Why Cornered Trump Is Turning On His Own Justices

It will no longer be about the Supreme Court basically humiliating him. It will then be about his theatrics in responding to this. When you see this guy, it is, he wears it all on his sleeve. I mean, he has done that for years now. Absolutely. No, and it was like, well, I'm going to do tariffs anyway, 10% on all of them. I mean, it absolutely is the Mad Queen. Off with her head. Off with her head. off with a head. Reduce the political world to boring, can't stop watching. What does that get you? Well, gets you Donald Trump. Michael. Joanna. Where are we going? It's Saturday morning. Where are we going, Michael? You know, we're going inside Trump's head. And can we remind people? Do we feel like being inside Trump's head on this sunny day in the Hamptons? I don't know. Well, we're expecting, I think, somewhere between 10 and 12 inches of snow this afternoon, which fills me with a little trepidation because I'm supposed to be going on a jaunt upstate, but I don't feel 100% steady as yet. So I'm just debating what to do. You're going on a jaunt with your new hip? I'm going on a jaunt with my new hip, except I don't think my new hip wants to fight through 10 inches of snow. So we're going to take it under advisement, as they say. But for new people who haven't joined us on this podcast before, do you want to give them a suggestion of what they're in for? No, I do, because it's important. And I think continue to believe we do something that is unique. People cover the Trump administration from outside. They cover the Trump administration, frankly as though despite all the evidence it is a normal political situation um and um and it isn't and it isn't because because it actually doesn't work from the from the outside what in order to understand what is going on at this moment in political time you have to understand what goes on in Donald Trump's head. Because nothing else matters. I mean, it doesn't matter. The policy goals don't matter. Political reality doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what he gets up in the morning, thinking, wanting, or having seen on television in the last number of minutes. So it is, again, as we have said often, a government of one. He doesn't listen to anyone. He doesn't really have advisors. He doesn't take advice. What he does, it is all reflexive. Who he hates, who he wants revenge on, and most of all, how he wants to project his own dominance. And I think I would say that what I find so intriguing and fascinating and unlookable away from is just the way that he says things that other politicians have never said. And we were talking earlier before we hopped on to record today and we were talking about the opacity of most politicians and how you don't actually know what they think because they're saying what they think people want to hear. And of course, Donald Trump doesn't do that. And I find myself now and will go into the SCOTUS of it all and the decision yesterday to not allow him to impose his tariffs. And we'll go into his reaction. But I now find myself on the edge of my seat for the State of the Union address on Tuesday. Not words that would ever have come out of my mouth. You know, I mean, we had an exchange, an off-camera exchange, or for those on audio, off, what would it be? Off audio. Well, we were just talking. We were talking as friends. Just talking. And your response, which was a perfectly understandable one, is again that, you know, he's such an embarrassment. He's a moron when he talks, which is certainly absolutely astoundingly true, except for the fact that it's incredibly effective. You cannot take your eyes off him. And his response after when he came out yesterday to deride the Supreme Court with all manner of insults, again, he was absolutely moronic but absolutely riveting. Well, and as you make the point, it's as much about who he hates and who he wants retribution on that makes his policy. And I mean, yesterday he came out and he called the justices who ruled against him. So the three Democratic justices, the women who are appointed by Biden and Obama, but also Neil Gorsuch and Amy Comey Barrett, who he appointed. The one who votes against him. Yeah, OK, but he specifically called, and this is new territory, the justices, unpatriotic fools and lapdogs. And I think actually in an effort to be even more effective, we've got the clip here. They're very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It's my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think. I can't stop laughing. We could just do the gestures on this because it's so rudimentary that you could just. But but but but again, who would say such things? And you don't know. You don't know the next thing he's going to say. So you're you're kind of glued to it. But the other, in the broader context, handed a defeat that galvanizes him. You know, he his magic is to turn that defeat into into victory. So, I mean, let's let's remember the 2024 campaign. He's indicted four times. These are criminal indictments. This is his life is at stake. His freedom is at stake. And does he bow to that at all? No. It's all confrontation. It does throughout the campaign. There were there were really no campaign issues except except to to to him, the prosecutors, the judges and and and anyone, anyone who would try to anyone who would who would oppose him in court. This became the entire narrative of the campaign. This will now, in this election year, this tariff things, the court will become the enemy. He will rise to this occasion. And this will ultimately redound to the legend of Donald Trump rather than to a policy defeat. Well, can you imagine being Chief Justice John Roberts yesterday morning, waking up and saying to Mrs. Roberts, well, today is the day. And, you know, this is a man who oversaw giving the president immunity and allowing Donald Trump to think that he was literally above the law. And finally, SCOTUS has pushed back. John Roberts, the chief justice, wrote the opinion. I cannot imagine a worst day for the poor man. And then, of course, the reason I'm on the edge of my seat about State of the Union, which is on Tuesday, is that at last year's State of the Union, Donald Trump caused much sturm und drang. And when he walked past Roberts, he shook his hand. He said, thank you. He sort of murmured into his ear. And everybody was like, oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. You know, the two of them are working together. There was so much online drama about it. And now, of course, he's got a new enemy in John Roberts. And I'm sure during his speech, he'll go after them, right? He'll come up with nicknames for Amy Barrett. He'll come up with nicknames for Neil Gorsuch, the first justice that he appointed. The important point is that it will no longer be about the Supreme Court basically humiliating him. It will then be about his theatrics in responding to this and his emotion. And it's incredibly effective. When you see this guy, he wears it all on his sleeve. It was like watching a child yesterday. Absolutely. And it was like, well, I'm going to do tariffs anyway. 