate both of them, but I don't know which is which because we don't have the majority. They didn't give it to us.

And so that's, you know, so we're left with saying, okay, did he effectively shut down the Department of Education? Well, I could argue no, because that wasn't the issue in front of the court. The issue in front of the court was do we intervene immediately in this reduction in force? So that's a small version of this ruling, that all they're doing is they're just saying, we're not saying you can get rid of the Department of Education, we're saying you can do a riff without judicial intervention. That's a small version.

A big version would be, hey, civil service protections can be swept away. Presidents can effectively shudder agencies just by draining them of people. That's a big version of it. Which one is it? we don't know. And I think that's a big problem because, as you both said, I mean, shutting down the Department of Education is not a radical Republican goal. This is something that's been talked about since the Reagan era. It's the how it is happening that is so disturbing and how it is being upheld is so puzzling.

Just to add to that, I mean, I would, I think that the Supreme Court has a responsibility to explain, its reasoning to the public. To me, the decision to refuse to explain, which is what this feels like. Not so much like we're not going to write one, but just like we refuse, we don't have to, we don't need to, is the court mistaking the pageantry around it

for some sort of actual authority over the public at large? The court acting as if it isn't a servant of the public at large. large, but it is, the servant of the Constitution, the servant of the public, of the people who imbue their sovereignty into that Constitution. And so the court simply deciding it's not going to explain something that if it is as expansive as some critics think it might be,

constitutes a fundamental reorganization of what the president can do. Right, if the president can dismantle, congressionally authorized agencies through personnel, that that transformed the balance of power in the American government, right? Yeah. And so that's what the president is asserting that the president, that the executive removal power is so broad and exists in this extremely rigid

vision of separation of powers such that Congress has no say whatsoever over the conditions of employment in the civil service. And it's all under the president. If the court thinks that this is the thing that exists, the court has an obligation to tell the public. We have a right to know.

And the court's refusal to explain is incredibly disturbing in that context. So you guys had mentioned the kind of minority dissent on this. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was making this exact point. She wrote that, quote, the majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way, the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave. So you have the dissent out there, you have no explanation from the majority as to its reasoning. David, doesn't this fuel concerns about the court and do damage to its reputation as, you know, its partisan leanings? It creates an empty space into which people pour their hopes and their fears.

And that's not good. So let's talk about the hopes element of it. So MAGA thinks a lot of people in MAGA, because they're taking the maximal reading of this, think that this is a permission structure for Trump to do as he will, do what he wants to do with federal agency. I think that's in all likelihood, although I'm not sure, because the court's been silent in this instance, I think that in all likelihood that's the maximal reading is the wrong reading of this. And so what happens when the court actually does rule on the merits is it will eventually, sooner or later, and let's suppose it disappoints MAGA.

Well, then you've got all the braying and yelling from MAGA that the court's illegitimate, it's defying the duly elected president, et cetera. But then on the other hand, if you were concerned about this ruling because of the absence of reasoning, you don't know really how to respond to it. You don't know what the core arguments are that you need to make. You don't know how to adjust your argument in the courts below. Like these are very, very important things. And so while I can absolutely make a case that maybe injunctions aren't the right form of relief in the case of termination, maybe in some circumstances, in some circumstances, what I cannot make a case for is not saying anything.

Yeah, people talk about Chief Justice John Roberts wanting so desperately to protect the reputation of the court as an independent branch of government. This just does not seem to lend itself to helping with people's concerns. It just really doesn't. Can I say David mentioned something that is very important as well. What we have are district court judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans appointed by Trump, Obama, Biden, Bush, Reagan in some cases, right, working in good faith to try to figure out what the law is, figure out how to move forward in the face of, you know, expansive. claims of authority by the administration.

You have district courts trying to work it out on the ground. And you have the Supreme Court intervening and then not explaining. What are the district courts supposed to do? Right? Like this is, the administration has been engaged for months in this attempt to argue that the president has no obligation to obey the rulings of district courts and only needs to listen to the Supreme Court, which is not the case by. intervening and issuing decisions that essentially allow the administration to move forward with

its plans, whether or not they happen to be lawful, the Supreme Court is basically affirming this. They're saying, yeah, you don't have to listen to the district courts. We're the only ones you have to listen to. And what I don't think that the conservative majority understands, maybe they're willfully ignorant of it, and this gets to Senator Mayor's dissent, is that at a certain point, you're going to just habituate the administration and not wanting to follow any court. And you can hope you can think to yourself,

oh, they'll listen to us when it really comes down to it. When it really hits brass tax, they will listen to our ruling. But I wouldn't make that bet, right? If I were in that position, if I were on that court, I wouldn't make that bet. But the Supreme Court seems just totally indifferent to what is going on in the lower court level.

