This is the text of an article from the New York Times. Many of you do not have access to The Times, so the complete transcript follows
The journalist Will Sommer examines the perfect storm of the Epstein files, Trump, QAnon and MAGA
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
There’s an old joke: A conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven.
When he arrives, God says, “Welcome. You can ask me one question. Anything you want.” The man says, “I need to know: Who really shot J.F.K.?” God says, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him, and he acted alone.”
The man pauses and then says, “Wow. This goes even higher than I thought.”
On July 7, the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice released a memo detailing the findings of “an exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein.” This systematic review of more than 300 gigabytes of material, they said: “revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
It went on to say: “After a thorough investigation, F.B.I. investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on Aug. 10, 2019.”
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The memo also explained why further files will not be released. Information related to Epstein’s victims is: “intertwined throughout the materials.” It said: “One of our highest priorities is combating child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.”
So case closed.
No, I’m just kidding. MAGA is tearing itself apart over this. Much of the MAGA-verse thinks Attorney General Pam Bondi is lying and is calling for her head. New theories are spinning out: Maybe Donald Trump is on that list. Maybe Donald Trump or his administration is being blackmailed by the intelligence services. Maybe Donald Trump is now himself using that list for blackmail.
Or maybe there was no list. Maybe MAGA’s elite was playing its followers for fools. The juicing of the Epstein conspiracy was not a small project confined to a few outliers in the movement. This one went right to the top. In October 2024, JD Vance, as the vice-presidential candidate, said: “We need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”
In January of 2025, Peter Thiel wrote an Op-Ed for the Financial Times, calling for an “apocalypse” of the old regime’s secrets. The truth about our world, he said, had been kept in the shadows by the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. But the widespread belief that Epstein did not die by suicide showed that complex was dying. Trump’s job, Thiel said, was to finally kill it, to reveal all the secrets.
MAGA has a cosmology, a mythology: There is a corrupt elite — in the most extreme forms, it’s a corrupt, pedophilic elite — and that elite controls everything. And Donald Trump as a person, and MAGA as a movement, are justified in doing anything necessary to break that elite’s control and return this country to the people.
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There is a problem that movements like this face when they take power: What happens when the conspiracy isn’t there? What happens when you declassify the files and there’s nothing in them? What happens if you read the files and you realize there is some reason you can’t release them? What happens when you are the system? When you become the corrupt elite?
Because here’s the thing: Donald Trump is a corrupt elite. He is now, and he always has been, selling out the people who believe in him.
Liberals always want to make this point in the framework we have of the world. Here’s my version of it: Trump is a champion of people who are heavily dependent on Medicaid and SNAP. He just absolutely betrayed them. He cut about a trillion dollars of Medicaid and food assistance to finance tax cuts for him and his rich friends. He did that while denying he was cutting Medicaid — lying to the people who believed in him.
In my framework of the world, that is corruption. That is what the worst elites do when they get power.
But that’s not how the cosmology of MAGA works. His hardest core supporters knew what the problem was, and it wasn’t in the tax code or the safety net. For them, the problem was a conspiracy that reached to the highest levels of American government.
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Then Trump appointed people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to office — people who had been spreading and giving attention to these theories for years. By elevating Patel and Bongino, the message was: Trump knew what the problem was, too. And he was going to fix it.
And then he didn’t. And now he’s lashing out at his own supporters for believing a story that he, and the people around him, were perfectly happy to promote when it served their interests.
I think I should say, before I start this episode, where I am on the Epstein story. If you forced me to give you my best guess, I think this guy had a lot of powerful friends, and that he was a predator and a pedophile, and those sides of his life were mostly separate.
I don’t think there is a list of boldfaced names. The reason I don’t think there is a list is that there have been a lot of big law firms hunting for cases here. There is a lot of money to be made in suing anyone connected to Epstein. Very, very powerful firms — to say nothing of media organizations — that are capable of hiring excellent investigators are just not finding much. Some of the accusations that have been made have fallen apart, like the one against Alan Dershowitz that ended with the accuser admitting she might have been mistaken.
But does that explain everything? No. Does the plea deal Epstein got in Florida look unusually sweet? Yes. Does Epstein’s death seem weird to me? It does.
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There is a remainder, a remnant, that will probably never be resolved. But I don’t find it easier to resolve that remnant in a conspiracy so total that no government, no law firm, no media organization, seems able to breach it.
What MAGA wanted out of Epstein was the same thing it wanted out of QAnon: a story that collapsed reality down to something that is well-ordered. A world where the problems resolve down to a few villains. A world where someone is in charge — and maybe that someone, right now, is evil. But if you could replace them with someone good, then we would finally be able to fix all of this. What is the fantasy of Donald Trump if not that?
But now Donald Trump is pitting himself against that fantasy. The reason the fizzling of the Epstein case has mattered in MAGA is it does something worse than undermine a conspiracy theory. It undermines a worldview.
I want to talk about that worldview. My guest today is Will Sommer, who has been tracking conspiracies for years now. He was a reporter at The Washington Post and is now at The Bulwark, and he’s the author of “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.”
Ezra Klein: Will Sommer, welcome to the show.
Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.
I want to begin with the dominant conspiracy theory of Donald Trump’s first term. For the uninitiated: What was QAnon?
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QAnon, in a nutshell, is the idea that Donald Trump was recruited by the military to take on a pedophile cabal that runs the world — or what we might also call the deep state.
Trump supporters got this idea because starting in late 2017, someone named Q was posting cryptic messages online, and then they would decode them. That’s really what formed the basis of QAnon.
To the extent that QAnon developed a fully fleshed-out mythology, tell me what that story was. Who was in it? What did a serious QAnon believer believe was going on by late 2020?
QAnon believers believe that the world is full of symbols and horrors that they can decode. What they had come to believe is that powerful elites sexually abuse and murder children in satanic rituals, and they drink their blood — or this substance called adrenochrome, which exists but not in the way they think it does — which they believe is a sort of fountain of youth. So they think that people with talk shows or bankers or celebrities are just regularly drinking children’s blood to stay young forever.
