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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for revised jobs reports that showed numbers below expectations. | |
| Some of those numbers have now been amended to reflect a gain of 6,000 additional jobs in July that were previously unreported. | ||
| This evening, we'll be live with the opening ceremony of the 2025 National Book Festival. | ||
| Speakers include acting librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newland and Festival co-chair David Rubenstein, among others. | ||
| From the Library of Congress, you can watch it live at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| Agriculture is the main life in Sussex County, and I'm very proud of that. | ||
| I felt like we were being left behind. | ||
| Everybody around us seemed to have internet, but we did not. | ||
| When I found out that Comcast was coming, I ran down the road and I said, Welcome. | ||
| High-speed internet is one of those good things that we needed to help us move our farming, our small businesses, our recreation forward. | ||
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| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
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 isn't 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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. | ||
|
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? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, all of us at the bulwark started out, you know, our careers as Republicans. | |
| You know, I worked in Republican communications for, you know, 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. | ||
| There might be crime, but there are not emergencies. | ||
| We believed that character mattered. | ||
| And Donald Trump is obviously not a person of good character. | ||
| You know, we were, 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. | ||
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Cameras go out. | |
| You have doctors say that his high, you know, his throat 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? | ||
|
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. | ||
|
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. | ||
| Good evening. |