Trump, Epstein and a Stinging SCOTUS Dissent

So first up guys, we’re six months into the Trump administration. So I want to know your mood – hit me. Yeah I mean, it’s a disaster. And it’s everything I thought it was going to be, which is terrible. It has been a week of ups and downs for the Trump administration. So I want to talk about an up, which is the huge expansion of President Trump’s power this week, specifically the Supreme Court’s order that he can effectively dismantle the Department of Education. But there’s also been a serious and quite spicy downer. And that is the ripping apart of the MAGA right over the Epstein investigation. And as always, I should say that we are recording on a Thursday afternoon, so who the heck knows where things will be by the time we reach your ears. So let’s jump in with the Epstein uproar. First, to recap for people who have not been following this drama, Trump has been telling his supporters basically, drop it. Drop this obsession with the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Epstein is, of course, the financier who died in jail in 2019, some say mysteriously, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. So for years, Trump and many of his supporters have been Fanning the flames and clamoring for the release of undisclosed Epstein files, including a so-called client list. But now Trump has totally reversed course. Now, Jamelle, before I let David take us down the MAGA wormhole, do you got a quick reaction to this backlash. Do I have a quick reaction to this backlash. I’ve just been like watching it with real fascination. I wasn’t following this too much either, and my native anti conspiracism led me to be like, this is just a bunch of nonsense, but I am. I am genuinely fascinated by two things. The first is how this is the thing that seems to be fracturing the MAGA coalition, and I suppose it’s a matter of live by the conspiracy, die by the conspiracy. The second thing is that if you were to envision a response to any accusation that made it seem like you were guilty. I can’t think of a more apt example of it than how Trump is behaving right now, right. Like, Trump is behaving exactly like someone who is trying to hide something, telling people that it’s a hoax. He’s called it. He called it the Russia hoax, which for me at least is like, oh, well, it’s true then, right. Saying, it’s the fault of the Democrats. It’s the fault of fall of Biden. Everything the way he is visibly panicking just makes it seem as if Oh well, maybe. Maybe it’s not a crazy conspiracy theory. Maybe there’s real stuff here. David, I know you’ve been following this. How big a deal was it. Come on y’all. So here’s the question. You say you wanted to go down the rabbit hole. Do I want to just walk. Do you want to walk into the opening of the cavern and shine a torch around, or do you want to go actually spelunking? Because this thing is deep. Head first. Just go. Let’s be. Let’s be a little bit. We’ll do a middle range. So I think the way to think about this is to think about Epstein in two contexts. We’ll call them the little Epstein theory and the big Epstein theory. So the little Epstein theory is, look, this is a very real crime. Unlike a lot of the stuff you’ve heard of from before Pizzagate and all of this other stuff. Very, very real crime here. The grooming and preying on hundreds and hundreds of young women, including girls as well a teenage girls. There’s a lot of very unanswered questions. So, for example, he died by suicide. How did that happen. How was that allowed to happen. He was watched, right. He was heavily watched. Yeah He was one of the most well connected men in the world who a lot of very famous people flew on his jet, went to his private island, partied with him, including one Donald J. Trump, by the way. So what was the relationship between all of these very famous people and his predation. Was there any relationship. So there’s a reason for natural curiosity. So that’s little Epstein theory. But in a lot of MAGA, it’s really what they’re really focused on is what you might call big Epstein and big Epstein. Theory is the thinking man’s version of QAnon is a way to think about it. It is essentially that the Epstein story is the key that unlocks the whole globalist pedophile conspiracy, that if you really knew the whole Epstein story, it would be he was working as an agent for foreign governments, that he was blackmailing people at scale, that he has an enormous amount of information about World leaders, financiers, et cetera. And so this is of fits very neatly with an overall MAGA narrative that the ruling elite is so fundamentally depraved and corrupt that they would either participate in or excuse or cover up massive scale pedophilia. And so one of the reasons why this became so much of an urgent issue in MAGA is when you drill down for some people within the MAGA movement, this is why they’ve stuck by him for years is because they believe he’s the guy that they believe is going to crack open this whole thing. So if you actually believe that