QAnon, needless to say, had become very complex and baroque, but they also believed just really random, crazy things. They believed that the government was controlling the weather through chemtrails — clouds in the sky. Or they believed that if a celebrity wore red shoes — a relatively common color of shoe — that was a symbol that they drink children’s blood.
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There was this whole universe of beliefs that they had about nefarious things that the cabal had done.
When you say it like that, it sounds a little hard to believe.
It does.
So what gave it its power? Why was it believed?
I think there were a couple things. The idea of people or an organization of people nefariously abusing children in the dead of night goes back to the Middle Ages, when people would say that Jews were murdering children for Passover, or the satanic panic in the 1980s and the idea that there were these satanic cabals across the country.
I think it is just so emotionally powerful. All right-thinking people are really offended by the idea of children being abused.
And a lot of Trump supporters had really put an enormous amount of faith in Trump that he would change their lives really materially. When QAnon appears about nine months into the first Trump administration, they aren’t getting a lot of what they wanted. He’s bogged down in the Mueller investigation. The wall hasn’t been built. Hillary Clinton hasn’t been locked up.
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Then suddenly Q shows up and says things like: Hillary Clinton is going to be arrested by the end of the month, and Trump is not. It might seem like he’s going to be bogged down in Washington morass, but really he’s at war with essentially satanic forces.
And when he wins, you’re going to own your apartment for free, your car loan is going to be canceled, diseases are going to be cured. There were other things, there were religious elements — a lot of stuff that matched up with what was going on at Fox News at the time. So I think there was a lot of appeal to people.
Plus, it was kind of a game. There was a community of people decoding the clues together.
One dimension of both QAnon — and then Epstein, which has more texture of reality to it — is that if you think back over the past few decades, there are a huge number of sexual abuse scandals that really did have cover-ups, that really did exist in forms of common and elite knowledge, that really were grotesque: Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal. More recently, we have the Diddy parties.
On the one hand, QAnon has this outlandishness to it. And on the other hand, when you think over this period, there actually is a recurrent pattern of networks of powerful people or individual powerful people abusing women usually, although in the Catholic Church scandal it wasn’t only women. And it’s not just covering it up, but it being known by other powerful people who did nothing about it.
The idea that you cannot trust the elites to police this — there is truth to that.
Cover-ups in these sexual abuse scandals are part of why QAnon is so powerful and resonant with people: because people see something true in it and something that is really real.
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From my perspective, talking to QAnon people, I often feel silly saying, “Do you really think an institution would cover up sexual abuse to protect itself or to avoid embarrassment? Even at the cost of more children and more women being abused?”
Obviously, we know that does happen.
If you just said there’s a cabal and it’s putting resources into green energy or it’s offshoring jobs or it’s keeping taxes high, a lot of people — particularly the often apolitical people that were activated by QAnon — wouldn’t care, understandably.
But when you say that the absolute worst things that you can imagine are happening, and those people are going to get away with it and they rule over you, that really resonates with people.
I want to hold on to something you said in there — that after this satanic pedophilic cabal is arrested, maybe your rent will go away, maybe your disease will be cured.
There’s a version where there isn’t a lot of political import to this — that there’s a terrible crime happening, and it needs to be stopped. And the final step in the stopping of it is the arresting of all these child molesters.
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But there’s a politics to Q, a sense that on the other side of it lies something for you — the normie or average reader of 8chan, the average MAGA supporter.
Explain that part of it.
I’m glad you point that out, because the utopian or messianic aspects of QAnon, I think, were often underplayed at the time.
In QAnon, they thought there would be a moment called “the storm,” where Trump would arrest and presumably execute everyone conservatives didn’t like. It would be people in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood, in banking — people like Tom Hanks and Oprah would be sent to Guantánamo Bay for military tribunals.
Then after that, for everyone left behind, life would be pretty sweet. They believed that this cabal was responsible for all the evil in the world, all the wars. It was holding back all the cures for all the diseases. That basically the cabal created the concept of debt.
And you might say: Who would really believe this stuff? But we know that on Jan. 6, Ashli Babbitt, who died that day, thought that day was the storm.
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There was a guy who was part of the mob who had just bought a new car, and someone said: How can you afford that? And he said: Don’t worry, the storm’s almost here.
QAnon was powerful in part because it offered people excuses or some relief in their lives that the system or the economy or the government wasn’t giving them.
In your book, you talk about meeting a QAnon believer who had terminal cancer. I think it was at a rally. Can you tell me that story?
Absolutely. This is someone who at one of the first QAnon rallies I went to said: I have cancer, and I’m too poor to afford the treatments for it. In all likelihood, it will kill me relatively soon. But the good news is that because Trump is going to bring on the storm, he’s going to take down this cabal that has been holding back the cure for cancer. And soon enough, I’ll be back in action, and my cancer will be cured.
I saw a woman who said: My child has an intellectual disability. He’s getting mistreated in school, but the cabal is holding back the cure for autism, and Trump is going to find it.
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It really reached into people’s hearts in places where they were most vulnerable and offered them something.
When you met these people — I mean, they’re different people — but what were they like?
We’re used to the QAnon Shaman, the guy in the paint and the horns, or like the Jan. 6 mob and these people who just look like lunatics. I think what would surprise people about QAnon believers is that often they were otherwise totally normal people and very affable.
They were totally happy to talk with me about QAnon. There was a woman I interviewed before the riot really started on Jan. 6 who was totally nice and said: I’m here in D.C. for Jan. 6, and also I’ll be going up to Comet Ping Pong to see the underground child tunnels that I believe exist there.
She was a very nice person, and then she went and caught a criminal charge for her role in the riot.
These people exist in the world. They have jobs. But they also have this derangement, or they exist in another reality.
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At its peak, how big was QAnon? How many people are we talking about or believing in some version of this conspiracy?
There has been some polling on this, and one that stuck out to me was a 2021 poll by P.R.R.I., which found that 16 percent of Americans believe that there is a pedophile cabal that runs the world, and 22 percent believe that the storm is coming. That is a huge number of people.
When you hear polls like that, how literally do you take them? Because sometimes I wonder about a random person being called by a pollster and asked: Do you believe there is a satanic pedophile cult running the world? And they’re like: I don’t really want to be talking to this person. Sure.