and I find it very disturbing. To my mind, the Supreme Court is leaving these judges, again, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, leaving them to hang out to dry. David, you're nodding thoughtfully. Well, I'm going to say the thing that's troubling to me, and look, I have defended and will continue to defend the judiciary amongst our three branches of government, I maintain that it's our best functioning branch of government. I still maintain it's the best functioning branch of government. I disagree with the decision not to write here. And the thing that is frustrating, another thing that's frustrating about it is in some ways the court is not being consistent here because it is not, it has rebuked Trump in this term. It is rebuked him pretty decisively.

It has expressed concerns for the administration's willingness to defy precedent at the oral argument in the birthright citizenship case. Justice Barrett was holding the administration's feet to the fire on compliant. with precedent. There's obvious concerns and other opinions. The Supreme Court has said that immigrants get due process before they're going to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act. They have issued affirmed rulings to, for example, get Abrago Garcia to facilitate his return. And all of that was explained, and you could read it. And so, yeah, once again, I could look back at this last term of the Supreme Court. And I could point to you time and time again that that court rejected a MAGA legal argument or would not take a, or rejected a Trump argument.

So I do not think that this Supreme Court is in Trump's pocket at all. But I cannot justify not explaining this. I just, no matter which way I look at it, I just can't get there. I think there should be a conspiracy theory that we start to explain at all, taking us back to our opener. I think that's the only. There's got to be some conspiracy theory. So before we go, it is the middle of July. It's the summer. Let's go a little lighter. Let's go off topic. And I want both of you to give me something that has given you some delight right now.

All right. I'll go first. I bought a new camera. People who, I guess, read my newsletter, New York Times newsletter. You should read that. We'll know that I love photography. And I bought a new camera. What'd you get? What'd you get? It's called a, let's just show it. I have it right here. It's called a Mamea 6. It was first manufactured in 1989, stopped manufactured in 1995. It's a medium format range finder. It's not what you see is what you get. It's a you look through a separate viewfinder, but I love it.

And the reason I bought it is because I bought it is because I've always wanted one of these. It's cool. But also for kind of, you know, taking it with me when I travel. And if you look behind me, I feel like you can see on frame. I have a lot of cameras behind me. That's your thing. That's my thing. All right, David, so you're up.

What do you got? What's delighting in? Mine is a lot less sophisticated. I've got two recommendations that have given great joy. One is a Netflix show that a lot of people talked about called Department Q. And you might say, not another British crime drama. I would never say that. I know.

I say another British crime drama. Thank you. This one about cold. Starring a really motley collection, sort of think of it as the Moss Isley canteena of British detectives. And the lead guy is very grumpy and often not in an endearing way, but it is really good. And the constellation of characters around him, fantastic. And then the other one is the show called Poker Face, which stars Natasha Liam. Who I love.

It is a delight. I mean, the premise is just pretty. There's a kind of down-on-er-luck woman who has this unique gift that she can always tell that somebody is lying. And she has the worst luck in the world, Michelle, as you know, everywhere she goes, somebody gets murdered. The show's really well done and surprisingly funny. So both of those are giving me a lot of joy. I also like Poker Viz a lot. I appreciate the kind of Colombo style.

Not really mystery. Oh, she's such a slob. Mystery of the week. but sort of like you're just seeing how this, yeah, this kind of slubby but compelling person pursues this. So mine is a very different direction, which is it's summer in Washington, and this is when you get boatloads of tourists with their families here. And in some ways, it's fun to complain about them, especially when they're in a rental car in front of you in the traffic time. But it's also fantastic to just see no matter how ugly it gets. on the political scene.

People still come to the nation's capital, and I was on the hill earlier today interviewing a senator, and there were people up there looking hot and confused because it is really brutally high. It's got like 105 heat index today. But nonetheless, they were persisting.

They were out with their maps and their water bottles, and it just made me feel a little bit better about the state of the country. I love that. All right, so we're going to leave it there. David, Chimel, thank you very much. As always, it was fun.

And I will see you next time. See you next time. Thanks so much, Michelle. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Bishakadarba, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzik. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amun Sahota.

The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.