New Epstein Documents Are Very Bad News for Trump | The Next Level

Take what's in these documents and then think to yourself, there's a bunch of stuff they're keeping back. Like this isn't even the bad stuff. This is the stuff they think they can get around.

Hello everyone. This is J V L here with my best friends, Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller of the Bulwark. Happy Christmas, my friends.

This is our go home show for the year. And uh, not really. We do have one Christmas week

Well one more one, but this is for Christmas go home for Christmas as we say in WrestleMania Really? We've already had a Christmas miracle tens of thousands of pages of pedophilia documents Yay, some bad news for tiny Tim a lot in the initial tranche a lot of Bill Clinton stuff A lot of Bill Clinton mentions a lot of Bill Clinton

Photos, I have so many questions about the Bill Clinton photos

Can you update us on the state of play because you and your team have been on this like white on rice?

Yeah

so people are gonna have to bear with me because we are I've got a It's like the ragtag team of kids who didn't go home for Christmas yet and they are pouring through this stuff through criminal pedophilia documents.

Great boss. Great boss. Sarah.

Well, you know, somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to bring people the information. And there's so much stuff and so much of it's crap. Right. It's not like it's organized in any way that is meant for us to be able to make heads or tails of it. And in fact, the way they are releasing it is often meant to make it as difficult as possible to sort of put together any kind of narrative around it. And just so people understand, because I think people are like, wait a minute, when you guys

were on before, you were showing a picture of all the redactions, what's going on with the redactions, like there's a lot of different layers to the story. There's the first layer, which is just a process conversation around how much is being released, what kind of stuff is being released, in what form it's being released.

And also they are weirdly doing things where like, they put it out and then they pull it back. They are clearly, in my opinion, I think what is happening. And I ran, well, this is more of this is a get on the processes. I think what's happening is they are trying very hard to comply

with the law, the Epstein Transparency Act. And so they're bringing a bunch of people in to like, get this stuff out. And some things are getting missed or done improperly. And so to date, okay, DOJ has released eight sets of materials in response to the Epstein Transparency Act, okay, which Trump did sign when he saw there was no other choice, he was going to lose the vote in

Congress, tried to keep this from happening for a long time. So the most recent set of stuff, which is called data set eight was released yesterday, and includes roughly 11,000 documents. So 30,000 pages of stuff, which is why everybody's trying to figure out how to go through it. And so the DOJ has done this like terrible job. So first, the DOJ DOJ initially released the documents without the redactions properly applied.

So that you could easily go and look behind them to see the text that was supposed to be hidden. Like whoever did it, didn't do it properly. It was easy to do if you just copy and pasted it into another document. And so I was talking to some former DOJ attorneys

and they're like, this is amateur stuff. Like DOJ attorneys know how to do this stuff.

Kind of stuff you'd expect from a, like an assistant US attorney, not, you know, like Alina Haba, not a DOJ line officer lawyer.

Apparently confirming that redactions are properly done. This is like a base function at the DOJ, right? Like you have to make sure. Apparently they do that, yeah. the DOJ, right? Like you have to make sure. Yeah, that's like one of the most basic steps any lawyer is going to take before producing documents, let alone publicly producing the

documents, right. So right out of the gate, there's the weirdness about the redactions, which looks like it's just a mistake. It's just the amateur hour, Apple dumpling gang nature of these people. So then, DOJ, like I said, they pulled the documents down after they were released and replaced them with the redactions properly applied. But the damage was done because the Washington Post, a bunch of other people... I'm sure nobody downloaded them.

They downloaded them immediately. Oh, they did. You can do that on the internet. They did. Wow. They downloaded them when they were up. And so imagine our Department of Justice puts them out, realizes the oopsies that people can see behind the redactions, and then they take them down. Okay? Which means because part of it is the one thing that is supposed to be redacted is identifying victims. That's the one thing that had to be done. And that is where they have been failing, right. So then when the DOJ announced that they were available, so the DOJ after they're acting like

they're the most transparent people, this is what the, you know, because everything's done by tweet, the US Department of Justice tweeted thusly, the Department of Justice has officially released nearly 30,000 more pages of documents Department of Justice tweeted thusly, if they had any shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already. Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency,

the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein's victims. Okay, on the second try, fellas, you guys got that one in. This is the Department of Justice.

How does that tweet read to you? Does it tweet, does it read impartially?

It reads like a state, you know, a pronouncement from the Kremlin. I mean it doesn't even cause it's kind of too stupid for that. Like this idea that like, well, there's some stuff in here and it's pretty bad, but it's like, if it was that bad and real, then you know that that dastardly bastard Merrick Garland would have already used it against Donald

Trump. It's kind of like, it's like based on a premise of like the, this sort of bizarro world in which where Trump and his people live, where like they think that Merrick Garland was out to get them and that everybody would look at this and be like, sure, yeah, I guess that does make sense rather than the real world or Merrick Garland was like napping for most of the time.

Right, I mean, how is this any different than what Bill Barr did at the Mueller report?