your political opponents are running a global pedophile ring and Donald Trump is the man, some of them believed to be prophesied to break this apart, you’re going to overlook a lot of stuff about Donald Trump. A lot of stuff is just going to be less important than breaking up the global pedophile regime. And now he’s turning around and saying, essentially, if there’s anything in there, Obama planted it, or Biden or Clinton or whatever, it is massive cognitive dissonance, because this is the reason he’s disrupting the very reason that a lot of people supported him. Yeah Jamelle had a good point, which is that I’ve been on Truth Social, reading his posts and then reading the comments, responding to them. This is my hobby this week. Better hobbies. Michelle, you need better hobbies. Emotionally speaking, I’m. I’m not doing well in there. It’s very dark. But Trump just set out to insult anybody who would have questions about this. And do we think he just doesn’t have a different playbook. I mean, he just he’s going to go to the same sheet music he’s always sung from. And he just he assumes it’s going to work. I think you’re right to suggest that he really only does have one playbook. I mean, kind of the remarkable thing about Trump after all these years is that he really is very predictable, right. He’s not he isn’t this enigma of a human being with a lot going on internally. You can predict what he’s going to do very reliably. And in this case, he’s accused of something. He denies it. He tries to turn the accusation around. He tries to discredit the accusation, and he’s just following the typical playbook. I think the issue, as David points out, is that this is one of the rare instances for him where he really is directly going at of a core set of assumptions, beliefs, suppositions among its supporters that they can’t simply square it with their support for him. And so if they see him as this avatar of vengeance against the global pedophile ring, and he’s refusing to act in a way that is commensurate with that, I think the response, which makes total logical sense on their part is to say, well, well, O.K, what’s up with Trump. I will say one thing I find strange about all this is that part of the reason I kind of have been ignoring all of this is that I thought, I thought everyone I thought they’d all priced in. The fact that Trump is publicly was publicly very close to Jeffrey Epstein, publicly has been accused of inappropriate behavior. All this stuff is just like known fact about Trump. So my I going has just been well, they already know that he’s iffy. But what I’m beginning to realize is that maybe they don’t. Maybe they have no idea that this guy is a sex pest. Well, the thing that has been fascinating is how especially among Republican Congress members, they’re framing it as not whether or not Trump did anything or was aware of anything. But this is all about accountability. It’s all about transparency. They’re arguing that, of course, the administration should put some information out there, because that’s what the Republican Party and the Trump administration has been promising is transparency, which, I mean, I find that amusing in and of itself. But sure, whatever gets you through the day, David, how do you see the people like the MAGA faithful justifying standing by Trump in this moment. Are they just saying I can’t possibly be true. That’s a really good question. And I would say this is the first time. Look, Trump has lied to MAGA lot. He’s lied to MAGA ton. But generally when Trump lies to MAGA, he’s telling them something they want to hear. So, for example, if he’s lying to them about there’s nothing to the Russia investigation. They want to hear that if he’s lying to them and saying the election was stolen, they want to hear that. This is the first time, really that I can think of that he has lied to them and contradicted core elements of their worldview. But it isn’t just that they have a defeated worldview, it’s that they are now faced with just two terrible options. One, the whole conspiracy is correct and Trump’s in on it. Or they were lying to us all along. So what’s going on here. And so how are people reconciling themselves to it. Michelle, I think it’s a answer is really, really simple. At the end of the day. MAGA is going to turn to all of its people and just say, whatever you do, you can’t help the left. You can’t undermine Trump, because if you undermine Trump, that’s what the media wants. That’s what the left wants. So you’re going to begin to see a lot of this. Well, whatever else Trump is, the left hates him. So you have to stand by him. And a lot of this is going to drill down to ultimately why did people support Trump. Why have they been with him. And if the ultimate answer is because he hates Democrats and fights Democrats, then they’ll probably keep on clinging to Trump. If their ultimate answer is, I genuinely, really thought he was going to be God’s angel of vengeance against the global pedophiles. Then you might see some cracking in that support. And so let’s not