I never know if I should really believe that almost one in five of the people I’ve met believed that in a real way — or they’re signaling or having fun or not thinking about it.
In my head, I subtract a couple points from the higher numbers and ask: What does the storm mean to these people? Or maybe they’re liberals who believe that Donald Trump runs the pedophile cabal. Or just don’t really fit into the QAnon framework.
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Really rigorous polls that have asked: Are you a QAnon believer? have found a couple of percentage points of people.
So QAnon begins on very esoteric online message boards. It migrates to social media. But for a while we’re mostly talking about random people on the internet stumbling on this thing and getting involved in this strange subculture.
Tell me about the way it begins to get picked up by influential, notable people in the MAGA and right-wing influencer movement.
The power of QAnon is that it grew from such a small point — a couple of posts on 4chan — that people were initially saying: This is ridiculous. Even the people there discounted them. Then, because it reached an emotional resonance with people, it started growing.
It gets on YouTube, where someone like Roseanne Barr or Curt Schilling, the former baseball player, picks it up, and from there, it keeps growing.
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You have people picking up the ideas, like Alex Jones at Infowars, who’s obviously a huge vector, and a kind of a crossover moment between conspiracy theorists and the broader MAGA movement. He starts getting into it. He starts interviewing the QAnon experts who are talking about how great it is. So QAnon is bubbling, and it gets a big boost in 2019 from the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
But then with the pandemic, you can look at it and see all of these conditions that would lead a conspiracy theory to get really big: People are at home a lot more, so they have more time on the internet. People are, understandably, very frustrated with the state of the world, and they want answers. And one of the things that is offering answers is the world of QAnon. The world just seems unsettled.
The pandemic is a moment — the writer Anna Merlan called this the “conspiracy singularity” — that things begin to cohere into one overwhelming set of ideas.
Yes. The elites, the government, is reaching into your life in a particular way, in a direct way, that it probably was not in the past. Your kid’s school is closed, you may have lost your job, or you have to wear a mask.
In this way, it bred a lot of anger at the government and elites. Then QAnon says: That Dr. Fauci guy, he’s maybe not just a busybody to you — he’s actually part of a very sinister group. This isn’t just a thing that happened to us that we all have to live through — there are specific people who caused it, and we can go get them.
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One thing that began happening with QAnon is that not only influencers but Donald Trump himself began sending signals that he was hearing them, that maybe he agreed with them, that maybe this was true.
How would you describe the relationship between Trump and QAnon?
For QAnon believers, acknowledgment from Trump is the most important thing. Because people in their lives are saying: This thing you believe is so dumb — how could you believe that? But it’s all based around Trump, and if Trump said it’s real, then they’re confirmed.
Initially, they were saying he used the number 17 or he waved his hand like a Q. They were so desperate for this.
So Trump was already getting asked about this in the 2020 election. Interviewers would ask, “What do you think about QAnon? These are the people who think you’re after the pedophile cabal — isn’t that ridiculous?” And he would say:
Archived clip of Donald Trump: I do know they are very much against pedophilia, they fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it.
Just from QAnon believers I talked to, that really improved their faith in QAnon and helped them continue holding on to it for a while.
You also have Trump associates like Kash Patel, who, when Trump’s social network Truth Social was launching, said:
Archived clip of Kash Patel: I think people are having fun with Q, and I think also that, you know, I don’t really follow him. We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the “America First” movement.
Basically: I want this to be a home for things like QAnon.
So the promise of QAnon in this whole period is that there will eventually be the storm. A lot of what you’re seeing happening in the Trump administration, a lot of the flailing around, a lot of the apparent chaos behind it — there is a plan. “Trust the plan” is one of the big watch terms of QAnon.
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Then you have the 2020 election. Donald Trump loses. He has his own conspiracy theory about whether he lost — but he loses. There is no storm. Jan. 6 happens, people are arrested for it. They do storm the Capitol, but they do not take over the government.
What happens to QAnon after that?
This is the biggest challenge for QAnon. The entire point of QAnon was that the only way we can take on the pedophile cabal is if Donald Trump is elected. That’s why the military recruited them, they believe — and then he loses. A lot of people had pinned their hopes on Jan. 6 being the storm, and then it didn’t happen.
They kept thinking: Well, maybe all these troops are in D.C. for the inauguration to arrest Biden. And that didn’t happen.
I talked to a QAnon believer who, on the day of the inauguration, said: I threw up. I was so upset that, suddenly, as Biden put his hand on the Bible, it became clear to me that this wasn’t going to happen.
So QAnon stumbles along there. Q comes out and basically says: Stop talking about Q. Keep talking about the cabal. Stop talking about Q so much — essentially because people have realized that we’re lunatics if you talk about Q or our slogan “Where we go one, we go all.” But keep the ideas going.
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From there, QAnon gets subsumed, in a way, into the broader Republican Party. Think about Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was a hard-core QAnon believer at the time. I’ve looked at her posts. She wasn’t someone who just posted Q a couple times. She was deep in it.
Now she’s one of the most prominent members of the House. She’s a huge fund-raiser.
A lot of these people take off the QAnon outfit, but they still keep thinking in that way.
You mentioned that during this period, in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein is found dead.
There is this thing happening where a very rich and powerful person has actually been arrested for pedophilia, for sex trafficking, and then he is found dead mysteriously.
Tell me about the theories that began to build around that and how these things converge.
I think the most effective conspiracy theories really have a kernel of truth at their center, where they have something that is genuinely very weird or unprecedented or uncomfortable — or a crime, in the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Even from the start of QAnon, and its precursor conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, a lot of material was drawn from Epstein because it was a case of someone who was sex trafficking, who had powerful connections.
They were already very interested in Jeffrey Epstein. When he was indicted and then later found dead, that made it just explode because this was a case where you didn’t come off like a crazy person if you said: Don’t you think it’s weird what happened to Jeffrey Epstein? What was he doing? How did he have all these connections to people like Bill Clinton or Donald Trump?
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From there, you can recruit people into believing in something more outlandish, like QAnon. I would say Epstein’s death, even before the pandemic, was really a huge crossover moment for QAnon in terms of getting new recruits because people really were legitimately unsettled by it.