I mean, it's more comically embarrassing than what, I mean, Bill Barr, yeah, it's stupider. Bill Barr tried to like, to wrap his doing cover for Trump in a letter before the Mueller report went out and like legalese, you know, are smart enough to be able to like use the fancy words that you use and lawyerly documents and this, you know, sounds like it's written in crayon.

To me it's like, are you his defense attorneys?

Yes.

Like it sounds like one of these, you know, right?

Yes, that's what they are.

Like, and the whole point, this is where, this is where- Tom Blanch was literally his defense attorney, wasn't he? I know. That is not, though, what the Department of Justice is supposed to do. That is not how this Department of Justice, that is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to operate. And to Tim's point, the reason that Trump's people are so sure Merrick Gardner would have

released it is because they think everybody's as corrupt as they are, right? They can't conceive of a world in which everybody's not doing everything through the same political prism that they are, that they actually thought that the DOJ should be independent. You may recall Biden's DOJ actually convicted his own son. Right?

That they were so dedicated. For good reason, but like out of a, but they also were like, like this has to be done versus these guys who act like they are personally there to protect the president.

Don't trigger me with Hunter Biden.

Sorry, I know he's back in the news.

He's back in the news. I brought up Hunter Biden. I did a two minute Hunter Biden rant with Tom Nichols today. And at the end of it, Tom was just like, okey. I was like, sorry, I don't like him. Fair enough. Let's get back to the topic. Sorry.

Is there any remedy? So, this is just a dumb question, but if the Justice Department starts acting with no pretense of impartiality and just takes the position that we are the President's defense team, is there any remedy for that?

I don't think there is.

The Marshal of the Supreme Court

No, I do think here's the one remedy and I am The what the good news for us a ballot box. I'm gonna come No, no, no, the one thing that's really helping us all right now is that they are very stupid. They keep making these unbelievable mistakes with all of these redactions and everything. And so they are beclowning themselves. And also, they're getting caught in lie after lie after lie. And so, the recourse is honestly the public, whoever the first person was who were like, let me

see if these redactions are correct and put it in, I don't know all the public, like whoever the first person was who were like, let me see if these redactions are correct and put it in, you know, I don't know all the software, but put it in some software. And they're immediately like, yep, you can see right through these. That is the recourse, like the recourse is to expose them with their own idiocy. I gotta tell you though, just, can I just

pop in on this? If they're acting totally like, they're like this mishmash of like corrupt and incompetent, you know, and unclear on how to navigate that. Like, so for example, sure, they sound like his defense department in putting out the statement,

you know, before they put out the documents, but they tried to cover up these documents for many months. They did. And we don't know what is in the remaining documents that they even put out But just in this tranche that went out was my favorite one Well my least favorite

but the one that I think will have the most staying power in people's memory because it's so horrific and that was the letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar. It feels like the type of thing that you could not put out. This is like something from Mad Magazine. It's like, it's like having Jeffrey Dahmer writing to John Wayne Gacy. Yeah, Epstein is in jail. He's writing to Nasser, who's also in jail. And he says this, our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by, he loved to grab snatch, whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system, life is unfair. So, I mean, given that Trump has already admitted

that he likes to, you know, grab you know what, you know, it feels corroborative and it feels like not the type of thing the defense team would wanna have wanted to have put it out.

The one thing I'll say about this postcard, cause I really tried to run this down, is that it was posted a few days after Epstein killed himself. That doesn't mean that it wasn't written before he killed himself. And it was admitted into... Died. Right, died. It was admitted. So like, I put this out online when we saw it, like we put it out and people have been like, is this real? So it is real insofar as it was admitted into evidence.

Like it is from the files that it was stamped, it was real evidence that was used. Apparently at some point, they did a handwriting analysis to try to do like authenticate it. The results of that were never made public. And so some of this is why when JVL says like, what's the recourse? I think it's digging in on these things, right? And like making sure if it's definitely real, if we authenticate that,

that's like pretty close to smoking gun with Trump. Here's the other thing about what's in here. Number one, Trump is lying and has been lying about all kinds of things. Pam Bondi has been lying about all kinds of things. Kash Patel has been lying about all kinds of things.

We went and pulled up his testimony, his under oath testimony, where he talked about the fact that no, none of these young women were trafficked to anyone besides Epstein himself, that he was the only person.

But all over the files are the redacted names of up to 10 co-conspirators. They are saying there are up to 10 co-conspirators. Who are the 10 co-conspirators? Because here, the redactions are working for that part. They did have the right redactions for that part.

And so- No oopsie for that.

To the extent that there's an Epstein list, it would be who were the 10 co-conspirators that were working with him on the trafficking side? That's what I wanna know.

The other men that the girls were trafficked to. I do think- That's right. This is what I keep coming back to it. It's like you cannot accept any release of documents that does not provide at least credible allegations of other men, you know, who sexually assaulted molested young girls like you can't because like you refused is not plausible that that did not happen. Given the scale, the number of young girls that we're talking about, young women we're talking about. Like it's not plausible that it was just Jeffrey getting massages and Glenn and et cetera. Like there were other men involved.