forget this he is a lame duck president. He’s not eligible to run in 2028. There’s going to be a successor. This could be some of the early jockeying that you see as to who’s true MAGA after Trump goes away. So you’re going to see some internecine fighting over this as well. That’s very much related to the order of succession in the royal court, so to speak. So, Jamal, it’s also been interesting to see what has been stirred up on the left, people talking about maybe there is something to see here and a little bit of joining the conspiratorial thinking, I guess. What have you been looking at with interests on the left of this whole discussion. I mean, I think it’s interesting that elected Democrats really some are treating this a legitimate scandal and not just waving it away as a distraction, that the usual language Democrats have adopted for not doing anything. I think A.O.C. made note that there was no surprise that someone who was a rapist would be hiding this stuff. I think Gavin Newsom has said things. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Senator, has said stuff along these lines. I mean, you’re beginning to see mainstream Democrats treat this as a live political issue, which I think is the right thing to do. You’re being given a clear opening to fracture your opponent’s coalition, to make the president who you are opposed to be very uncomfortable. It would be political malpractice not to indulge this, not to fan the flames of conspiracism here for the sake of hitting at your opponent. And although it does, I think, seem quite unseemly, I think one thing that’s always worth remembering is that American politics has never been a particularly seemly place to begin with. And so if you are of the view that Democrats should be more aggressive in their opposition, this is basically what that looks like. One of the most fascinating responses that I’ve enjoyed. So there have been conservative lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has a reputation for loving her, some conspiracy theories, and Lauren Boebert same who have been very outspoken about this being a problem. And I think it was Boebert, in fact, who wants maybe Matt Gaetz to run a special investigation. I was like, O.K, O.K, fox meat henhouse. I’m speechless in this regard. But that would I have to say it would be interesting. I would not be a dull moment. If we’re looking at who might have an interest in keeping this alive. Have you has anybody popped up that you think oh, I can think of somebody whose initials are Tucker Carlson. Oh, there we go. I hadn’t even Megyn Kelly. There are a lot of people with very, very, very large followings who hope to continue to have very, very large followings after Donald Trump is gone, who won the position themselves as more or less independent voices. And so what we’re going to actually see here is an interesting breakdown. We’ve often used the term influencer to describe a MAGA influencer to describe a lot of these people with big voices. That’s the wrong word. They’re more like famous followers than they are like influencers. Because the instant that they depart from Trump, traditionally, these quote unquote influencers find out they had no influence at all. But somebody you can go through, name after name who’s kind of calling for answers in this circumstance. And look, the charitable explanation is they just want answers. That’s the charitable explanation. The less charitable explanation is there’s also some jockeying for position going on. So look who folds and look who doesn’t fold. And the people who don’t fold either. Maybe they have some integrity about this matter or some combination of. They also want to be more independent of the rest of MAGA. They want their own following. Yeah the strategery here goes. Strategery Yes. All right, so now let’s go ahead and flip it. We’ve talked about the administration’s very bad week. Let’s talk about its win, which is a pretty interesting victory in the Supreme Court. I’m sure more popular topic in the White House than the Epstein files. He made it clear from the start that he has no love for the Department of Education and wants to Ax it, which is not to be fair. It’s not an uncommon Republican dream. He’s not the first presidential contender who wanted to do this. Now, he signed an executive order saying as much project 2025 called for this. And this week, the Supreme Court said yeah, sure. Why not. The president can unilaterally abolish a federal agency that was created by an act of Congress. Are either of you surprised. Am I surprised? I don’t know. I’m surprise shocked. These are no longer feelings and emotions that are relevant to me anymore. You’re burned out. Yeah, when I read the news, I’m just – I was struck by two things. The first is that, the court had lifted an injunction on basically like mass firing at the Department of Education, and it did so without any kind of explanation, no explanation of why this was appropriate. And my immediate thought was, I don’t understand the rationale. Like, if I’m looking at this, if