David French, my colleague, had this good line where he called the Jeffrey Epstein theories the thinking man’s QAnon. And I get that, because the thing about Epstein is that it is weird, and there are things in it that are hard to explain. And there are things here that really happened, right? This was not a bunch of cryptic Delphic writings on an internet message board.
If you were trying to explain the Jeffrey Epstein story — not any conspiracies, just the story — to somebody who didn’t really know anything about it, how would you do it?
In the early aughts, there was this guy named Jeffrey Epstein who is fabulously wealthy. People don’t know why he’s so wealthy, really. He ostensibly had some time in finance in Manhattan, but in terms of wealth, he’s leagues beyond what you would expect that to be. He has an enormous home in Manhattan. He has a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He has a ranch out West. He has a private jet. He has an island. It all comes back to the island.
He’s very, very wealthy, and people write articles asking: How is this guy so wealthy? Where does he get all these connections?
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Then, I believe, in 2005, a mother called the police in Palm Beach and said: My teenage daughter said that this man, Jeffrey Epstein, offered her money to give him a massage. And he masturbated.
Essentially, a sex crime has happened here. The police take it very seriously. They start investigating. They find many girls who were given this treatment by Epstein, and they start wondering: Why is this guy so well connected? They’re surveilling him at the airport as he takes off on the private jet.
Then, when they start actually trying to prosecute him, it seems like he has a lot of friends in high places. He has really high-powered lawyers. Prosecutors on the case are being shuffled around, moved away. There’s a sense of: Don’t look at this too closely.
Ultimately, he signs a plea deal that has been called the deal of the century — that in exchange for pleading guilty to a couple of these cases in Palm Beach, he eventually ends up on house arrest.
It’s been said that what they had on him could have put him away for life. Instead, the federal and local authorities agree that they’re just not going to prosecute him anymore beyond that.
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There are some other weird dimensions of the plea deal. There’s immunity for co-conspirators. And there’s something that comes up later that, of all the things, has always piqued my interest in this: The prosecutor or the local district attorney, or whoever it is, Alex Acosta, later becomes Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
There’s a report in The Daily Beast that when he’s being vetted for labor secretary, he’s asked by Trump officials: What’s up with this sweetheart deal you gave Epstein?
Again, this is in a Daily Beast report, and it’s not coming from Acosta himself, it’s coming from some unnamed Trump official — but apparently Acosta said: I was told he belongs to intelligence and to back off.
If you take that at face value, it adds to this other dimension here — that somehow he is an intelligence asset. Somehow he is protected. And not only that, but the government knows about all this. But also — weirdly, for where this story goes — the Trump administration knows about all this.
So what did you make of that?
The Jeffrey Epstein intelligence connection is really interesting because it ties into a lot of the mystery about him because it makes you think: Why is this guy so wealthy? Why does he have all these locations? Why does he have all these really high-powered connections? Why does he seem to move through the world with ease, inexplicably?
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That intelligence remark in The Daily Beast Report has really been scrutinized. And people start to wonder: Is this guy running a honey pot? Does he blackmail powerful people? Do they — and this is pure conjecture — do they come to the island, and he plies them with underage girls or adult women? Does he videotape them, perhaps, and then use that as blackmail material? Is that how he got so wealthy?
That idea then becomes kind of a key part of the Epstein story. The other thing I would say is the intelligence connection is then used to explain, for people who scrutinize this, how he then managed to get off so easily. Was Jeffrey Epstein an intelligence operation that ran off the rails in Palm Beach — and then they essentially tried to cover it up?
Here’s something I’ve been wondering about the Acosta dimension of this story: It’s not like Acosta disappeared from public view after this. He became labor secretary for Donald Trump in the first term. He ended up having to resign as labor secretary because the Epstein story kept growing, and it was becoming a distraction.
But he gave a press conference about all this. And obviously, if somebody told him Epstein was an intelligence source, it would probably be helpful to Acosta or helpful to the rest of us if he would say who told him that. But Acosta, to my knowledge, doesn’t really admit this ever happened.
Maybe it never happened. Maybe this initial Daily Beast report, which is all unnamed — maybe that’s the thing that’s untrustworthy.
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But what do you actually, substantively make of it? What is your hypothesis of what we should think about that comment?
Acosta just got named to the board of directors of Newsmax. He exists out there in the world. People can ask him questions.
That is a great question. You would think because this plea deal imploded his career or has haunted him forever, he would come out and say: Basically, I was told by the head of this intelligence agency to leave it alone. So it’s not really my fault.
But as you said, he hasn’t vanished. He’s certainly not talking about it. I think there are a lot of weird intelligence connections. Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s friend and lieutenant — her dad had a ton of intelligence connections and was involved in various intelligence operations.
I think part of the challenge, and part of why this story is so interesting to people, is because unless these secret files come out — that may or may not exist — it’s really unknowable.
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Another dimension of the Epstein story: You mentioned his wealth is a bit mysterious for what he appeared to be doing. He was maybe a money manager to some degree, maybe offering tax and estate-planning advice, but he seems richer than that should have been able to offer him. The other thing is he also seems better connected than that should have been able to offer him.
One thing that is somewhat complicated for the way this theory and the ideas around it begin to evolve is that he was very well connected to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump was somebody who appeared to have known early on that Epstein liked young women.
Tell me about the Trump-Epstein relationship.
Donald Trump was friends with Epstein for a long time. There’s a video of them on the side of a dance floor, and they’re whispering to each other. They seem to be saying: She’s hot — maybe I’ll ask her to dance later.
Then there’s this quote Trump gave for a profile of Epstein — one of these profiles that’s saying this guy seems to be a billionaire, but no one can explain his wealth. Trump says — and I’m paraphrasing here: People say Jeffrey Epstein likes young women — maybe even more than me.
I’m going to give the whole quote here. This is New York magazine in 2002. Trump says, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
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It’s a little odd.
It is. If you think back to how people would talk about Harvey Weinstein before #MeToo, it’s this weird, open secret that people will nod to.
One question I have as this begins to merge all together with Trump, the savior of QAnon and the scourge of pedophilic elites — but also the only person on record, as early as 2002, saying that he knows Jeffrey Epstein has a thing for young women.