None of them have been charged. Prince Andrew, I guess, is the one name that does keep coming up that has suffered consequences. Besides him, nobody else has.

But those were his family consequences. Like they unmonarched him or whatever, but that was them.

Yeah. Demonarched. But if you, if you do that, don't you expose Cash to perjury?

Yes.

Right. I mean, Cash's sworn position is that there were no other people. And I think maybe Bondi, maybe not, maybe she didn't say her as under oath, but Cash's sworn declaration is that there's nobody else.

The only question would be, is there some way in which he didn't know this? But presumably the first thing they did when they got into office was go through the files and to see how they could get their enemies. And then they shut the whole thing down.

I kind of feel like a cash perjury case is sort of kind of like, oh man, I'm blanking on it. Who was the special counsel that went in and looked at and interviewed Joe Biden about the classified documents and was like he's too old to have credibly lied to me

about the classified documents? Yeah, I remember that. I feel like that's that case about Cash. I feel like he's too stupid to have credibly lied about this sort of thing. I think that any jury would look at Cash and be like, yeah, this guy was flying to see his girlfriend in Nashville.

Okay, wait, can I just, let me, sorry, I just want to get through a couple other things really quickly. That is, is relevant. Are you going to get to the plane manifest? I will. I just want to get through a couple other things really quickly. That is, is relevant to the plane manifest. Uh, I, I will, uh, I just want to say something else about the redactions though, really quickly. You guys both look like you want to yawn at this new information. It's not as exciting. They appear to have redacted the names of all the DOJ prosecutors in here, uh, including the names of prosecutors that have long been public, and including documents like press releases that are public press releases. So this like it makes doesn't make any sense, because the DOJ has no legal basis for

redacting public information. So that kind of raises questions about what else DOJ is redacted that it should not have. This was like very excessive redaction. And there are quality questions out there based on the release of the hundred plus page documents that are completely redacted, right that we looked at, but they're intensified by these clearly incorrect and very silly redactions. So like, again, when you say recourse, I think part of

it is to continue to push on the fact that these are not compliant. And we should keep pushing on them. I'm not a lawyer, but that seems pretty clear. And finally, on this particular point, there remains obvious omissions in the documents that DOJ has released so far. For example, the House Committee has called for DOJ to release its prosecution memoranda regarding its decision to prosecute or not Epstein, Maxwell and any other co conspirators, those memoranda

have not been released. As best we can tell, those would be very important, those would be very telling. So it seems like they have made selective choices about what is this is this is the main point. Take what's out there, take what's in these documents. And then think to yourself, there's a bunch of stuff they're keeping back. If there were if this stuff was all able to come out. Imagine what is being held back. That this is not the worst stuff. Like this isn't even the bad stuff. This is the stuff they think they can get around.

Though who knows also, it's just like, they could just be dumping stuff and like have no, be totally incompetent and like they're trying to vet the Trump stuff. I mean, supposedly they had the share file that had all the times Trump was listed.

And that's what they said, And that's in the reporting.

Few self corrections.

Julie Brown, obviously the Miami Herald is the best person on this shares your skepticism on the grab snatch letter. She says that Jeffrey Epstein didn't know how to spell. So I don't think this is him. Which is a pretty funny alibi. And Robert Hur is the name I couldn't come up with. We kind of blocked out the bad times. You know, you have a little blackout on those bad weeks.

I don't know how much, maybe you guys don't want all the details. We only want to discuss sort of the juicy stuff. Maybe I'll do a legal pod going deeper. Juicy stuff. Yeah, you just want the juicy stuff. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of documents related to Epstein suicide, including his mental state beforehand, there was like a psyche valve that they had conducted documentation of suicide watch periods, which apparently he had been on

suicide watch, and memos related to his earlier apparent attempted suicide. It's not clear what information is new or earth shattering. I don't know if that stuff was out there, but it's more material than I think we've seen before about his mental health in the months

leading up to his death.

And I would assume that somebody who's been convicted of mass rape of young girls probably doesn't have great mental health.

You know, pretty embarrassing. Yeah, and he also had like an insane, I mean, his his roommate or his cellmate was a very scary man. If only he had waited long enough he could have got moved

into the puppies and fancy toilet paper prison, you know, if he had held off long enough. Yeah,

here was the thing that I actually thought was most interesting, which is that Epstein's relationship with Trump, and the DOJ is focused on that relationship, right. So it's clear that during both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, the DOJ prosecutors were acutely focused on flagging every any evidence that mentioned Trump, a

federal prosecutor whose name was redacted sent an email in 2020 saying that Trump's name appeared on flight logs many more times than previously has been reported or that we were aware. The message was sent for situational awareness because they didn't want any of this to be a surprise down the road. And as I was going through the images...

Who was the name of that plane again, Sarah?