10% on all of them. I mean, it absolutely is the mad queen from Alice in London. Off with her head. Off with her head. I mean, it's extraordinary how it's playing out. And nobody knows. And if you're a business, incredibly difficult to know how to play. It's very difficult to organize anything in advance. It's incredibly difficult. If you're a Democrat, how do you counter this? I mean, and all of these Democrats, Democrats have spent their whole life in politics, know that caution is there the chief virtue of of of a political life and a political career that you want that every word you say you want to you want to hone craft. And here is a man who doesn't hone anything. He doesn't craft anything. I want to go onto the Board of Peace a bit later in the show. And also we want to talk about the homoerotic videos that are now spinning out of the cabinet with alarming frequency. But just let's make the distinction between boring and can't stop watching. So take that out of the realm of policy. Forget that. I mean, which is the Democrats are always saying, no, no, no, you can't forget that. It's policy, policy. But but really, put that aside and just think of those two things, reduce the political world to boring, can't stop watching. What does that get you? Well, gets you Donald Trump. It gets you Donald Trump. It gets all of us Donald Trump. It gets the world Donald Trump. We're all saddled with this with this man. But the fools and lapdogs description of the of the justices is a new. Well, it's just new territory. And to set them up like this really politicizes them in a way we haven't seen for a long time. I'm trying to think if that is true. And it's not exactly true because the court during the 1960s, the Warren court, It was the I mean, the court was highly politicized under nearly constant attacks, constant calls for impeachment and resignation. So, I mean, this is this is a little different. Actually, it's a lot different because this is his court, theoretically. I mean, this is a court which has six conservative judges. Yeah, I mean, this is one of his chief accomplishments, theoretically, to have stacked the court in the way he has. But that doesn't matter. This is a typical Trump thing. He first has no loyalty to anyone and anybody who crosses him, disses him. There is no compromise. There is no Donald Trump is not saying, yeah, OK, I got up. I got up. You know, these guys have been pretty good to me and I'm in a pretty good place on this. And they've basically said, I can do anything I want whenever I want. And nobody can do anything to me. But and so maybe I should swallow this. No, he swallows nothing. I'm sure that John Roberts as a child borrowed his mother's cape and swished around the living room going, I'm going to be chief justice one day. Be careful what you wish for. He had no idea when W appointed him that one day he would be doing battle with Donald Trump. And in the court of television and entertainment, Donald Trump would win. Anyway, I can't wait for the State of the Union. Is he going to walk past them? I mean, he actually said, I don't care if they're invited or not. I could care less if they come. Again, you know, of course, they're supposed to be there sitting there on the road. We famously watched Ruth Bader Ginsburg falling asleep at the State of the Union. And why wouldn't she? Because they're frequently boring. But this is going to be electrifying, I think, on Tuesday. Anyway, that's my prediction. But a reasonable prediction is that nobody falls asleep during Donald Trump's State of the Union. And they go on for longer. They break precedent almost in every occasion. But you don't know what he will say. Well, he doesn't know what he's going to say. He doesn't know. Exactly. So this is, but, you know, again, it's so interesting to me that the Democrats are helpless in the face of this and cannot come to terms with what this is and how to meet this head on. And I'm not, I can't help them because I don't know what you would do. I think on this one, you sit it out, because there will be many more things before the run up to the election. It's not just this. It's the entire it's it's his entire political frame of operation, which the Democrats don't know how to how to how to how to counter. I mean, Newsom now has, you know, he's he's he's trying to create social media, social media means, et cetera, et cetera. But it's still it's it's weak. So is there a Democratic politician, and I'm just trying to think through the cast of characters, who could possibly be as performative as Donald Trump? Well, and that may not be what people want. People may not want someone as performative. You know, they may just want to return to something that feels a little bit more. No, no, no. People just say they want that. Well, they returned to Biden after they returned to Biden after Trump won. Well, that lasted, what, 10 minutes before before he was he was we want him back. He was completely in the doghouse. Yes, we want him back because that guy, we don't even notice that guy. He just white noise So so if you think of you know and this is a problem with the Democrats of course they continue to think of voters as voters instead of voters as an audience What does Trump understand? Voters are an audience. And they respond to the same things that an audience responds to, which is not policy and it's not a legislative agenda. What it is, is they respond to the guy on the stage. Well, and the thing that we know that Donald Trump also responds to is he doesn't like being backed into a corner, which he has been with the tariffs, although he's now said that he's going to impose 10% tariffs on absolutely everybody. But meanwhile, we have a buildup of troops in the Middle East, the biggest buildup since 2003 and the