That doesn’t seem like a guy you would put your trust in to be outside of this — and your savior from it. That seems like a guy who might be part of this thing.
Ezra, you’ve got to think about this like QAnon. This makes Trump the perfect guy to take it all down.
In their case, you’re right. It is kind of crazy. Their rationalization is that, in this video of Trump hanging out with Epstein, for example — perhaps he was looking inside Epstein’s operation to bring it down from the inside.
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Or you say: Why would he pick Alex Acosta, the guy involved in this nice plea deal Epstein got? Why would he make him the head of the labor department, which has a ton of oversight over human trafficking?
Well, Trump was maybe trying to bring attention to the plea deal and to get it overturned by elevating Acosta’s profile. That’s how they see it.
We know Trump is subtle, if nothing else. He does things through misdirection and symbolism.
Yes. [Laughs.]
But I want to stay on what’s strange about Epstein for a couple of minutes. Epstein is really well connected. He is friendly — not just with Donald Trump. He’s friendly with Bill Gates. He’s friendly with Bill Clinton. He hosts these dinners for scientists and innovators. He has lots of friends who are very, very rich.
So the idea that begins to emerge, as I understand it, is that Epstein is running something like what we would now describe as the Diddy parties — but for the most powerful people in society.
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That on his island, he is flying back and forth with the most powerful and most wealthy people in the world for these pedophilic orgies. And that it is in the union of these two things that the cabal begins to take a shape.
Epstein knew everybody. He knew what they had done. Maybe he’s doing it in part for blackmail, for intelligence reasons, or maybe just he has the files on them.
So Epstein is a threat to them and the whole cabal. When he begins to get brought down, now this whole thing is endangered. And the fact that he ends up dead in a cell reportedly by suicide begins to look very fishy to people. Is that basically the structure of the theory here?
That is the crux of it — the idea that he finally has this federal case in which he could potentially flip, or maybe all of his evidence will, at minimum, come out at trial. So perhaps either he’s killed in his cell or — which I think is maybe more believable — someone says: Hey Jeffrey, we’re going to create the circumstances for you to take things into your own hands.
That is the Epstein story summed up.
I want to hold on that last bit because, again, there are things that are weird. Epstein has already tried to kill himself in prison. The psychologist or the person in charge of mental health has said: This guy should not be allowed in a cell by himself. He’s a suicide risk.
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He is left in a cell by himself.
There are irregularities around which cameras are on and off and whether or not they’re working, irregularities around whether or not the guards are watching or not watching.
On the one hand, I think that if you don’t believe D.M.V.s are run well, you should not believe prisons are run well. I think all evidence we have about prisons is that they’re run, in fact, terribly.
On the other hand, for such a high-value prisoner, in whom there’s a lot of interest — it’s strange. I get why people think it’s strange. I think it’s strange.
You’re somebody who studies conspiracy theories — theories that, typically, I think you don’t believe. Where do you fall on this? What do you think here?
If I can get a little wild and woolly with it, this is one that I’m quite suspicious of.
I’m used to really going through the guts of conspiracy theories and saying: Well, I think we can chalk that up to human incompetence or just a coincidence.
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But in this case, I think there’s a lot of smoke. Again, what you described as the mainline Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory, I don’t think has been substantiated in a lot of ways.
But I also think there is a lot of weirdness, and I think we’re at risk of discrediting ourselves with the general public, as the media or the government, if you just say: Nope, he killed himself. Case closed. There’s nothing weird here.
To be fair to the other side of this, I want to try to give my best version of how you would explain most of this away and see what you think of it: Epstein seems to have been very good at ingratiating himself with very rich people — something in between a money manager and a con man — and he was living beyond his actual means.
But at the end of the day, when people captured him, and he was put in prison, the Epstein estate was not actually that large. So it’s not like he was sitting on billions of dollars.
So maybe you can explain that as con man work. And the fact that all these rich people know each other and fly in planes together — it’s just kind of what their networks look like.
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And yes, Epstein was a pedophile, and, working with Maxwell, he did groom young women and assault them. And he was just kind of doing that himself, and there isn’t that much evidence — I mean, there’s smoke around Prince Andrew, but we don’t really know what was going on there.
So maybe this looks really weird — and there’s not that much there. And the weird truth of this is that there’s not all that much order behind it.
That’s the best account I can give in which there’s not much there. What do you think of that?
I think that’s very possible. When I look at conspiracy theories, there are often cases where I say: Yeah, maybe this guy has weird art you don’t like, and maybe he made a couple off-color remarks. But it’s very possible that then you’re making it a jump to: This guy is running a child sex dungeon, or what have you. And there’s kind of a logical leap there.
I think it’s very possible that Jeffrey Epstein was a guy with a lot of powerful friends who was incidentally a pedophile, and that these powerful people were not involved with that aspect of his life. And maybe he got this sweetheart plea deal because he was just a rich guy in Palm Beach, and they wanted to move on with it and cover it up.
Or alternately, maybe there was this whole intelligence aspect to it. So I think that question about how it could go either way is, in part, why there’s so much pressure for the release of whatever the government can release.
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Tell me about the role that Epstein and the Epstein files begin to play in the broader MAGA movement.
Specifically, because of the connection to Bill Clinton and, by relation, Hillary Clinton, they become really fixated on this idea that Jeffrey Epstein was the Democrats’ pedophile pimp — that anyone you personally don’t like as a Trump supporter is probably on the Epstein list and that someday this will all come out.
The Epstein stuff and the broader feeling that something is being kept from you is really the most visible, and maybe the most potent, aspect of the broader kind of Trumpian populism — this idea that there’s this group of elites who are doing bad things to you and they’re getting away with it. They’re shipping your jobs overseas. They’re bringing in immigrants to depress your wages. Who knows what they’re doing with gender to your children? And then at the very top, let’s say in the case of J.F.K., they killed the president. Or in the case of Epstein, they did all these terrible things to children, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they think you’re too dumb to even know about it — or that you don’t deserve to know about it.
So there’s that idea that your intelligence is being insulted that I think really plays on these Trumpian chords and gets people riled up.