The Lolita Express is what they called it.

Oh, not good.

I wonder if Nabokov sales are up. Like, I wonder if a lot more people are just reading that book because it's in the zeitgeist.

One of the pictures in this trench was the chest of a young lady with lines from Lolita, scrawled in Sharpie across it. I don't know if you guys saw that. You know, not on the nose at all.

Yeah, it's really on the, there's not much of a-

He kept the first edition of Lolita in his office.

I think we cracked his code, his literary code. Hey Tim, your buddy Bannon has got more stuff in here. And in fact, as they went through his phone, right, because he did some bad things, he got in trouble. There was an image of Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Bannon's phone.

They're together a lot.

But that was from 2021.

Yeah, a lot of photos.

In 2021. Remember Trump was like, I wish her well, whatever?

Well, I mean, Bannon did have that nice, like fit check photo with himself and Jeffrey in the mirror where they were kind of, you know, buddying up. I mean, I think that it's pretty relevant that Trump and Maxwell were photoed together with Bannon, given the fact that Maxwell has been moved to a fancy prison when she's a notorious child sex trafficker.

Ah, Blanche, explain. That was, you know, he's not gonna get into that, but it was all about safety.

Threats.

It really could have been.

It's all safety, national security.

Did you see Brit Hume tweet that he thought the Epstein files was like beating a dead horse? Who, what are all the, like, there's so, something Tim was just saying triggered this. There's so much we don't know, clearly. Like the more we learn, the more it's clear, we don't know. And this I think is part of what Trump was really concerned about, right? Is

that, oh, no, he did have a relationship with Maxwell as early as a few years ago. Why is Pam Bondi lying? Why is Kash Patel lying? Why is everything redacted? Was this so there were so many people involved that like like Bannon's got pictures on his phone. Larry Summers was gonna be the executor of Epstein's will. Like actually it does go to the highest levels.

They were all participating in this. Bill Clinton and Trump hanging out, doing weird stuff.

There remains like the big Xbox, the big black box is like, who is Epstein trafficking the girls Xbox, the big black box is like, who else, who is absolutely trafficking the girls to write, like to me, that was a big black

box.

And obviously like the biggest question in that is, is whether that was Trump or not, but it's kind of like the information that we have, like already just indicates like how deep in, in he was with somebody that was doing this. I'm like these girls that are on the plane that are saying, Jeffrey gave me over to some of his friends, not Trump, but Iq is there. Trump was there at all the parties that I was at and like two of the now women,

I don't know what they were inducted, so I don't know when they were victimized, but um, that, uh, you know, that the main allegations against Maxwell were on the plane with Trump in this new trench of information. Dudes all around it, like at a minimum, you know, and I think like the remaining redactions is like, okay, well, if it wasn't you, then who was it?

It could be anything. But I have been for the last like now four months or so wondering if maybe it isn't actually worse than most of us think. Like, it isn't just that he was hanging around the island.

It wasn't just that he knew. I wonder if he's a participant. Allegedly.

This one I'm trying, like, you know, it's bad. Can I also say he's a participant, allegedly. This is what I'm trying to, like, you know, it's bad.

Can I also say it's enough if he knew, if he knew and just hung out with the people who were raping these girls, trafficking these girls, if he just knew. Trump didn't bust any pedophile ring. He's not some QAnon hero. Trump was just a participant. Even if even if he himself didn't

have sex with somebody who was under the age of 18 and was scrupulous about making sure that they showed him a photo ID saying that they were 18 when they were all partying together and when they were hiring prostitutes, which is another thing that's in there is Trump was having a party and it was all prostitutes. And you don't know are those prostitutes prostitutes or they mean these sex trafficked young girls. Who knows? This should be enough. It should be enough to discredit Pam Bondi. It should be enough to discredit Kash Patel. The entire world should look at this and say, this is unacceptable.

He can't be president of the United States. People should be horrified by this.

Resign.

Resign.

He attempted an armed coup. He attempted a coup.

We're so far past consequences ever showing up for him.

As much as I think that it should have been disqualifying what happened on January 6th, the extent to which his own supporters have wrapped his narrative up in the idea that he is a pedophile buster in the face of the elite cabal that traffics kids and that everything that they do, whether it's trans kids or groomers or whatever, or school, everything's happening in school is all about protecting kids. This should take him down. The hypocrisy should take him down. The the moral nihilism should take it down. The criminal content

should take him down.

Should we should be a word?

We should not surrender in advance the idea that it should bring with it consequences.

Look, I want them. It's not that I don't want them. I just don't see what the mechanism is aside from I mean, the mechanism is the midterm elections. And then once you do that, then you can start some investigations. But realistically speaking, the best you can hope

is to weaken his hold on the presidency enough that J.D. Vance doesn't sneak into the White House. Like Trump himself is never getting touched for this.

That's partially true, but to quote the Vice President of the United States, I'm gonna, it's not an exact quote, but like any media worth its salt would be asking questions about this all day long. This should open a new tranche of investigative pathways to figure out what's happening to get them all on the record.