invasion of Iraq. Is he going to divert from what was a loss for him with the tariffs and bomb Iran? Is he going to keep threatening Iran? Is he going to try and do an in and out as he did in Venezuela or as he did in the summer? What do you think is likely to happen here? I assume these are rhetorical questions because we have no idea. Well, he has no idea. He has no idea. He has no idea. Exactly. No, but I'm interested to sort of game it out. The status wise of where we are is now he is talking about a a limited incursion or a limited action of some sorts. In other words, and as we talked about this the other the other day, you know, he's in a in a pickle. You know, if he doesn't do something, he looks weak. Also, we have all that we have. We have the entire United States military amassed to do something. So he looks weak, but he's also understands and people keep telling him about how complicated it is to, in fact, do something. And A, he doesn't want to listen to the details of why it's complicated. And B, he certainly doesn't want to deal with a sudden complicated situation which would take over everybody's mindshare instead of him being everybody's mindshare. And the whole idea, actually, and virtually no one in the world can make the prediction of what happens if they, in fact, get rid of this regime. Right. Which may well be the result. Right. And we should remind people he encouraged people to keep protesting in the streets last month that help was on its way. And his goal is to stop Iran becoming a serious nuclear power. Well, he doesn't really know what his goal is. The goal was first, you know, to protect the protesters. Okay, well, that goal fell by the wayside and they, you know, 7,000 or 8,000 or 10,000 or nobody knows how many thousands were shot in the streets. So that goal went away. Now the goal is about their nuclear capacity. And, well, I, you know, I mean, so it is interesting, but it does would seem that right now he is on the verge of doing some face saving thing that will not advance the ball in either direction. Well, and if he's doing a face saving thing over the tariffs, whether or not he overextends a decision in Iran. No, I think the face saving thing is over Iran. um not well there are two face-saving things i think there's the tariffs because that was humiliating and he's gone after scoters he's already he's already launched a face-saving campaign they're the enemy they're wrong i'm going to put tariffs on anyway i mean he's in his element here which is which is i don't need you i don't listen to you uh you don't you're not the boss of me you are not the boss of me that's the exact energy that he was giving uh that he was giving yesterday when he responded in that strangely lit White House press room too, which was odd, with poor Howard Lutnick standing there, solemn and silent throughout, never once called upon as Commerce Secretary. Never once called upon. Anyway, we have no idea if he's going to go into Iran. He doesn't know if he's going to go into Iran. The Epstein Secretary. Yeah, that's a good description. and obviously we'll get into the Epstein of it all. Do we want to discuss the homoerotic videos coming out of the cabinet? I think we might do because you're talking about how are the Democrats going to face 2028. You have always maintained that RFK Jr. is going to run as president in 2028, obviously for the Republicans. And he released a video with Kid Rock this week in the sauna, not to be outdone the next day. Pete Hegseth released a video talking about how it was very important to keep your butt down when you were trying to bench press. I think that's the term bench press 350 pounds. And the thing that was so bizarre to me and perhaps you can explain this. 315. OK, 315. Sounds like 350 if you say it quickly, which I think he did. You've got to keep your butt down. No, and it's this other thing that the other signal that they're very clearly sending. That's a bro message. It's protein powders, right? And creatine and all that stuff that they take, even though RFK Jr. says just eat real food and smother yourself in beef tallow. Anyway, we saw him smothered in beef tallow, cycling mysteriously on a stationary bike, cycling to nowhere in the sauna. Why does he work out in tight blue jeans? Because he thinks it's attractive and women will like him even more and the blue goes with his eyes. Have you ever seen anyone work out in tight blue jeans? No, but I have a friend who lives in Bedford slash Mount Kisco, who says that when RFK lived up there... Isn't one or the other Bedford or Mount Kisco? They're sort of next to each other. And the point of the story is that there were gyms... In other words, this person lives in Mount Kisco, but wants you to think that he lives in Bedford. No, I actually think it's the other way around. But the point of the story is there are gyms in both Bedford and Mount Kisco where I am told RFK Jr. was parading around the gym, to your point, in jeans with no shirt on. And I don't think it was a shirtless environment, as you can imagine, up there in those slightly prissy upstate towns. Anyway, you've had so much coffee this morning. I'm struggling to get a word in edgeways. But I was curious about Pete Hegseth. He's lying there. He's bench pressing £315. And the person who's spotting him is his 15-year-old son, Gunnar, who looks to be a young 15. And he's sort of desperately looking like, you know, I mean, first of all, who would trust their teenage son in a moment like this where you might end up dropping £315 on your own body? Who would trust a teenager to spot you? You know they're not thinking about you. They're thinking about anything else but what's going on in front of you. Poor Gunnar. And then at one point, Gunnar reaches out because it looks like his father is going to be unable to lift the full thing. And Peter Hexel just shouts at him. He just reams him out. He's like, get off, get off, like this. And you're like, you're humiliating your teenage son. And then you're distributing this on video. It was absurd. So what's the goal here? It's the message that masculinity is back. I mean, the other thing I keep hearing from my senior female friends in big companies is that nobody cares about DEI anymore. We saw that Goldman Sachs put out a statement saying they were jettisoning DEI. And I have a friend who was actually called by her boss, a very significant figure in the finance world, who said she has been working on another