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unidentified
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Gotlet talks about Benjamin Franklin as a scientist and how the stove he invented in 1742 became a popular product in and beyond the United States. | |
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern, Yoram Hazzoni argues that nationalism is necessary to protect democracy and freedom around the world in his book, The Virtue of Nationalism. | ||
| Watch Book TV every weekend on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| And past president. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
|
unidentified
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This is outrageous. | |
| This is a kangaroo crime. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Political Playbook Chief Correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Joining us this morning is Sarah Longwell. | ||
| She's the founder and publisher of The Bulwark and also the host of the Focus Group podcast. | ||
| Sarah Longwell, thanks for being with us this morning. | ||
| I want to start with this story from earlier this week in Washington, and that was over the Epstein files. | ||
| We saw on Capitol Hill survivors of the Epstein abuse all gathering, some for the first time in public, telling their stories along with some strange bedfellows. | ||
| You had Congressman Roe Cona, a liberal from California, Marjorie Taylor Greene, conservative from Georgia, Congresswoman Jayapaul, and others all getting behind the release of the Epstein files. | ||
| And those survivors on one of them on our screen right now talking about, responding to the president's characterization of this as a hoax. | ||
| And meanwhile, as they're talking, the president's in the Oval Office, again, saying, this is a hoax. | ||
| What did you make of the news story this week and the developments on the Epstein files? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I think one of the things that showed us is this is a story that is not going away as much as Donald Trump would like it to. | |
| For some reason, Donald Trump has decided that the way he's going to try to handle the Epstein situation is to try and ignore it, try and hope that it goes away. | ||
| They literally dismissed Congress. | ||
| Congress went out of session in order to avoid discussing the Epstein files. | ||
| But as a result, what it has done is it has prolonged this story. | ||
| It has made, it has increased people's interest because they don't understand why after Donald Trump's cabinet members, people like Kash Patel, like Dan Bongino, like Pam Bondi, who all promised not just before they were in the administration, but while they were in the administration, you know, Pam Bondi was saying things like, I've got the Epstein files on my desk, and at the president's direction, I'm going to release this material. | ||
| But what they continue to do over and over again is release things that are already public. | ||
| And so one of the things I hear about in focus groups a lot from people who voted for Donald Trump is that they expected him to be a very transparent president. | ||
| They expected him not to cover up for powerful people or for himself. | ||
| And they don't understand why he has changed course so significantly on the release of the Epstein files and why he is treating them like they are stupid and don't understand that they're releasing things over and over again that are already public. | ||
| And so I just think this is one of those sticky issues for the president that's not going away. | ||
| There's something called the Streisand effect, where by the way you engage with an issue, you sort of make it bigger instead of smaller, which is what the president has done with Epstein. | ||
| And so, and now you've got the situation where the survivors, these women who were girls at the time, who were abused by Epstein, have now seen Donald Trump out there who had promised that he would be transparent, promised that he was going to stand up against sex traffickers and criminals, instead protecting them. | ||
| It's starting to really shake people's faith in who Donald Trump is. | ||
| My faith was already shaken. | ||
| I don't think Donald Trump is a good person, but there are a lot of his supporters who thought he was going to be transparent about these things, and they're the ones now who don't understand why Donald Trump is behaving this way. | ||
| Quinnipiac University did a poll recently, and this is what they found: that 70% say they are following news about the Epstein files either very closely or somewhat closely. | ||
| 28% say they are following it not too closely. | ||
| What do you make of those numbers? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I think that sometimes people don't realize how significant the Epstein files were, not among sort of just everybody in the voting population, but specifically Donald Trump's most fervent voters. | |
| I mean, even sort of QAnon and a lot of the things that were animating some of the deepest Trump supporters over the course of years, it is rooted in this idea that there are pedophiles, both among the elites and who are also being protected by the elites. | ||
| And so this issue, like the reason people care so much is that this isn't, there was a child sex ring going on. | ||
| There was a pedophile who was serially abusing people. | ||
| And there appears to be a lot of very powerful people in his orbit who knew about it or were participating in it. | ||
| And I think Donald Trump and his team, like people who are close to Trump, who are in his cabinet, who have roles in the cabinet because they said they were going to release the Epstein files, they talked about it with voters on podcasts and in the news. | ||
| I mean, Kash Patel was on Steve Bannon's podcast over and over again talking about the Epstein files. | ||
| Dan Bongino on his own podcast was talking about the Epstein files. | ||
| Like this has been an issue for the right. | ||
| They are the ones who made this an issue, who have focused on this now for going on six years. | ||