Leaving in shame is a good is about as good a consequence as we can get them. It's not the consequence that we want. And, and potentially, potentially, there's oversight that would be done after the Democrats take control. But I really just can't answer within my own head about all this when all this stuff comes up is they don't feel competent enough to run a real cover-up. And it's like, so what are they doing? Like, why are they doing this?

And, you know, like, there are flip answers that are given. Like, one of them is like, well, he's involved with intelligence. He's involved with the Mossad and CIA, and that's what they're protecting. But it's like, does Trump care about that? Since when does Trump care about that?

Why would Kash Patel care about that? Are they threatening them? They blackmailed. Now you get into like, you know, movie, dystopian movie explanations. Then the other explanation you can have is that Trump wants to protect other sex pests because he relates to them on an emotional level or because he's their pals. Maybe, I guess, like, or he wants to protect himself. I, to me, it's just like, I guess he wants to protect himself. I don't, I, there's nothing else that explains this.

I, I don't, I'm not dismissing. I think Epstein probably, you know, obviously hung out with intelligence assets from various countries and who knows who the hell knows? He's like on emails on weapons exchanges with people. And I don't know the extent, but that doesn't explain like why Trump is doing this now. It's not like Trump is some big fan of our intelligence agencies

and that him and I feel like him and Kash Patel and Bondi would love to be able to like, let's use this to take down the deep state. Look at this, we've got information that Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and the CIA and the same in the Russia, Russia, Russia people were all working together with this child sex batterer. Like if that's what

it was, that's what they would do, I think. So to me, this seems like just Trump. It's about Trump.

I mean, it's the only plausible answer. Can we, can we take 30 seconds on Bill Clinton? A lot of pictures, Bill Clinton, a lot of pictures in general. It seems like old Jeffrey was a little bit of a shutterbug. Always had a camera out. Did that not strike anybody at the time as weird? Huh. I'm on this island that's notorious for a place to have sex with marginally aged teen

girls.

This guy's always taken pictures.

I don't think Clinton was ever actually on the island.

Was he? Clinton, these pictures are from other... I don't think Clinton was ever actually on the island. Was he? Clinton, these pictures are from other... I don't know, there's pictures of him like in a jacuzzi somewhere. Yeah. Nobody, nobody was there was like, hey bro, why, bro, why put the camera away? Like there is a, like, are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy aspect to this? Yeah, there's no defense of the Clinton thing. I do, you do get a couple of times I've said things in here and Clinton fans, whatever you mailed in and they're like,

technically I did, they don't think they know, had don't have evidence that he's been on the island, et cetera. And like his friendship with him was earlier. So was Trump's by the way.

In their fifties, not in their twenties.

Yeah, right. or not after the Julie, the Larry Summers friendship was with, with absolutely was happening after Julie Brown wrote the Miami Herald piece that caused his indictment. Like that's insane. Like the Clinton, the Clinton and Trump friendship with him was earlier than that. And he was a convicted sex criminal at the time. But anyway, um, the extent of it wasn't known. Like you're Bill Clinton or Trump or any of these people, but like you're Clinton and it's like

Why are you friends with this for like a rich guy? I don't couldn't be friends with anybody and he's like got this massive network going back to Arkansas. He's been coming up He's in the administration. He's like, why is he spending so much time with this guy? Like it's like some random Rich guy that can't spell that it's unclear where his money is coming from is inviting you to things all the time. And you're just going, why? Cause of the young girls. Like, I don't like, there's no good defense of any of that.

So it's like, I laugh about the nut. Have you ever seen the nut like quote where he gets asked about Epstein? Cause they're neighbors. And he's like, I went, yeah, not looks like I went over to his house with my wife. They invited us over and like, where the dining room, I'm sorry to laugh, but it's just so ridiculous. Sometimes you can't help yourself, but to laugh to keep from crying.

But like, it's like in the dining room, instead of a table, there was a massage table and it's like, my wife is like, what is the deal with this? And I'm like, I don't know, the guy's weird. And then he never went over again. And I'm like, that's normal. Like Lutnick, of all the people, like crazy ass little Howard Lutnick is like, that is normal. It's like, okay, I guess some rich guy invites me over. How do you even call a clock that when Jeffrey Epstein invites you over, you're not supposed That's not sort of assumed in the end, part of the bro code, right?

But it's like, that is normal, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know, I guess if some rich person in New Orleans is like, I love your podcast, I'm having a big party, do you want to come over? Maybe I'd come over if I wasn't busy and go to the party. But if you go over and it's like, there are a my hang anymore. I don't think I'm going to go somewhere else. But Clinton and Trump and the Summers and these other guys are just like, yeah, that's

my this is my new friend. This is my new I made a you know how they say it's tough for men to make friends after 40. Wasn't a problem for Bill Clinton.