This is not random people saying this. JD Vance in October 2024 — very close to the election — says: “We need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”
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Epstein catches on with the broader public and becomes a cocktail party conversation topic. So when people like JD Vance go on these bro comedy podcasts, people — I think understandably — ask: Hey, what’s up with Epstein? If you were elected, would you want to get to the bottom of that?
And in JD Vance’s case, he says: Yes, we’ve got to get this list out there.
But do you think he believes there is a list?
You know, it’s hard to know. JD Vance is kind of a populist — at least posing — sort of guy. I don’t think really that there are a lot of people in the Trump administration who are saying there was nothing going on with Epstein, and this is all just for the rubes.
I think they did definitely see it as an opportunity to inflame people against Democrats and to give bigger stakes than just: We’re going to do tariffs. We’re going to do tax cuts.
If you say: We’re going to get justice against the international pedophile network — I think that reaches people on a different level.
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But it ends up being a series of somewhat disappointing busts.
Yes. There was so much anticipation around the J.F.K. files. I think there’s some interesting things about the C.I.A. —
Yes — they had more contact with Oswald than people thought.
Yes. And for real J.F.K. intensives, that’s very interesting. But there isn’t what people hoped for, which was a file that said: The C.I.A. did it. The Mafia did it.
Or, in the case of the Epstein binders debacle, I think that really sums up so much of how the administration has handled this.
Can you describe what happened there? This is a couple months ago now.
This was late February.
So you have a bunch of these right-wing media influencers — people who were a couple of rungs below someone who might be on Fox News. People who have been maybe conspiracy theorists in the past and now have big YouTube or X followings.
They visit the White House to meet with administration officials and kind of get celebrated by the new administration. And Pam Bondi and Kash Patel show up, seemingly to everyone else’s surprise, in the White House. And they say: Look, we’ve got these binders — Phase 1 of the Epstein files. We’ve all been so excited about the Epstein files.
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So they give them to these influencers. Those folks then go outside. The White House press pool is there. And they get these photos where they’re really like gripping and grinning with the evidence of the human trafficking conspiracy theory.
And then it all turns out to be nearly entirely all public information already. So reportedly, Pam Bondi was hoping to kind of butter up these influencers and get some good press for herself. But in the end, it becomes really a fiasco both for her and for these figures.
So what begins to happen after that?
So then there is more and more demand, particularly from these people who received the binders, because they’re saying: You kind of made me look like a fool. So we really need to release the actual Epstein information.
So there’s more pressure. James O’Keefe, the kind of undercover guy, catches Pam Bondi on tape saying: Oh, my gosh, there are tens of thousands of Epstein videos that no one knows exist.
And so there’s this drumbeat of more and more demand for Epstein info. And so much of: When is the client list going to come out? When are we going to get the names of these pedophiles?
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And not just that, but Pam Bondi at some point says she has the client list on her desk. Or at least there’s something — I want to be careful here because the White House’s argument is that we misinterpreted what she said.
Yes, there’s this interesting ambiguity. But she’s on Fox News, and the anchor asks:
Archived clip of John Roberts: D.O.J. may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients? Will that really happen?
Pam Bondi: It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that. I’m reviewing J.F.K. files, M.L.K. files. That’s all in the process of being reviewed.
And so that is interpreted as: The “it” there is the Epstein client list.
And now they’re claiming: Oh, that’s not what she meant. The White House Twitter account reposted that video. People were saying: Oh, my gosh, she has the client list.
So they effectively said: Yes, this is true.
And now you start seeing this other weird thing happening. Of everybody in the administration at the cabinet level, Kash Patel is probably the most bought into and the most connected to MAGA conspiracy land. He goes on “Joe Rogan”:
Archived clip of Joe Rogan: You’re talking about the video of the murder or the suicide. But what about the video from the island?
And gives a sort of crazy interview, where he ends up saying that the videos do exist.
Archived clip of Kash Patel: Again, we’re going to give you everything we can. And people have to remember: We’re not going to revictimize women.
There isn’t a conspiracy, but they’re also not going to release any of these because they’re not going to retraumatize the women?
Archived clip of Kash Patel: We’re not going to put that [expletive] back out there. It’s not happening. ’Cause then he wins. Not doing it. You want to hate me for it? Fine.
Yes, there starts to be this new angle, where Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, who’s another real right-wing media guy, then start trying to throw water on Epstein after the binders incident. They do interviews, and they say: Look, Epstein killed himself. There are a lot of videos, but —
It becomes almost this weird twist, where they effectively start saying: We’re not going to release these sicko videos. Why are you even asking about that?
And it’s like: Well, you were the one who was really hyping up this information.
So they start really trying to lower expectations about what’s going to happen.
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How well does that work?
Not very well. People became furious with Patel and Bongino. They were already facing criticism for a lot of other things. This is an audience that wants Democrats’ heads to roll. They think the deep state was out to get Trump for many other reasons, and they’re not seeing, you know, Hillary Clinton getting arrested or the people who prosecuted Trump getting arrested. So they’re already really mad.
And you can see that the pressure is getting to Bongino, in particular, because he’s posting all the time. This is the deputy F.B.I. director — he should have better things to do. But he’s posting things like: I’m working really hard on finding out who took cocaine to the White House, or who planted the pipe bomb at Jan. 6 — because they believe that was a false flag operation.
So this is an administration that you can see is already really beholden to satisfying these conspiracy theories.
This gets at something that is different about Trump’s second administration from his first.
In Trump 1.0., his administration was staffed with a lot of members of the Republican or business establishment. So there was this layer of separation between Trump and the MAGA types inside the White House and his administration. When he complained that there was a deep state that was fighting him, it may not have been true in the sense that he sometimes meant it, but there was a bureaucracy. There were other factions and coalitions that were not bought into what MAGA was.
In his second term, that separation isn’t there anymore. He has put the most loyal soldiers he can find in these positions. Nobody can say Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are members of the establishment. They were not promoted up through the ranks of the F.B.I. Pam Bondi is very much handpicked by Donald Trump. Elsewhere, you have people like R.F.K. Jr.
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So Trump can no longer use the line he used all the time in his first administration, which is: You can’t blame me — I’m at war with these people.
