155. The Real Story Behind Trump’s ICE “Retreat”

Welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kaye, back in Washington, D.C. Finally, I feel like I've been gone for a long time. I'm digging out from under the ice, the big freeze of Washington. How are you, Anthony? Well, welcome back to your home. So nice to be home. I always like getting home. I'm here in New York. We also have weather that is more frozen than Alaska. But you know what's not frozen, Katty, are these Epstein files, okay? It's like molten lava. It's like a volcanic explosion. Yeah. Which is having a big impact on the UK and the potential UK government. I don't know if it's going to have a big impact on the US government, but I will predict, like Ed Luce said on your show yesterday, it's going to have an impact on our culture. I think people are really fed up. Yeah, I think they don't like seeing powerful people get away with things. No question. And that's what this is increasingly looking like. There's so much going on. We want to give you as much as we can, guys, but there is a common theme to some of this. I want to talk about the Washington Post. I have lots of friends who work there and I've been getting texts from them overnight. We also want to talk about what is happening in Minneapolis. Is this a climb down? I have a theory about both of those stories, which are these are both cases of leadership not reading their constituents properly. And we've got some new polling on Minneapolis and ICE, which suggests that. And then in the second half, we're going to talk about, I can't believe we have to do this again, but we're going to talk about the 2020 election and the president's new playbook, which is to sow discord and dissent about whether American elections are free and fair, which is exactly what he did in 2020 at this stage in the election. early in the year of 2020. He was telling people the elections were going to be rigged because he saw the tea leaves and he realized he was going to do badly. And guess what? Here we are six years later and the same thing is happening. So we're going to talk about that. Should we start with the Washington Post? I've been getting texts from friends of mine. I know you have friends that work at the Post too. I have several friends that work at the Post. And what's really interesting about this story, the Washington Post laid off a third of its journalists, particularly its foreign international coverage has been decimated. Sports section has been decimated. There's barely a section of the paper, once storied paper. This is the paper, of course, that brought us Watergate, that brought down President Nixon and is now really on its last legs. And the things that I'm hearing from friends of mine who work at the Washington Post is that this was a failure of management. Jeff Bezos bought the Post and for 10 years, he invested in the newspaper. This is when he changed the headline during the first Trump administration to Democracy Dies in Darkness. That was the kind of banner on the top front page. And then Jeff Bezos took a hard right turn, became much more Trumpy, and the Washington Post became disconnected from its readership. There was a failure of kind of Will Lewis, who came in as the publisher. He failed to actually implement some of the reforms that were needed in the paper in order to expand its readership. When they pulled their, you and I talked about this, when they pulled their endorsement of Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, they lost 250,000 subscribers and they never got them back again. What I'm hearing from friends of mine at the Post is that even very good management would not have been able to withstand Jeff Bezos's decision to get in bed with Donald Trump and suck up to Donald Trump and not do things that upset Donald Trump. And that alienated what is effectively a fairly democratic readership in the Washington area and around the country. So I think it's ownership and leadership getting out of touch with their populations and their readers and their subscribers. I think it's very sad. I think The Washington Post has a great history and we need more newspapers. We need more news coverage. There is so much going on in the world that we need good independent reporting. And to see it go like this is is very sad. Your analysis, I think, is spot on. But you have to remember what's going on in our society. We've fragmented the media. We've weakened the newspapers. The Pittsburgh Gazette has closed down. You and I could list probably 50 news publications in local markets that have closed. The New York Times, I was in Davos and one of the journalists in the New York Times said that we're a Wordle cooking company with news attached to it. Well, that was Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC, did that to the New York Times and did it brilliantly. So he made the right decisions there because he figured out what the audience actually wanted and then they were able to pay for the news. You know, William Paley, he had CBS. He wanted the Tiffany Network to have a world-class objective news organization, but it always lost money. If you go to David Havelstam's book, The Powers That Be, it was really a totem of dignity to have the news. It wasn't really a moneymaker. Okay, so now fast forward to 2013 Sun Valley Conference. The Graham family is hemorrhaging money from the Washington Post. They go to one of the richest people in the world and they say, do you want this thing? And I'm going to give you some quotes from Jeff Bezos married to Mackenzie Bezos at the time. He says, this is a irreplaceable civic asset, Caddy Kay. And he says that he's going to be working alongside of the journalists to maintain the public impact of this institution. Okay, that's what he says. He puts $250 million of cash in. Amazon itself doesn't buy it. Can I say one other thing that he