I think that's true. The only thing I would say, I don't, not even like looking for reasons to, it's, but like, this guy was clearly a donor who's also hooking people up with other rich people. Like, this is part of what's gross about the whole thing is that there's an aspect of,

well,

Jeffrey both himself gives a lot of money and knows lots of other rich people with whom to fundraise from. And so like the young girls are kind of in there with a lot of money and knows lots of other rich people with whom to fundraise from. And so like the young girls are kind of in there with a sort of political fundraising. I think here are the people I'm hanging out with in a context of becoming friends because they donate money to political campaigns.

And the email I like the one of the emails that struck me was because I was interested in the Peter Thiel thing because for obvious reasons he doesn't fit the mold Like why was Jeffrey emailing Peter Thiel so much?

Blood

Teenagers it's totally pure motives and Epstein is like inviting Peter. He's like hey Peter do you want to come to dinner with Woody Allen and Peters like I or do you want to come to dinner with Woody Allen? And Peter's like, I guess it'd be nice to meet Woody Allen. I don't know. I don't, I'm like, did he have a date? I think that was very strange.

It's like a strange person, right? But it's like he was doing that shit too, right? Like he was trying to connect other famous people that he has hooks into and do favor trading that way that was maybe not related to the girls. But even still, it's like, why?

You know, it just shows how vulnerable I, how people are just way too willing to go along and take favors from, I could, it's a little bit of a good life lesson, you know, about like, why is this person doing these favors for me? Who is this? Your spidey sense should be tingling. Spidey sense should be tingling. Shouldn't it? Yeah.

All right, JVL, we can move on to any of your boats or the other things Donald Trump is trying

to do to distract from these Epstein files. I was just curious if you guys had thoughts about the Trump class battleship, which is not a battleship. It's a, it's just a slightly larger destroyer. Not that any of this matters because it's also not going to be named the Trump class and it's also never going to be built. It's vaporware, but we're all going to pretend that he's building this, this battleship with lasers and rail guns and weapon systems which don't actually exist

and he announces it from his palace in Florida. I don't know anything about ships but here's something that I had Tom Nichols on side him talked about that and he did a very lengthy breakdown of the ship. Here's something that makes me happy about him putting his name on the ships. This is my version of Sarah's. I will not do preemptive surrender to him. I want him to keep naming things. The more things that he puts his name on, the more things we can take his name off.

And that's going to give me joy when they get the power washer out there. On the Trump Kennedy center. And I want to bulldoze it, but assuming that they don't want to do that, if they get the power washer out there, that's a nice day. You know, that's a good post on TikTok for me that day. You know, I get to enjoy that,

watch it from a couple of different angles. Taking his name off the ship will be nice. Throwing the coins away. The ship won't ever be built again. It's just vapor. This is just the thing that he does to distract people. And it works. It doesn't work.

Everybody, everybody covered the ship for 12 hours. I wrote a fucking newsletter about it because I'm just like, stop treating this seriously. I mean, fun of them. I don't know if it's working. I don't think it's working anymore.

David, I'm going to get good tweet this morning that was kind of like, in the first term, there was like this trade that people made. It's not everybody, some of the Trump people like all the terrible stuff, but there were some Trump voters that were like, the trade is that you get to do corrupt stuff and weird stuff and be strange,

and like I get a good economy and to see the libs I hate cry, right? And like this time, like the deal is like, I get a shitty economy and I get to watch you name stuff after yourself and become a billionaire. That deal's a little less appealing to folks.

100%. This is, I've just, I won't, I want to move out of the sort of framework of will it all matter? Does it all matter? Because I think it is mattering. The more stuff he puts his name on, the more it becomes a referendum on whether or not he

deserves to be putting his name on stuff. And will there always be a core of psychopaths who like love it because it makes us mad. This is one of those things where I think we should stop getting mad about the cosmetic changes. And I think we should wait until we should focus on how we get the power to take his name off things.

I totally agree with that. More of what I agree with is, Trump's luster is fading. And he is putting his name on things because he knows no one else will do it for him. It is the most pathetic cry for a legacy that is unearned and I don't

think we should spend that much time on it.

I want to do a do you have other ship thoughts? I want to do a little JD talk. I know I was gonna move on to JD. Okay, great.

Mind melt. Let's talk about JD.

So let's not go too deep into this because I want to save a little bit of JD talk for the other thing that we're doing. Well I'm of two so why don't we set up this way because I have two minds of the JD thing. Like JD is noxious and disgusting and one of the most despicable people in all of public life that is not a child sex trafficker. So like on the merits we all just agree I think so that can be some table stakes. I want to talk about whether what he's doing is effective or not, because I'm of two minds about it, like the positive thing that you could say for JD right

now is somehow the people that like in this big maga tiff, like right now, which basically breaks down to like on the one side, there are people that think we should not be helping Israel at all and think that there's a secret cabal of international spies that killed Charlie Kirk and that the United States should, you know, have completely closed borders and not have any involvement in the world. Like that's one category. Then you have another category of people

who's represented by the Ben Shapiros that believe that like Israel's an important ally. We should be allied with them. The great threat is the radical Islamic terrorists. We should be clear-eyed in opposing them. You know, the US does have a role to play

as a leader in the world. Charlie Kirk was killed by a Mormon boy. Like that's, you know, and we should just like live and live in reality, at least some version of that's closer to reality. Um, like those are the two camps. Both of those camps endorsed JD Vance at the, at the turning point