Because now they’re his people. And Trump himself seems to be getting upset that they’re not being trusted — that MAGA is turning on them and not trusting him. And he gives this comment when asked about it by the press:
Archived clip of Donald Trump: Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.
What have you made of where Trump is on this and his sudden sense that it’s ridiculous to keep asking about this creep Jeffrey Epstein?
I think Trump is basically just expecting this MAGA movement that he has created, with a whole lot of conspiracy theorists in it, to fall into line.
This is a guy who would signal the QAnon, and he would say: Well, maybe QAnon is right about some things. And now he’s expecting them to fall into line.
On one hand, I can see why he would think that because they’ve fallen in line on so many other things in the past. But this Epstein thing is so powerful to people, and it’s something that you really have to swallow: If they believe that there’s a pedophile cabal, they’re going to have to accept that Trump is not going to pursue them, not going to get justice. That’s a lot to take.
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Or you have to accept that they were all lying to you.
Yes. That is the worst-case scenario: They’re going to let the pedophile cabal keep going.
The best-case scenario is that they were capitalizing on genuine cases of young girls being sexually abused — that they ginned that up and used it to help win the election.
There’s another figure in here who seems significant to me: Elon Musk. Tell me a bit about Musk’s role in all this.
Musk has really helped bring this Epstein situation to a boil just in the past couple months.
So Elon Musk obviously was a very close Trump lieutenant and funder, and very involved with DOGE. But then after he and Trump had a falling out a few weeks ago, he comes out kind of biting Trump, and says: They’re spending too much money. He’s not being enough of a deficit hawk. Though ultimately, that’s not really something MAGA people care too much about.
But then amid this daylong fight, Musk comes out and says: Well, you know what? You’re not going to get the Epstein files because Trump is in the Epstein files, and that’s why they’re not coming out.
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Yes. This is June 5. He tweets: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.”
And that is a big bomb. I think that was treated — rightly — by people in the MAGA movement and these right-wing influencers and everyone else as suddenly the moment that the gloves were off. And this is a rift that cannot be healed.
Musk has since deleted that tweet, although on July 7 he wrote: “What’s the time? Oh, look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again.”
I guess there are two ways of understanding Musk here. One is that he knows something — that he was inside the government, his DOGE people were everywhere, and he is telling us this thing that he knows many people have also believed might be true because Trump did have this relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
And the other way of understanding Musk is that he knows nothing, but he does understand the pressure points of the MAGA base, and he does understand that Epstein is a high-engagement topic. And he even knows that it can’t really be disproved — because how do you rebut the idea that there’s a secret file connecting Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein?
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Where are you on this?
If this was in another administration and the president’s closest adviser and bankroll comes out and says: This president is in the pedophile files — it would be treated very seriously.
Musk is obviously a very smart guy. And on the one hand, perhaps he is recognizing that this is sort of the ultimate insult to pull on Trump and something that will cause Trump a lot of trouble with the base — as it has gone on to cause.
Or: He did have people all over the government. He himself is very insinuated — or was — in Trump’s circles.
Like so many things about Epstein, who’s to say it’s not true?
The other dimension of Musk is that he owns X, and he has juiced his own centrality to the algorithm. So when he writes something, it gets tens of millions of views — sometimes even more than that.
So when he broadcasts this — and he’s been recently retweeting people talking about it — he’s able to go onto one of these central platforms that has been a ground zero for this kind of conspiracy thinking and make the conspiracy more engaging. Like tell the algorithm that things that talk about Jeffrey Epstein are things you really want to be showing to people.
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It’s not that nobody else was interested in Jeffrey Epstein. I do think there’s smoke there. I do think it looks weird. And on the other hand, it’s hard to say anything because I don’t know anything.
But if you’re in the engagement business and you don’t care about facts, then it’s easy to say things — and in fact, it’s profitable. Because people want to hear the speculation here. There is interest. You will get views. You will get retweets. You will get people listening to your podcast.
And Musk has just turned X into a kind of clearing house and turned up the dial on this particular controversy.
And then all these people in the administration are really addicted to X. And they’re in the particular subcultures of it that talk about this.
So it’s not just to me that Musk has been able to levy the accusation in a way that’s a little bit hard to rebut — though nor has he ever offered any evidence. It’s also that he has filled their attentional world with it — which, if you’re not in their attentional world, you probably don’t realize how big this is now on right-wing MAGA X.
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I think that’s a great way to put it. Musk controls one of the main discussion platforms or media distribution outlets in MAGA.
X is obviously not actually huge in terms of its user base. We know that it really doesn’t drive traffic to news articles. But for conservatives it is hugely popular. Now Elon has shown that he will pull all kinds of different games in terms of what gets incentivized on the platform, and he’s literally paying people to drive more engagement.
So in that way, I think it encourages people to really whip up these mobs. And what is more controversial — or going to get people talking more — than Epstein?
On the other hand, for Trump supporters or allies who want to say: Hey guys, the party line now is to get over it and move on — that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t really go well on X. And people are going to say: Hey, pipe down. Or: You’re being a hypocrite.
And obviously, Musk is happy to oversee that.
One thing I found interesting about the MAGA freakout here was that there were some pretty loud voices who were angry about this. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on X: “No one believes there is not a client list.”
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Tucker Carlson said: “I feel like we’re at a dangerous point now.”
Alex Jones released a video where he says: “Now, by coming in and becoming part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it. You cannot see it any other way.”
I could keep quoting these. But then when I go and watch them or look at them, they’re very careful to stay away from Trump himself. They blame Pam Bondi. Some people say there’s a conspiracy that is even more powerful than Donald Trump, that he’s not, in fact, at the top — the elite pedo ring is above him.
They need somebody to take the fall for this. But the fact that ultimately the buck has to stop with Trump here on some level — you don’t really see that many of them saying that.
That’s right. So much of the power of these right-wing influencer characters is derived from closeness to Trump — and certainly to Trump not ripping into you in a Truth Social post, which I think is what they’re afraid of.
So who else can they blame? Well, Pam Bondi, I think, has been the main one. But even they must know that she wouldn’t do this all on her own. So this kind of twisted logic they have to do of: It’s the fault of the media for not asking Trump enough Epstein questions so that he knows this is a big deal to us.