I’m assuming the court is acting in good faith, it does not make sense to me to allow the president to move forward with a radical and expansive assertion of authority. It’s actually contested whether or not the president has the authority to unilaterally remove civil servants without any kind of congressional authorization. And secondly, typically when the president or is trying to advance a policy unilaterally like this, and they’re sued it, typically you let the lawsuit, you let the entire legal process play out from fact collecting in a district court judgment all the way up to the Supreme Court for the simple reason that while you’re waiting, you just have the status quo. And the status quo isn’t some intolerable offense. It’s just the way things have been working. And I don’t understand if I’m looking at this, if I’m saying the court is acting in total good faith, I don’t understand the rationale of not letting the status quo stand while you let this play out in the courts. So, David, before we get further into this, I want to step back then for a second and talk about this so-called shadow docket, which it’s a term used to describe this court’s emergency docket when urgent decisions are made much more quickly than in regular court session. And they can come with little or in this case, really zero explanation. Do you what is your thought on what the rationale for this being on the shadow docket would have been. And kind of do you buy the argument that this was needed to be there. Yeah, there’s a very live debate over what to call this thing that you’re calling the shadow docket. I think a word, another word some people have chosen is emergency docket. In other words, what do you do when cases are unfolding very quickly and they’re of great importance. This is not something that for a long time, the Supreme Court was known for doing, is taking up cases that were emerging in real time that were very, very important that the Supreme Court docket was known for a long time to be pretty slow. Well, that has changed in recent years, in part because the combination of the total collapse of Congress’s any effective lawmaking body and the expansion of presidential authority to fill that gap, has meant that we’ve had a lot of litigation that erupts immediately from executive actions. So, for example, nobody contests that Congress could say, pass a law tomorrow doing a reduction in force of percent of the Department of Education. Congress can absolutely do that. The question is, can the president do that. And that leads to immediate litigation, litigation that gets really important. And from that standpoint, I like the emergency docket. And I’ll tell you why I like it. For a long time, the Supreme Court was so slow in taking up cases that you would often just hit these slam on both feet of the brakes when you would get to the Supreme Court, when you would actually need the Supreme Court to rule, you would actually know for a fact. For example, the Supreme Court’s going to rule on this. Like, why aren’t they taking this now. And so there are circumstances where these emergency rulings or shorter term rulings, I think, are completely in keeping of with the urgency of the moment. Now, where do I have a problem. I have a problem in this instance, for example, because there’s no majority opinion. So here you have a very important ruling. You have the three liberal justices in dissent, and they have a stinging dissent. And you’re left filtering through what could be the majority’s reasoning, because there’s a small version of this ruling and there’s a big version of this ruling, and I can articulate both of them, but I don’t know which is which, because we don’t have the majority. They didn’t give it to us. And so that’s so we’re left with saying, O.K, did he effectively shut down the Department of Education. Well, I could argue no, because that wasn’t the issue in front of the court. The issue in front of the court was, do we intervene immediately in this reduction in force. That’s a small version of this ruling that all they’re doing is they’re just saying we’re not saying you can get rid of the Department of Education. We’re saying that’s a small version. A big version would be, hey, civil service protections can be swept away. Presidents can effectively shutter agencies just by draining them of people. That’s a big version of it. Which one is it. We don’t know. And I think that’s a big problem because as you both said, I mean, shutting down the Department of Education is not a radical Republican goal. This is something that’s been talked about since the Reagan era. It’s how it is happening that is so. Disturbing and how it is being upheld is so puzzling. Just to add to that, I mean, I would think that the Supreme Court has a responsibility to explain its reasoning to the public. To me, the decision to refuse to explain which this is what this feels like. Not so much like we’re not going to write one. But just a refusal. We don’t have to. We don’t need to. Is the court mistaking the pageantry around it for