| And so it is deeply embedded. | ||
| People want answers. | ||
| And so for Donald Trump to become the president and then immediately say, why are people still talking about this? | ||
| This is a hoax, feels like a deep betrayal. | ||
| And I think the reason people care about it is because there's a bright moral line around something like this, around the abuse of children, which is what was happening. | ||
| And so people, they want answers and they want accountability. | ||
| They don't understand why Donald Trump sent his deputy attorney general, which is a very unusual thing to do, to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, get no new information from her, and then move her to a cushy facility, like a club Fed. | ||
| That doesn't happen for pedophiles. | ||
| So why is Donald Trump giving Ghislaine Maxwell this kind of special treatment? | ||
| And look, voters have understood. | ||
| Trump's voters know that he was close to Epstein. | ||
| They know that they have a long-term friendship going back a long time. | ||
| And I think that they were hopeful that that information meant that Donald Trump could expose Epstein, not that he would end up covering up for Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and for the other people who might have been involved. | ||
| And it's obviously creating more and more questions among the Trump faithful about whether or not Donald Trump himself, like, what is it that he is hiding? | ||
| And so I think that's the reason it continues to stick with voters. | ||
| Well, we want to have the president's supporters, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, join us in this conversation this morning. | ||
| Here is how you can do so: Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text as well at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Sarah Longwell. | ||
| We also heard from Marjorie Taylor Green at that news conference when reporters asked her about this list that's being compiled by the survivors of powerful people who they saw with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Green saying, I'll read it on the House floor because the survivors, some of them saying, I'm scared. | ||
| I don't want to say it in public. | ||
| And Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, give it to me. | ||
| I'll read it on the House floor. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene is taking what I would call sort of a principled position on this issue. | |
| Now, I don't often agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she is one of those people who I think feels. | ||
| So one of the things that Donald Trump has done to kind of cover this up is as a lot of right-wing media has talked about this, Charlie Kirk, Megan Kelly, he got so frustrated with the fact that they continued to talk about it after Pam Bondi said she wouldn't be releasing it that he called them up and said, stop talking about it. | ||
| Stop it, Benny Johnson. | ||
| He called all these right-wing influencers and waved them off of it. | ||
| But a few people have remained committed to getting people the truth, in part because they talked about it for so long. | ||
| And so they feel like their own credibility is on the line. | ||
| And so there's become a bit of a dividing line between the MAGA influencer crowd who is shutting up because Donald Trump has told them to. | ||
| And in fact, Donald Trump told members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, that voting to release the Epstein files would be considered a hostile act against them. | ||
| And so most of the Republicans are being cowed into not releasing these files. | ||
| But somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, even Lauren Boebert, even Nancy Mays, and I think it might be, I mean, it could be in some ways, maybe because they're women and they feel like these survivors deserve to be heard. | ||
| Maybe it's because they talked about the Epstein files so much that they feel personally like they owe the people who believed them a response. | ||
| But Marjorie Taylor Greene has stayed pretty true to the idea that she's going to get answers on this, which is what voters want. | ||
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unidentified
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I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene, on this instance, she's very much on the side of what voters want. | |
| You know, when I'm in focus groups and I'm listening to voters, more than there are two things that they are most disappointed in Donald Trump about that I hear over and over again. | ||
| One is his inability, despite all his promises, to lower prices, specifically grocery prices, but prices in general. | ||
| People are still feeling deeply squeezed in this economy and things are getting worse. | ||
| And the other is that he hasn't released the Epstein files. | ||
| And so I think that you're going to see, and they only need two more votes to get there. | ||
| And so every Republican right now who is refusing to release these files, refusing to vote for it in Congress, is doing so against the wishes of their constituencies because their voters want to know the answer to this. | ||
| Thomas Massey is the one with the discharge petition, and he is two Republican votes short of bringing it to the House floor to compel the Trump administration to release the Epstein files to the public. | ||
| Sarah Longwell, you mentioned the right-wing media. | ||
| You said you don't like President Trump. | ||
| Is the bulwark the left-wing media? | ||
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unidentified
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I mean, all of us at the bulwark started out our careers as Republicans. | |
| I worked in Republican communications for over 15 years, almost two decades. | ||
| But Donald Trump's not a conservative. | ||
| Donald Trump doesn't represent the values of people that I came up with. | ||
| I mean, when I was coming up as a young Republican and a young conservative, the things that sort of animated the party were free markets. | ||