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[Laughs.] Sorry. That’s very funny.
And then you saw when someone did ask and he goes: I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s move on.
So they expect that suddenly, the media, their archenemies, should be working hand in hand with them to really get justice.
I think it is interesting the way this has taken root and has begun to be seen as a genuine problem for the Trump administration. And I think it gets at the way you cannot attack a coalition using the rules of the other coalition.
Liberals endlessly want to attack Donald Trump in their own framework of the world: He’s a threat to democracy. He says things that are untrue all the time. He’s outrageous. He’s cruel. He’s destroying due process and deporting all these people without any kind of evidentiary standard.
But when you’re dealing with a coalition that is conspiratorial, that is anti-system, that is founded on this idea that the ruling class is corrupt and is lying to you and nothing they say can be trusted — in some ways the thing that is very hard for that coalition to deal with is an attack under its own terms.
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Suddenly, its leaders have become the ruling class, and they seem to now be part of the corruption. They seem to now be part of the cover-up. And now they can’t be trusted.
There’s a bit of the dog-that-caught-the-car in all of this.
They are stuck in the world they created, under the terms of governance that they created. They said: We’re going to get these files. There is an Epstein client list.
Or perhaps Pam Bondi said: It’s on my desk.
I will say, they have also taught their audience to really reflexively distrust people in power, whether it’s: Don’t trust what Dr. Fauci says about Covid. Or: Don’t trust the government when it comes to your kids’ education.
So now they’re saying — I mean really Trump is saying: Look, I’m the president. Get over it. Move on. I say it’s fine.
And that is something these people are not really used to believing.
Do you think they will get over it and move on in two weeks?
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I think it’s going to stick around longer than that. I think Trump has sent enough messages. It was reported that he was making personal calls to some of these right-wing thought leaders to say: Hey, cut it out. Or to someone like Charlie Kirk: Why did you appear with Steve Bannon and lambast my administration? And suddenly Charlie Kirk says: I’m not talking about it anymore.
Incredible journalistic ethics over there. A real profile in courage.
Yes. [Laughs.] Now you have this situation where I think a lot of the really vocal people, the people who are getting invites to the White House, are probably going to chill out on it — or potentially risk their careers.
On the other hand, I think this is going to be harder to square for people in the “Joe Rogan” world who brought a lot of people to Trump and who have their own kind of credibility outside of Trump.
And then for the average Trump voter, I think they’re just kind of upset about it, and it’s hard to say: Because of my devotion to Donald Trump, I’m going to bury my concerns about the pedophile cabal.
There is also a dimension here where the Democrats clearly smell blood. So Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia, had this viral clip:
Archived clip of Jon Ossoff: Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?
Beyond him, you see Democrats in Congress calling for the release of the Epstein files. And I think Democrats now see this as a free way to crack up the MAGA coalition.
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Because whatever the Epstein files are, either they are not satisfying or the Trump administration feels they can’t release them. If the Trump administration had a thing it could release, they would have by now.
So now they’re in a bind. And yes, maybe the MAGA right tries to back off on this.
But you can always tell when the opposition smells blood. And clearly on this, the Democrats smell blood. I would not be surprised to begin seeing ads on this. I would not be surprised to see this in midterm campaigns. As a thing that can be frustrating for the other side, they seem to have fastened on this as a line of attack that works under the terms of the Trump administration, as opposed to only under the terms of the Democratic coalition.
I think it’s a great wedge issue potentially. You can see that it’s an issue that depresses Trump supporters. They’re left defending something they don’t really like — in the way that Democrats have been forced to defend institutions that are imperfect. And now Trump supporters will find themselves facing: Look, we just have to move on because the president said so.
So I don’t think that’s really a winning issue.
There’s also this way in which, to me, it gets to something bigger.
I mentioned this piece by my colleague David French where he says that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy was sort of the thinking man’s QAnon. He had this other good line in there where he said:
MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.
The first part of that is particularly true. The MAGA world really does rely on fooling its own people constantly. And it’s a thing that has always struck me about Trump and the people around him — that they treat their followers with a lot of disrespect.
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They’re constantly pulling the wool over their eyes, telling them there are no Medicaid cuts in a bill that is full of Medicaid cuts. To me, that’s a very consequential way to lie to people who are depending on you. Saying he’s going to end all these wars that he can’t end — and, in fact, does not have an intention of ending.
Scandals are always about something else. And the idea that MAGA has been selling its own people a bill of goods that it has no intention to deliver or maybe it can’t even deliver — that feels very real. And to the extent Epstein makes it legible, it’s interesting. But it exists across the entire operation of this administration and of this movement.
In a way, I think because there is what you might call a reality distortion field that I think a lot of MAGA voters exist in — where suddenly, Donald Trump will turn on someone or on a policy idea and you’re supposed to hate what you loved yesterday.
And in the same way, I think Epstein is unique. Because it is so emotionally powerful to people and because they have trained — I mean, it’s not like some industrial policy or something that they can say: Oh, well, who cares?
It is something that I think a lot of people have put at kind of a core of their being. And this idea that: We’re going to get justice for this, and that’s what being a Trump supporter is about. And then suddenly Trump says, in a very disrespectful way: Get over it. He was mad.
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And then saying that Obama made the files — things that really don’t hold up to any amount of scrutiny.
I think this idea that people are having their intelligence disrespected is very powerful. And I think it’s something that once they say: Well, what did Trump lie to me about or fail to deliver there? What else am I discontent about that he did?
And then always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
First Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of William F. Buckley. It’s big, but it’s worth it so far — as far as I’ve gotten. I think it’s always interesting to look at these books about politics and how different American politics was, even just a few decades ago. I also think of Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” stuff like that.
My second book would be James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid,” a novel about the Kennedy assassination. If you’ve enjoyed putting yourself in a conspiratorial mind-set — and obviously J.F.K. is in the news with the release of these files — this book really cannot be beat. It’s one of my favorites, and it gets into the dark heart of America, which is sometimes a place that’s fun to visit.
And then, finally, Lucy Sante’s book “Low Life,” about the history of organized crime and skeezy characters in New York over the centuries, is always a good one to visit. Again, it kind of takes you back.
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Will Sommer, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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