USA event, right? Erica Kirk endorsed him. She's in the bench of bureau camp kind of uh endorsed him for 2028 obviously tucker jd explicitly sided with the other side so they obviously were with him like that shows some kind of deftness at internal management of the coalition right that he is able to do that i mean part of that is maybe just like political cowardice like the ben shapiros of the

world are like willing to call it Candace Owens, but they're not willing to call it the person that might be the next president of the United States so they can continue to have access. So maybe like, it doesn't show that much skill from JD because it's just, these guys are cowards,

they'll go along with whatever, but even still, it's not nothing. case you could make is it shows pretty bad political judgment as far as your ability to succeed outside of that room in Arizona for you to like explicitly side with the person wearing the like cookie monster holocaust oven sweatshirt that will summer was reporting on like you sided with the the guy making that the Jews didn't die in the ovens jokes and you're siding with

Tucker and all these fucking weird freaks and you're doing so in like the most humorless fashion possible in a way that's extremely unappealing and smarmy and that that that like shtick probably won't work as well as Trump's kind of like you know kind of old man Atlantic City comedy routine does. I don't know. I actually don't know.

I'm curious what you guys think. I'm not sure whether he's demonstrated political deafness or like, or is really fucking himself.

Sarah.

I talked a lot at the front end. Do you want to answer? I have, I have strong opinions on this.

I do.

I do have strong, I have a I have a theory that I have already turned into half a newsletter. I just haven't published it yet. So here's my theory. Trump squared the circle by welcoming the anti Semites into his coalition, sitting down and having dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West and making them totally acceptable parts of MAGA and then giving Paul Singer everything he wanted on Israel. Right, doing maximalist support for BB, Netanyahu, basically becoming Netanyahu's bitch,

getting slow walked into bombing Iran, even though it cost a lot of money and all it did was set back the nuclear program by a few months. And Vance seems to be trying to execute the inverse of that trade, where he's going to give the anti-Semites everything they want on policy. He's signaling that he's going to do a hard break with Israel. But what he's going to give the singers of the world and the Bari Weisses of the world is, he's going to say that Nick Fuentes can't be in the coalition. I don't know if that trade can work. He is welcome to try it. Like I do wonder how long the Ben Shapiros and Barry Weisses and

Singers of the World will stick with that. Some of them longer than others probably. But the problem is that like in the long run, the Gripers, like they have just time on their side, you know, like they are the young rising part of the coalition. That's that's where all the energy is. They're transgressive. They're fun.

You got me, Tim. You and I did a take on this yesterday. The that's City Journal, Manhattan Institute, Focus Group. Lordy, right? And Nick Fuentes can be othered for a little bit, but especially if JD Vance winds up with power, eventually they're gonna be able to demand

their seat back at the table. And then they will have gotten both the policy wins they want and they'll be inside the tent. Vance is not gonna be able to have it both ways in the long term the way Trump was. And so his hope has to be that the people who are very pro-Israel are just okay with being relegated to the back, back of the bus.

Is that a bad bet? I guess. What do you think? I don't know.

I think that might not be a bad bet.

I mean, how many people is that? Really? Analytically? It's not, not like I'm not, not, no, not morally, not my policy. This is like, how many votes does, does the, do the Adelson's have, right? How many votes does the singer have? And, uh, I just don't know that there is where, where are you on this? You and I actually haven't talked about this at all. We haven't. Yeah.

I have my own theories about Vance.

And one of them is that I do not think that. So Tim Tim said something before that is like, also a thesis of mine that I hold on to in things that I when I think about Trump, which is that there's a trade people do. And women are one of the groups white women are one of the groups that did a lot of trading where they said, I would never have him over dinner.

I don't like him, wouldn't introduce him to my kids, but I need the economy to be strong. His businessman lore, the parasocial relationship he's had, the fact that he is not being to them a hypocrite, that they are all like, yeah, he's been on page six my whole life. I know that he's kind of a scumbag, but like, he's funny about it. But like, I don't want him in my house. But I don't mind him running the country, right? That was a that was an explicit trade off. What does JD Vance bring to the table? Like

we can we can I think that both of you have interesting assessments of him holding that coalition together. Trump's magic is not actually with that coalition, and just managing the tensions that exist inside of it. Trump's ability-

He was good at that, too.

He was good at that, too. But that's like, the thing that gets him elected President of the United States is the ability to bring something to the table that offsets the fact that much of that is something people hold their nose for, right? And so to the extent that people, average people, normies, have to hold their nose for J.D. Vance, what does he bring in the trade-off? What do you get from him? I mean, the genuine way in

which a lot of voters thought that Trump was like an economic wizard, businessman, deal maker, erotic, changing the game, kind of a moderate. Like, J.D. doesn't have any of that.