| And Donald Trump is not a free market Republican at all. | ||
| The tariffs are a great example of something that is not free market. | ||
| We believed in limited government, distrust of the federal government, but Donald Trump is deploying the federal government into cities, probably unconstitutionally and illegally. | ||
| It was just ruled against, he was just ruled against in LA for deploying the military there because he is declaring states of emergency where there are not emergencies. | ||
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unidentified
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There might be crime, but there are not emergencies. | |
| We believed in that character mattered. | ||
| And Donald Trump is obviously not a person of good character. | ||
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unidentified
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You know, we were, I can't, I was a Reagan Republican. | |
| I remain true to a lot of those ideas. | ||
| And one of those animating ideas was we don't cozy up to dictators. | ||
| And Donald Trump has cozied up to Vladimir Putin and other dictators at every opportunity. | ||
| He's abandoned Ukraine. | ||
| He has, you know, I think he's sort of a failure across the board of what it meant to be a conservative for most of my lifetime. | ||
| And so, no, I don't think the bulwark is left-wing media at all. | ||
| I think actually we're in the center of a lot of Americans. | ||
| And I think Donald Trump is very extreme. | ||
| And I also, I got to say, one of the things that's always struck me as odd about Donald Trump is that if you look at a lot of the people, both Trump himself and the people around him, right? | ||
| So there's Donald Trump, there's Tulsi Gabbard, there's Elon Musk, there's RFK Jr. | ||
| You think about Joe Rogan or other people that endorsed him. | ||
| 10 years ago, they all had one thing in common, which is that they were Democrats. | ||
| And a lot of the ideas that Donald Trump has brought to the Republican Party, they bear no resemblance to Republican or conservative ideas. | ||
| They're things that, I mean, tariffs were something that the industrial left supported, you know, 10, 15 years ago. | ||
| And so I really bristle at the idea that Donald Trump is a Republican or a conservative in any fashion. | ||
| He was a limousine liberal who supported Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And he hijacked the Republican Party. | ||
| And I think it's unfortunate that the Republican Party went along with him. | ||
| But I think what the bulwark does is fearlessly tell the truth about Donald Trump. | ||
| It chronicles the ways in which things that he do are not only not conservative, but deeply un-American. | ||
| The idea of deploying the National Guard and other military into cities, deeply un-American. | ||
| The way he talks about immigrants, deeply un-American. | ||
| And so the bulwark is just there to, I think, bring some accountability in a world where most of the other Republicans have decided to just go along to get along. | ||
| We'll go to calls. | ||
| Tuck in Alabama, Independent. | ||
| You're up first. | ||
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unidentified
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I'm curious about the first cover-up. | |
| You know, Epstein was supposed to have been on, you know, I think suicide watch. | ||
| Cameras go out. | ||
| You have doctors say that his high, you know, his broke was broke, so he was probably choked to death. | ||
| And then you have others said that committed suicide. | ||
| And plus, this was under the Biden administration. | ||
| You know, you'd think that a person of, you know, that nature would be well watched and all that, and yet they let him get killed. | ||
| I mean, you know, that's the first cover-up we need to be talking about. | ||
| What is going on with that? | ||
| And Sarah Longwell, when you do focus groups, has this been a consistent trust issue when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, I do need to correct the caller on one thing. | |
| Epstein died under extremely strange circumstances. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| There's missing tape. | ||
| It is very unclear what happened there. | ||
| It's one of the reasons people are interested in this. | ||
| He did not die, though, under the Biden administration. | ||
| He died in 2019 when Donald Trump was president. | ||
| Now, so the idea that the Biden administration was the one sort of that it was under those weird Biden circumstances, that's just not true. | ||
| I think it's strange to me how often people forget so many of the things that they're frustrated with, whether it was the widespread deployment of the vaccines, the handling of COVID, the economy falling apart, Epstein's death. | ||
| Those all happened in 2019 and 2020 when Donald Trump was president. | ||
| We'll go to Kenny next in Kentucky, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Kenny. | ||
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unidentified
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Hey. | |
| The guy was hitting the right marks, but why didn't Biden staff bring all this out when he was president, but they had to wait to Donald Trump just to bring something out against Donald Trump? | ||
| They always do that. | ||
| That's the Democrats for you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Sarah Longwell, why weren't the Epstein files released under the Biden administration? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, the Biden administration didn't run an entire campaign on the idea that they were going to release the Epstein files. | |
| All of the members of Biden's cabinet didn't talk about the Epstein files, didn't make an issue of the Epstein files. | ||
| It was Donald Trump's cabinet. | ||
| It was Kash Patel. | ||
| It was Dan Bongino. | ||
| It was Pam Bondi. | ||
| It was the entire right-wing media influence machine. | ||