some actual authority over the public at large, the court acting as if it isn’t a servant of the public at large. But it is. It’s a servant of the Constitution. It’s a servant of the public, of the people who imbue their sovereignty into that Constitution. And so the court simply deciding it’s not going to explain something that if it is as expansive as some critics think it might be, constitutes a fundamental reorganization of what the president can do. If the president can dismantle congressionally authorized agencies through personnel that transforms the balance of power in the American government, right. Yeah, that’s what the president is asserting that the president that the executive removal power is so broad in exists in this extremely rigid vision of separation of powers such that Congress has no say whatsoever over the conditions of employment in the Civil Service. And it’s all under the president. If the court thinks that this is the thing that exists, the court, the court has an obligation to tell the public. We have a right to know. And the court’s refusal to explain is incredibly disturbing in that context. So you guys had mentioned the minority dissent on this. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was making this exact point. She wrote that, quote, the majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way, the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave. So you have the dissent out there. You have no explanation from the majority as to its reasoning. David, doesn’t this fuel concerns about the court and do damage to its reputation as its partisan leanings? It creates an empty space into which people’s pour their hopes and their fears and that’s not good. So let’s talk about the hopes element of it. So MAGA thinks a lot of people in MAGA because they’re taking the maximum reading of this, think that this is a permission structure for Trump to do as he will do what he wants to do with federal agency. I think that’s in all likelihood, although I’m not sure because the court’s been silent in this instance. I think that in all likelihood, that’s the maximum reading is the wrong reading of this. And so what happens when the court actually does rule on the merits, as it will eventually, sooner or later. And let’s suppose it disappoints MAGA. Well, then you’ve got all the braying and yelling from MAGA that the court’s illegitimate, it’s defying the duly elected president, et cetera. But then, on the other hand if you’re concerned about this ruling because of the absence of reasoning, you don’t really how to respond to it. You don’t know what the core arguments are that you need to make. You don’t know how to adjust your argument in the courts below. These are very, very important things. And so while I can absolutely make a case that maybe injunctions aren’t the right form of relief in the case of termination, maybe in some circumstances, in some circumstances, what I cannot make a case for is not saying anything. Yeah people people talk about justice. Chief Justice John Roberts, wanting so desperately to protect the reputation of the court as an independent branch of government, this just does not seem to lend itself to helping with people’s concerns. I say David mentioned something that’s very important as well. What we have are district court judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans, appointed by Trump, Obama, Biden and Bush. Reagan in some cases. Working in good faith to try to figure out what the law is, figure out how to move forward in the face of expansive claims of authority by the administration. You have district courts trying to work it out on the ground, and you have the Supreme Court intervening and then not explaining what are the district courts supposed to do. This is the administration has been engaged for months in this attempt to argue that the president has no obligation to obey the rulings of district courts and only needs to listen to the Supreme Court, which is not the case by intervening and issuing decisions that essentially allow the administration to move forward with its plans, whether or not they happen to be lawful. The Supreme Court is basically affirming this. They’re saying Yeah, you don’t have to listen to the district courts. We’re the only ones you have to listen to. And what I don’t think that the conservative majority understands, or maybe they’re willfully ignorant of it. And this gets to Sotomayor’s dissent, is that at a certain point, you’re going to dishabituate the administration to not wanting to follow any court. And you can hope you can think to yourself, oh, they’ll listen to us when it really comes down to it. When it really hits brass tacks, they will listen to our ruling. But I wouldn’t make that bet. If I were in that position, if I were on that court, I wouldn’t make that bet. But the Supreme Court seems just totally indifferent to what is going on in the lower court level, and I find it very disturbing. I to my mind, the Supreme Court is leaving these judges again, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, leaving them to hang out to dry. David, you’re nodding thoughtfully. Well, I’m going to say the thing that’s troubling to me. And look, I have defended and will continue to defend the judiciary. Amongst our three branches of government, I maintain that it’s our best functioning branch of government. I still maintain it’s the best functioning branch of government. I disagree with the decision not to write here. And the thing that is frustrating. Another thing that’s frustrating about it is in some ways, the court is not being consistent here, because it is not. It has rebuked Trump in this term. It has rebuked him pretty decisively. It has expressed concerns for the administration’s willingness to defy precedent. At the oral argument in the birthright citizenship case, Justice Barrett was holding the thing the administration’s feet to the fire on complying with precedent. There’s obvious concerns and other opinions. The Supreme Court has said that immigrants get due process for or before they’re going to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act. They have issued affirmed rulings to for example, get Abrego Garcia to facilitate his return. And all of that was explained and you could read it. And so yeah, once again, I could look back at this last term of the Supreme Court and I could point to you time and time again that court rejected a MAGA legal argument or would not take or rejected a Trump argument. So I do not think that this Supreme Court is in Trump’s pocket at all, but I cannot justify not explaining this. I just no matter which way I look at it, I just can’t get there. I think there should be a conspiracy theory that we start to explain it all, taking us back to our opener. I think that’s the only there’s got to be some conspiracy theory. So before we go, it is the middle of July. It’s the summer. Let’s go a little lighter. Let’s go off topic, and I want both of you to give me something that has given you some delight right now. All right, I’ll go first. I bought a new camera. People who, I guess, read my newsletter, the New York Times’ newsletter you should read, that will know that I love photography. And I bought a new camera. What’d you get. What’d you get. It’s called a - I’ll just show it. It’s right here. It’s called a Mamiya Six. It was first manufactured in 1989. Stock manufactured in 1995. It is a medium format rangefinder. It’s not. What you see is what you get. It’s you look through a separate viewfinder. But I love it. And the reason I bought it is because I’ve always wanted one of these. Just because it’s cool. It’s cool. It’s so cool. But also for taking you with me when I travel. And if you look behind me, I feel like you can see on frame. I have a lot of cameras behind me. That’s your thing. That’s my thing. All right, David, so you’re up. What do you got? What’s delighting you. Mine is a lot less sophisticated. I’ve got two recommendations that have given great joy. One is a Netflix show that a lot of people talked about called “Department Q” and you might say, not another British crime drama. I would never say that. I say another British crime drama. Thank you. This one about cold cases starring a really Motley collection think of it as the Mos Eisley Cantina of British detectives. And the. The lead guy is very grumpy and often not in an endearing way. But it is really good and the constellation of characters around him? Fantastic. And then the other one is the show called poker face, which stars Natasha Lyonne, who I love. It is a delight. I mean, the premise is just pretty simple. There’s a kind of down on her luck woman who has this unique gift that she can always tell that somebody is lying. And she has the worst luck in the world. Michelle, as everywhere she goes, somebody gets murdered. This shows how really well done and funny. So both of those are giving me a lot of joy. I also poker face a lot. I do. I appreciate the kind of Colombo style. Yeah, not really. She’s such a schlub. Mystery of the week. But like you’re just seeing how this. Yeah, this kind of schlubby but compelling person. Pursues this. So mine is a very different direction, which is it’s summer in Washington, and this is when you get boatloads of tourists with their families here. And in some ways, it’s fun to complain about them, especially when they’re in a rental car in front of you in the traffic. Time but it’s also fantastic to just see, no matter how ugly it gets on the political scene, people still come to the nation’s capital. And I was on the Hill earlier today interviewing a Senator. And there were people up there looking hot and confused because it is really brutally hot. It’s like 105 heat index today. But nonetheless, they were persisting. They were out with their maps and their water bottles, and it just made me feel a little bit better about the state of the country, I love that. All right. So we’re going to leave it there. David, Jamelle, thank you very much as always. It was fun and I will see you next time. See you. Thanks so much, Michelle.