project. And he said, I need you to come and talk to the men. The men are out of control. And there is this sense in which I think the whole DEI. The men are out of control in their bro-ness? Yeah, in their bro-ness, in the way they're talking again, that all the things that men thought they couldn't say about women or couldn't say about anything, they can now say what they like. The HR department no longer matters. The Jeffrey Epstein emails have become inspiring rather than whatever the opposite is. Yeah, which is odd because for many people, they've become fireable offences. And we can talk about Casey Wasserman and what's going on in Hollywood there. And obviously, Casey Wasserman started the Wasserman Agency. He's the grandson of Lew Wasserman, Hollywood legend. And perhaps more importantly, he's actually chair of the 2020 LA Olympics and is now under enormous pressure to resign that role because he was friendly with Epstein and had a series of racy emails with Ghislaine Maxwell. in which one of which he imagined her in tight leather outfits. Just note these emails were from almost 25 years ago. Yeah, I am noting that before people understood the scale of what Epstein was up to. And it's not illegal to send an email to someone saying that you'd like to imagine them in black leather. But what I am hearing from my senior females out in the workforce is that DEI is out of the window. Nobody really cares what women think anymore. And it's to your point about why are people putting out these videos? It seems to be a celebration of a very classic masculinity, possibly the toxic masculinity that we wanted to move on from. But I think it's an interesting moment that that occurs exactly simultaneously with the Jeffrey Epstein moment. Because, I mean, the Jeffrey Epstein of it all is, you know, I mean, essentially to have created an incredibly toxic environment in which women are not only of little consequence, but you can do with what you want with them. And there will be no consequences. Exactly. And this is what? I mean, people are losing their jobs all over the place. Not Peter Attia. Not Peter Attia, the longevity expert. So side by side, these two contradictory forces are on the loose. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. And it's the Trump government who, or it's the Trump administration that is really pushing this sort of masculinity. I happened to drop by Dan Bongino's podcast yesterday. You remember that Dan Bongino was the... I thought you were just going to say you happened to drop by his office. I thought, well... No, no, no. I mean, I just dropped by it. And I dropped by him on Rumble or wherever, whatever distribution platform he's on. And he had an interview with Kash Patel on. So I thought, oh, this will be interesting. I'm curious to know what the two of them are going to talk about, because obviously the two of them, before they entered the administration as the number one and the number two of the FBI, were demanding the release of the Epstein files and kept going on about the conspiracy of the Epstein files. And you will be surprised or perhaps not surprised to know that in the 20 minute interview that they did, they didn't mention Epstein once. And actually, I was encouraged by the fact that all the comments were like, guys, guys, why aren't you talking about Epstein? Instead, they talked about Antifa and no mention of Nancy Guthrie, no mention whatsoever. So Kash Patel has time to give to his old friend doing a pointless suck-uppy podcast with Dan Bongino, where he talks about the brilliance of Donald Trump, the brilliance of Donald Trump. But him allowing us to work, especially after early on the successes of Viper, Operation Viper, the violent crime operation in Tennessee. He saw the results and said, guys, we got to expand this nationwide. There's no reason we can't replicate this in cities across the country. I think you just hit upon the brilliance of true leadership in what President Trump said to you and I. He said, go reduce violent crime. Go defend the homeland. Stop children from overdosing. And let's protect our children online. Doesn't mention Nancy Guthrie once, who has been missing now for three weeks, for three weeks. An 80-year-old woman has disappeared and the FBI can't find her. Meanwhile, Kash Patel has time to give to Dan Bongino as Dan Bongino promotes his coffee powders and whatever else he's promoting. It was a shocking display. Well, I'm shocked that you're shocked. I guess I shouldn't have been shocked. I mean, look, we know who these two guys are. Again, what you're trying to do is... Is normalize them. I'm trying to normalize them, and I shouldn't be doing that. You're quite right. Is to give them some credit as professionals in their job or people who ought to be professionals in their job when they are not professionals, by every evidence, don't have the capacity to be professionals, probably not the interest to be professionals either, and are doing, who knows what they're doing there? They're just there to not create any friction between themselves and Donald Trump. That was their sole mission. I was wondering if perhaps Donald Trump had been back-channeling Takash Patel. You've got to sort out this Nancy Guthrie story because it's just a remarkable story. And as you know, it's completely gripped the nation. And for those, and we have a lot of listeners abroad in Europe and in Australia, for those who haven't been following it, this is the disappearance. Actually, and this is something I don't know. Has Trump been asked directly about this? Yes. And he said that they are going to bring in the death penalty for whoever did this. The death penalty. Yeah. He's been, you know, super supportive of them trying to find Nancy Guthrie. And we should just say for people abroad who haven't been following the story, this is a story that swallowed America for the last couple of weeks. It's the disappearance of the mother of Savannah Guthrie, who's a much beloved presenter of morning television. Anyway, her mother, who lives in Arizona, has disappeared. There doesn't appear to have been a ransom note or there have been several, but it's unclear if any of them were real. Anyway, it's a strange story. But within a ring video, there appears to be no evidence. Yes, and why don't you describe the ring video? Because it's really haunting. Yeah, I mean, it's just somebody in a mask of some sort. I mean, you don't see very much. It doesn't offer