| They were the ones who were desperately looking for the Epstein files. | ||
| Now, I don't have an answer about why Joe Biden didn't do it. | ||
| I think, but I also know they didn't run on doing it. | ||
| They didn't say they were going to do it. | ||
| That was those people. | ||
| Given the public's interest, though, as we just talked about in this, should the Biden administration had made this more public? | ||
| I mean, any politician, just given the interest that people have and the mystery around his death. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I mean, I think that it was more Republican voters who were really, really interested. | |
| And so I think that Democratic voters, what they were pushing for from the Biden administration, was just a bunch of, was just wholly different things, right? | ||
| Like they wanted Joe Biden to focus on getting the COVID vaccine out, lowering prices, passing the infrastructure bill. | ||
| And so in terms of Joe Biden being, and his administration focusing on the priorities that they had promised the American people that they thought the American people were most concerned about, I think they focused on the issues that they ran on. | ||
| It was Donald Trump and his team who ran on these issues, the issue of Epstein. | ||
| And it's their voters who had been sort of talking about this for years and years. | ||
| And so that's why it's so strange that Donald Trump didn't do it. | ||
| It's not that strange that Joe Biden didn't do something he didn't never said he was going to do and never ran on doing and was focused on entirely different things. | ||
| Trump and his team were focused on Epstein. | ||
| So for them to then turn around and not do it is much stranger. | ||
| We'll go to Dorothy, who's in Baltimore, Democratic caller. | ||
| Welcome to the conversation, Dorothy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, thank you. | |
| I want to ask a couple of questions, and maybe she can answer this or even give him some more information. | ||
| I look here and I see where Jeffrey Epstein was being questioned. | ||
| It may be by the FBI or someone was questioning him, and it's on video. | ||
| And when they asked him, you know, they asked him about Trump about their friendship, and they asked him a question, and he said, Have Trump ever been with girls under the age of 18? | ||
| This was Jeffrey's answer. | ||
| He said, I'm going to have to assert my fifth, sixth, and 14th Amendment rights. | ||
| And he wouldn't answer it. | ||
| Also, Michael Wolf, a Nobel Prize winner, he did an interview with Jeffrey Epstein because he was doing, I guess, a book about him. | ||
| And he also said he witnessed pictures with Donald Trump surrounded by topless young girls. | ||
| He said he couldn't tell what the age, but they looked very young. | ||
| And he also mentioned, he described something sexual about it, but I'm not going to get into that because it could be looked up. | ||
| And Jeffrey Epstein's brother also said that Trump was on that Lolita plane. | ||
| And everybody should know what Lolita is about. | ||
| People don't even know what that's about, but they should know about it. | ||
| It was a movie about a man in love with a 12-year-old girl. | ||
| That's what her name was. | ||
| But you should look up the people. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| All right, Dorothy. | ||
| Okay, let's get Sarah Longwell's reaction to what you said. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, Lolita was a book and then a movie. | |
| And Epstein's plane was called Lolita Express, and Donald Trump wrote it, I believe, seven times, was on there. | ||
| Look, their friendship is very well documented. | ||
| Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein knew each other very well when they were in their sort of 40s. | ||
| They partied together all the time. | ||
| There's lots of footage. | ||
| There's lots of like video footage of them together partying. | ||
| There is lots of photographs of them together. | ||
| Donald Trump has said publicly that Jeffrey Epstein was a friend of his, was a great guy, and somebody who liked very young women. | ||
| Donald Trump has himself been on the record in interviews with Howard Stern, talking about how his daughter, Ivanka, said that he, when she was quite young, I believe 17, said that he wasn't allowed to date anybody younger than her, which he noted in the interview was getting quite hard for him. | ||
| And so I think that culturally they were at a time, like we all know this, Donald Trump partied with Epstein. | ||
| Now, there was at some point much later in recent years where they had some kind of a falling out where they've given conflicting reasons for falling out. | ||
| And Jeffrey Epstein did plead the fifth in matters of Trump. | ||
| And frankly, in the most recent interview where Trump's personal attorney, the person who is his personal defense attorney, who is now the deputy attorney general, when he interviewed her, his questions were very, were sort of meant to not put her in a position to implicate Trump. | ||
| And so she gave a very mealy-mouthed answer that was to the effect of, I never saw anything inappropriate by Donald Trump. | ||
| So this is a person who was not just procuring these young girls for Jeffrey Epstein, which, by the way, one of the victims who is now dead, Ghislaine Maxwell met her and procured her for Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| This is all well documented. | ||
| That woman now has committed suicide, but she said that she didn't see anything inappropriate. | ||
| So to have a pedophile, a convicted pedophile, because she wasn't just procuring the girls, she was a pedophile herself, along with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| We're abusing these young girls together. | ||
| For her to be the arbiter of what is appropriate or inappropriate, I mean, we don't take her word, especially since what she is looking for is better treatment while she's in prison, which she's gotten now. | ||
| She's been moved to a much cushier facility, and she's hoping for a pardon. |