No, he gives you America first. No more wars, no more immigration.

That's his, that's it.

And so that bet is that Americans want an undistilled version of America first, and I'm not real sure they do.

I would throw on top of that, you're getting in the trade, you're getting America first with foreign policy and immigration. But also what he would then end up trying to do is you get like,

he would try to position himself as Americans first. Like I care about like these, the whole trans, they're for he, you know, they, them, right? Like that, whoever the Democrat is, they're getting a lot of things that they care about. You know, they're gonna care about the African kids. You wanna give them money back.

They care about the climate change. They care about the trans. They care about, you know what I mean? Like whatever the thing of the moment is. And I'm not, I don't care about Ukraine and European stability. Right. I don't care about NATO.

That's a good pitch for the American people. I will tell you. Like, I think there's a question. This is always like on the other side of the ledger. Like, I don't think J.D. brings the magic. No. And right.

And I paid for Bill to Somalian joke. He did. He did like a racist Somalian joke on the same stage. Mogadishu, yeah. And it's just like, it's the worst delivery of a joke that I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, no, he's got nothing. He's got zero riz.

But he brings the negative side. Like Trump also brought out, you know, he turns a lot of people out against him. I think J.D. brings the same negativity without the magic. And this is where the edge matters, right? Do I think that JD Vance can be a plausible second fiddle to Trump that comes in and kind of does a low key simulacrum of Trump that everybody's just like 40% less interested in 60% less interested in? Sure, he can do that. Does that hold

together not that coalition at America fest, which holds tensions on Israel and other things? But does it look like something that creates vibes? Does it look like does JD Vance have a big enough thing that when he throws the stone into the water, the ripples reach out that make average people who are looking up every now and then being like,

oh yeah, I like that guy. So the question is, is can Democrats...

Hatred of the other would be his. No, he can't do that. He can't do that. Could he unite them on hatred of the Democrats?

Yeah, but that's why the Democrats need to be less hateable. And also economically, this is the thing, also economically populist, also focused on Americans, That is also worth doing.

Isn't the big question for J.D. not just can he hold a coalition together, but can he turn out the Trump-only voters who've never really had policy asks, right? Because J.D. is like, I'll deliver policy to you. I think that's his promise.

And his policies are very straightforward. America first. But, you know, Trump won all these people who don't vote in presidential elections or who and when they show up, they just vote for him at the top of the ticket. They don't vote for anybody down ballot. They are not policy voters.

And I don't know if J.D. activates them.

Feel like most people, maybe it's maybe just me look at JD and think that guy hates me.

And he doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like a great time.

I would have thought that about Trump.

Yeah. I don't know.

Here's what I'll say in the focus groups. People are resigned to JD and think he is fine.

Well, they think he's have we short circuit a big fight.

He's just fine. Not the voters don't aren't thinking about the big fight. They're just like, I don't know. He's okay.

Before we get out of here, did you have any thoughts about the, uh, the city journal focus group, Sarah, they were horning in on your territory a little bit.

Um,

You ever do focus groups with people who say, you know, I was reading Mein Kampf and I can see where he was going at. I do actually.

It is um Boy, how do I put this? I do things like I do with so many focus groups that I try to present them sort of as a big in terms of big understanding if I took young trump first voters, I would get exactly that group and And I do get it sometimes.

And we play versions of that. I think for them, the shock, the shock of the group wasn't because of the group, the shock was to them. Like they put it out because they were shocked by what they were hearing.

And I realized that I was reading it being like,

yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

If you screen for a certain kind of kid, like, that kid's very certainly out there. It is not I would say, though, that the shock value everything of the transgressiveness of being young is through this. That is the most intense version of it. And then it goes out from there. The median version would still knock your socks off.

Can I leave people with one more Christmas item? I agree with you, Sarah, by the way, and I'm happy. I should just say you shouldn't put up that. Right. It was good that the Manhattan Institute put it out. Not us. Uh, just because it's good for folks who have magus sympathies to

see what they are cultivating. Again, all this stuff is just raw data coming through. So just allegations, they're releasing the documents. This is just something that has been posted since we started the pod today. Just wanted to leave people with it. It's an FBI record that showed that Jeffrey Epstein's brother, Mark Epstein, via email submitted a tip to the FBI in 2023 claiming he believes Epstein was murdered because he

was prepared to name names. According to the FBI intake document, Mark Epstein alleged that the killing was authorized by Donald Trump. I know I don't, I'm not making that allegation, but Jeffrey Epstein's brother apparently made that up. See, uh, allegation to the FBI.

So we'll see how that goes.

Merry Christmas to all, to all. Good night. This wound up being actually a mid show, but a normal size show, normal size show. We will be back. We're going to be one more show before New Year's. Guys, Happy Christmas.

Happy Christmas, everybody. Happy Christmas, everybody.

And to all a good night.