very much. Just it would be haunting if someone approached your ring video in a mask Well and a mask and gloves clearly doing something untoward It looks utterly premeditated The whole thing is like a scene from a horror movie It is But the interesting thing about this is that it doesn't go beyond that. I mean, we know nothing more. This story has not advanced beyond that. So it's just it just it just becomes literally a black whole mystery and not a mystery clearly that's being solved. Well, and certainly not being solved by the head of the FBI, Kash Patel. Well, it appears to be being solved by nobody or certainly, I mean, maybe somebody knows things that we don't know and they're performing in a very professional manner, but it certainly does not seem that way. Well, it just seemed a mystery to I mean, that Cash Patel would have time to appear on Dan Bongino's video when there are other more urgent things for him to do. Yeah, so three weeks, this is obviously a tragedy of great proportions. And the likelihood is that this is not going to end well. No, it really doesn't look as if it is going to end well. Although, frankly, we have no idea. But it's a terrible, terrible story. but I've watched the Dan Bongino podcast so nobody listening or watching this podcast needs to including you Michael but you wouldn't even know where to find Rumble no well you sent me a little clip I thought and it confirmed I mean the fact that these people are so stupid I mean you just hit your head again and again My God. Well, and the idea that the two of them are running the FBI is really shocking. Anyway, what do we think about the banners, the very sort of 1930s Germany banners that Trump is erecting of himself? Everywhere. All over D.C. Everywhere. So every government building is going to be required to have a Trump banner. And these are, I mean, if you haven't seen these banners, these are huge banners. They're huge enough to dwarf huge buildings. Yeah, the one outside the Justice Department is perhaps the most egregious, the sort of signaling this is Trump's Justice Department. Let's speculate on where these come from. Does Donald Trump say, hey, I went by that building this morning and we could put a really big picture of me on the building? Probably. Is that how the message gets sent? Or are the people at the Justice Department and every other building so much the toadies that they figure, hey, hey, hey, this is a good idea? Well, we should actually... Forget Nancy Guthrie. This is a good idea. Let's put up a building size banner of the president. In fact, the only person I know who's had a banner or an image as big as that is you when you were projected on the side of Windsor Castle with that video of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. So maybe that's where he got the video. Maybe that's where he got the idea from. That was so fleeting video. I wonder if the idea somehow, the kernel of the idea came from that, because he liked the idea of himself on the side of Windsor Castle. And then he thought, or maybe he's just been looking at imagery of Nazi Germany and thought, hey, those banners are a good idea. I don't know. I mean, let's think, does it come from him? Does it come from Susie Wiles thinking, oh, God, you know, he's in a bad mood. this is this will make them you know we'll get a couple hours respite if we put up some some banners you can't you ask your person in the white house next week and we get some sort of we should investigate this because it's super interesting and there was that moment during one of the cabinet meetings where he briefly stayed a week awake and we haven't actually discussed the possibility of whether or not he could fall asleep in his own state of the union but there's another question, which is, we're making fun of these banners, but is there a political point with these banners? Does he get something from these banners? This imposition, we're talking about Nazi Germany dismissively, but that was, you know, for a while. Well, I didn't mean it dismissively. I meant it just symbolically. So does this happen, does putting up your face anywhere you can put it and putting your name anywhere you can put on any building you can put it on, what does this accomplish? Certainly for a good part of the country, it just contributes to turning everybody off to Donald Trump more than everybody turning people off. The revulsion is clear. But to the other part of the country, do they look at this, Donald Trump's immense face, on these buildings and not particularly, by the way, an attractive face and think, you know, what do they think? Is there an outpouring of pride and affection? Well, maybe to him, it's the logical conclusion. As we've said many times, here's a man who's built his brand by slapping his last name on buildings. He was the first developer really to do it and this is the natural extension of that and so he feels that that has consistently worked for him um and i guess in some way although it is hard to believe it has well and it's taking ownership of government departments and perhaps reminding people if you walk into those departments every day that this is your boss so it's about dominance again dominance dominance dominance it's always about dominance and then it's about a cult of personality and then it's about speaking to the fan base speaking to the fan base not as a political base but as a fan base then what matters is the face is the person is the merchandising yes and I think it can't be lost on those who work, who walk into those government buildings every day that he's the boss for now. Yeah. You know, and just, you know, always traditionally there has been, you walk into a government building and there's a framed portrait of whoever the president is, but it's a framed portrait. It's, it's just, it exists in a, um, in a boring capacity. So back to what we we talked about before which is politics is boring donald trump is electric is crazy is ridiculous um but he is not boring and suddenly you've taken those old boring stayed portraits in which the people look dead into this now this this um this flowing gigantic portrait which looks like the monster has come to earth. Yeah, the sort of political Godzilla. And also he must have been used to having portraits of himself when he was doing The Apprentice, those absolutely enormous posters on Sunset Boulevard that go up to announce the new season of a show. So he probably just thought, why don't politicians have those and I could bring them in and it could be a new thing. Well, our job now is to find out whose idea was this. Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. It's a great question. You know, I did think he was pretty, it felt so amateur the way he did all the introductions to the Board of Peace, which was this week on Thursday morning. It felt like he hadn't bothered to read the notes. He described everybody in the same way. Great guy, tough guy, strong guy. He always does is he really likes this this moment in any room when he can single out the people that he knows. So he's Tumblr like in that way. Vegas, you know, and I struck me almost as a cat skills comedian. No, I've seen him do this many times, many times. And he starts to go on. And often, if he actually knows the people, then he'll say something kind of off-color or personally embarrassing. You know, he had a beautiful wife, beautiful wife. But, you know, time passed. Now he has another. Look at her. Look at that. Isn't that great? Well, a bit like he said about the poor man who was sitting around. Was it Harold Hamm, the oil executive who was at the meeting post the Venezuela-Maduro takeout? And he goes, Harold Hamm, Harold Hamm, he's got some problems going on. And everybody was like, oh, my goodness, what are the problems? Because, again, it's unexpected. But I think we have a clip of him here as he's doing his round of introductions to the 20 countries that turned up for the Board of Peace meeting. President Pena of Paraguay is here. President, thank you very much. Young, handsome guy. It's always nice to be young and handsome. Doesn't mean we have to like you. I don't like young, handsome men. Women, I like men. I don't have any interest. Such a sort of, can you imagine any other American president? Can you imagine President Obama doing that? No, no. George W. wouldn't do that. I mean, it's such a bizarre. Your word tumbler is the right word. Tumbler. Tum, tum. Not the B. Tumbler. T-U-M-M-L-E-R. No, it's like at the Friars Club. Right. Or like a vaudeville comedian who's a little... Well, that's with the Friars Club. Okay. They're a little down on their luck. They're throwing out their last material. They're seeing if they can keep the audience. I mean, such a strange moment. as was the moment where he's talking yesterday and he's referring to having gone to a factory and someone at the factory said, Mr. President, I would like to hug and kiss you. And he's like, please don't. Please don't. No, no, no, no. Let's be specific. He said someone at the factory said this. Now, it is very likely that no one at the factory said this. that it just comes into his head. It just is a kind of way. I mean, it's actually pretty ineffective speech-making way. It's an anecdote. You quote somebody. The fact that these people don't exist is immaterial to him. As a matter of fact, there was a period in the first administration where he gave a speech about a friend of mine went to Paris once. And then and then evermore, when he would when he would come up in a speech with one of these anecdotes about an unidentified person, people in the White House would say, well, the Paris friend is back. Meaning there's no such person. No such person. Never. No such person. I'll guarantee nobody wanted to kiss Donald Trump. Well, let's have a look. Can we just we've got the clip here, actually. I just want to play the clip because it was so delightful. A lot of the press right here, we're in Georgia, and I said to the owner, I made a speech at a factory. They make steel products. And I said, how are you? Nice to meet you. How's business? President, I'd love to kiss you. This is a very powerful man. I don't want to be kissed by that man. But a very powerful, strong man. He's been in the steel business for many years. His father started it. And he said, sir, I want to kiss you. I said, why? He said, because we were down to working one hour a week, and then you came in and imposed tariffs, and all of that foreign junk that they were dropping into our country stopped. And we're now going to double shifts seven days a week, and we may be very soon going to 24 hours around the clock, almost seven days a week. He said, sir, I want to kiss you so badly. And I said, no, thank you. Now, the interesting thing is I'll bet nothing in that statement was true. Not the kisses, not the 24 hours, not the double shifts, none of it. Well, we know who doesn't want to kiss him, and that is Melania. Melania does not want to kiss him, and she wants us to know she doesn't want to kiss him because that's why she's done her documentaries. The one thing you take away, that this is not, in any romantic sense, a couple. Or in any geographic sense, which is quite relevant to me. So you had an interesting column yesterday on Substack about Epstein and friendship. And I've been thinking a lot about the nature of friendship recently, just because I've had a lot of friends come around post-surgery. I've had people come and stay. My younger son came. I have a gay vicar friend. I thought you were going to say you had a lot of friends who went to jail. No, I have no friends who went to jail. I've done my friend inventory. I was trying to think about who's gone to jail. But, you know, I have friends who who really turn up when I need people. As a British person, I find it very difficult to admit that I need help. But certainly when you're recovering from hip surgery, you need help. My best friend came from London for several days, which was fantastic. And she was in the middle of a book deadline. So, you know, I was particularly grateful that that she came. But if I were to go to jail, which I'm not planning to do, hopefully it's not on the cards. But would I expect my friends to stand by me? And of course, you have Prince Andrew, formerly known as Prince, recently arrested and now I think awaiting charges, saying that the reason he didn't drop Jeffrey Epstein was because he was too loyal a friend and he wanted to stay loyal to him because just because he'd been in jail for soliciting prostitution from a minor, he was still a friend of Andrew's. Now, we know that Andrew wanted lots from him and it was a transactional friendship. But, you know, I mean, all friendships on some level are transactional. So just to say that doesn't dismiss the friendship. But the the the I mean, I think the the interesting point here, I mean, virtually everybody who who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein has now said, you know, you know, I wish I had never been. I don't know what, you know, I didn't know. Certainly, I didn't want to be friend, knowing now I wouldn't want to be friends, et cetera, et cetera, cast off. Instead of saying, and the question is always, how could you have spent time with Jeffrey Epstein? How could you? And the answer the true answer among an enormous number of people a broad section of interest disciplines I mean kind of extraordinary is they spent time with Jeffrey Epstein because he was their friend They were his friend. They all of the attributes of friendship were in place. And and that is so so so to your point about not abandoning him or or you can see it even in a different way. When you are friends with someone, you go out of your way to overlook what their what what whatever is negative about them. I mean, you might get to the point where you no longer overlook that, but that's what we do as friends. And that's what all of these people who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein were doing. They were genuine friends. And I always thought it was interesting because functionally Jeffrey Epstein is a middleman and New York is kind of a city of middlemen. But the thing about most middlemen in which you can almost instantly tell is their is their insincerity. And the thing about Jeffrey Epstein, in which I was often a witness to this, is that he really was interested in the people he was in the middle of. Did he like people? I mean, he seems so sociopathic. It's hard to imagine that he had any relationships. No, I think that's completely I mean, I think on the one hand, he lacked all intimate relationships. You know, he had a problem, classic problem with intimacy, but he replaced that with a strong connection to to people who who who did interesting things, who had interesting jobs, who had who were successful and accomplished in the following ways. And he was genuinely interested in those people and genuinely had forged a bond with those people. There was a good piece in New York Magazine this week which illustrated the point I was trying to make on our last podcast where you said that Jeffrey didn't shake hands because he was a germaphobe. And I always think that germaphobes, like Donald Trump, it's such a tell. People are like, oh, I'm a germaphobe, I'm a germaphobe. how could this man be a germaphobe when he was having sex with three different women every single day? What kind of a germaphobe is that? And the piece in New York Magazine is about the circle of doctors that he kept close. And there's a description of him having gonorrhea at some point and reaching out to the doctors and then saying, well, these girls will need the shots. And that whole sense of him and his friends trying to manage all this. And then you think about the anecdote of Bill Gates, who was supposed to have caught some kind of STI from a Russian woman who and then he was trying to smuggle antibiotics to his wife. I mean, this is how the germaphobe. It's such a tell. Yeah, no, I always thought, I mean, you know, I mean, I sat through Trump's Stormy Daniels trial. And frankly, it was one of the things that constantly came into my head. He's a germaphobe. There's Stormy Daniels. How does this match up? So I don't know the answer to this. I mean, there's a solution to all of this. Just use a condom. um yeah well i'm not going to go there on this so um i mean okay well i'm not expecting you to go there but i mean it's just is i i don't understand any any of this i don't understand how you would uh anyway let's not go there i don't want to go there one of the things i'm finding very complicated about understanding the epstein files is one there's so many of them two They are all over social media and social media is also full of AI slop. So there are some very good fake emails that look as if they could be real. And there are enormous numbers of emails that purport to be from Glenn Maxwell. No, no, it's just it is extraordinary. I, you know, I watch I mean, I happen to know the truth about some of this stuff at any rate. And you tune in social media and there is somebody you can say, everything that I have just heard, 100 percent, is completely wrong. And people say it with enormous certainty and earnestness and alarm. I wish that Ghislaine Maxwell would give evidence because I've read at least three correspondences which appear that she was, well, at least having intimate emails with Thomas Pritzker, Casey Wasserman and Bill Clinton, all I think concurrently. So she's an underexplored person in this whole thing, partly because she's gone to jail. She's out of sight. And I think I remember saying to you on a couple of podcasts ago, I had a friend who was at Oxford with her. He was gay. She would constantly come up and put her hand down his pants. I mean, I've never heard of a woman doing that. Why on earth would you do that to a gay man except that she was very sexualized and very sexually aggressive in a peculiar fashion? No, I think she was a classic seductress in the dramatic version of that, which is part insidious and part accomplished and in part a serious disruptor because of this willingness and ability to seduce. And I think she did this on a rather chronic basis. I mean, I know somebody, somebody who, you know, a young, a young woman who she just she approached randomly in a restaurant in New York, sat down with, gave her her card. That kind of that kind of come on. Now, this this person and, you know, I think clearly the world cleaves here. this person said, okay, there's something wrong there, as opposed to the women who said, oh, this is an opportunity. Yeah, it's a very strange, she's as yet a still untold part of this story, I think, and who knows if we'll hear more from her, but what a sort of bizarre character, and how weird that the two of them would have met each other, and would have been able to, she was obviously so useful for him, not only in her ability to bring in high profile people, but also her ability to make young women think that nothing untoward would happen because somehow she would, as a woman, protect them. Well, also, she seems to have had a, well, I mean, she had such a horrible father that to walk into this situation. I mean, I think Jeffrey Epstein, to the people around him to the, you know, I think he established a very hierarchical relationship. And I think Ghislaine was willing to fit into that. I mean, because her father obviously established those kinds of relationships with everybody. He was the boss. Everybody else was in service to him in some capacity. This is also true, by the way, about Donald Trump, obviously. Mm-hmm. Well, and the two stories that was sort of legendary on Fleet Street, where I spent some time as a young journalist, were that Robert Maxwell would pee from the top of his tower onto people walking below it, onto, you know, unsuspecting pedestrians. Well, that's interesting because one of the scenarios for how Maxwell died is that he was peeing off the side of his boat and then fell in. right and then miraculously when he fell in well shortly after it was discovered he plundered the pension fund of the mirror no no no it was discovered actually before that so it was it was pretty clear that he probably went over the side because he had no no recourse he was they were all come they were coming for him at that point yeah well i think he knew that But maybe he was peeing. Obviously, he still had to pee, even if he was a plunderer. Well, he was definitely a plunderer. I don't think it was common knowledge that he'd done that, though. It only became apparent the extent of his plundering, which was half a billion dollars. He knew that the police and investigators were... Were closing in on him. But the public didn't know. It only became clear after he died quite what trouble he was in, which was that he'd stolen up to half a billion pounds from his pension funds. And he was living on hot air. These days, that seems like a small amount. Yeah, but it wasn't a small amount. And at the time, I think it was one of the biggest ever con jobs on people. But it explained why he was able to live as large as he did, when to a lot of people, it was unclear how he was making any money. But anyway, one of the things he also used to do was to interview people in his car. He famously lived at Headington Hall just outside Oxford. He worked in London. So he would say to people, come and we'll do the interview in my car. They would drive up the M4, which is the motorway to Oxford from London. And then when the interview was over, he would have his driver pull over and drop people on the side of the freeway motorway and leave them there. And then they would have to figure out how to get back. So that was another thing that people eventually stopped wanting to have interviews with him because that might happen. You know, I once went, I had a meeting with him. I was involved with some journalism startup project, a magazine startup, and I had a meeting with him in London at a suite in the Ritz Hotel. And I was shown in and I sat down with him and we exchanged a few words and then he got, something happened, got called away and left the room and left me waiting there. And I waited for, this is embarrassing, because I waited for an hour and a half. And then finally I thought, okay, I guess I got to go. And I think that was my one interaction with Robert Maxwell. That must have gone down in Fleet Street Law, too. Anyway, not a father that he would necessarily want to have. In the question about Ghislaine, and I do think that's an unexplored, her presence and what she did in this other than recruit young women for Jeffrey Epstein, but what her larger position in this whole lifestyle, in this whole weird, weird story is unexplored. explored. Well, she was a sort of courtesan. She was keeping some of the more powerful people in his circle engaged, I think. Right. But it does then go back to the father, who is such a weird, weird story. Does it go back to the father? Does it have to go back to the father? I have so many friends. I just want to finish this point, because this is a point of friction with a lot of British friends I have who knew her, who were at Oxford with her, who are still very fond of her and somehow think that she's ended up carrying the can for Epstein in a way that she shouldn't have done. And they all say, oh, it goes back to the father. She had a terrible father. You cannot imagine how awful her father was. And I just think at some point you have to have agency over your own life. And the fact that she had a terrible father does not excuse the fact... But you don't have agency over your own life is the tragedy. And when you have a father who is that large, that awful, that in his own right, that much of an aberration, well, you certainly then have to say, you know, probably had something to do with the father. I'm not saying it didn't have anything to do with it. I'm just saying it's not an excuse. It's not an excuse for picking up underage girls and serving them up to... We're looking for explanations. Explanation. Well, it may be some kind of an explanation, but it doesn't excuse her behavior, picking up girls from the schoolyard and delivering them to... No, I think it's an important point. We're not excusing. This is about explaining. How did Ghislaine Maxwell get into the position, you know, I'm a writer. This is what you have to do. The larger context. How did this happen? And you certainly, if you're writing this story, can't ignore the fact, the Robert Maxwell element of it all. Well, she had, I think, eight brothers and sisters and none of them procured underage women for Jeffrey Epstein. no but nevertheless actually they were in themselves have had odd careers and odd lives and um um and and i know this because i was actually in almost in business with one of them and there's a very funny i think i think um account of this in my book burn rate and they became internet grifters um oh i think i remember this when you went to see them for money yes and i was almost i was almost became part of their their uh their grift and and that actually was a moment in which in which um um in which the bankers told me i was worth an enormous amount of money and then but then their grift became apparent and then i said how much am i worth now and it was It all passed Well happily you fell back on your actual ability Which is as a brilliant observer and writer And it turns out that you've been writing about The people that have been the centre of our culture For the last few years So we are the beneficiaries of that Michael Wolff Which is a very nice note to end on this Saturday So if you have been, thank you for joining us Don't forget to leave us a comment on YouTube Feel free to subscribe to become a Beebeast tier member. 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