says? He said at the time, if you shrink a newspaper too much, it's no longer valid anymore. It's no longer viable. Words to that effect that you can't shrink it and still have a viable newspaper, which is exactly what he's just done this week. Right. But it's on brand to be a left of center news organization fabled for the Watergate investigation. So it's on brand, right? Yeah. But he then goes to Turkey to have a memorial ceremony related to Khashoggi. He gives a speech there that is in the spirit of all of this. And guess what starts to happen? The subscription surge during the Trump era. Trump won. Everybody gets the Trump bump. It becomes the top global English language news site, Trump One. He expands the newsroom aggressively 2014 to 2019. Now, I don't know when he started dating his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, but I think it's right around that time. Okay. He gets a divorce and Trump's coming for him, by the way. So let me just say that to everybody. And I will take you back to the 20th of July. Okay. And I'm going to tell you that that was a Thursday in 2017 because obviously I remember it. And I was sitting in the study off of the Oval. And Trump is going to hire me to be the comms director. I'm going to start the next day. And the first thing he says to me, Caddy, is what do you think of Jess Bezos? I hate that blankety blank, blankety blank. SOB. And what do you think of him? And can we break up Amazon? Now, I took antitrust in law school. I said, there are certain tests that you have to go through. Amazon does not meet the threshold that's in the Sermon Antitrust Act. And he looks at me. He said, well, I hate that guy. I would like to see that broken up. And I hate the Washington Post. So gets back to Bezos, of course, that Trump hates him. And now he's made a decision that he's going to buy a $500 million yacht. He's going to get himself remarried. He's having some glorified middle age crisis road trip, and he's disconnected to the moral anchor of what he had. Okay. So let me just finish this last thought. He then pulls the op ed endorsement. Well, he could have endorsed Trump or he could endorsed Kamala Harris, but he doesn't want to endorse anybody. Even though the op-ed was written. It was all written. The editorial crew had signed off of Kamala Harris. Yeah. Yeah. I feel saddened by this. Okay. I canceled my subscription, by the way, because this is BS. This paper's going nowhere. But by canceling that description in hindsight and the multitudes of people that did, we created this vicious circle. So he lost 22% of his revenues. And now you're looking at the paper. he's worth several hundred billion dollars he could support the paper and keep it as a civic asset he wouldn't even notice but he's not doing that catty cake okay he's not doing that and and here's the sad part of it for me is that we're going in a direction now where you're going to see boycotts we're going in a direction now where our fellow podcaster and friend personal friend of mine, Scott Galloway, is asking people to remove themselves from MAG7 subscriptions. And people are doing it in droves because they're needing to send a message to these sycophants that this is not tolerable what you're doing. And by the way, these CEOs better wake up because Donald Trump has a 61% disapproval rating. Yeah. Okay. In order to curry favor with Donald Trump, they're going to be on the wrong side of America. and Trump's power is fading, Katty. And Trump's political stature is going to jump the shark, which is an American expression for fading out, okay, after the midterms. It took me a long time to understand that one. So this was Arthur Fonzarelli, 1978. He was water skiing in Hawaii. You know the origin of that one. He was water skiing in Hawaii in a leather jacket, no less. And they had him jumping a shark. and it was at that moment that everybody looked around and said, this is a completely stupid sitcom. We've run out of ideas and they canceled the sitcom. So when people say you've jumped the shark in the United States, it's Henry Winkler, who I adore, friend of mine, jumping the shark in 1978 and it's over. Okay. Trump is jumping the shark, ladies and gentlemen. And by the way, look at me. Everyone's why I got to do this. Hey, Jeff, what are you doing there? Okay. Yeah, he knows. You have no advisors. I get the fact that you want to hang out with Mrs. Bezos and float around in the yacht. God bless you You entitled to that You made a great amount of money and provided a lot of economic rent to the society I get it But this is what you doing I mean come on wake up man because let me tell you something Trump is on the way out Yeah. I know people who worked very closely with him in Amazon in the early years and don't understand what's happened to him now and just say he's a different person. He's taken a different turn. A different kind of compass is guiding him. Okay. But listen, this is where I think this ties in. And I think you're right that there's a lot of jumping the shark going on and people going too far in one direction and actually losing their base. And it was very interesting. Ross Douthat at the New York Times did an interesting essay this week basically saying Donald Trump is losing America, that the White House has gone so far that they've got out of touch with the American population. I think you don't see that anywhere more clearly than on these new poll numbers that have come out on Minneapolis and ICE where here, let me just run through a couple of them. This is a poll by Quinnipiac that was taken over the course of this weekend. 51% of Americans now say that Donald Trump's immigration policies are making them feel less safe. Remember, the whole premise of this was to make America safe. You safeguard the border, you make Americans feel safe. Okay, 51% say they feel less safe because of Donald Trump's immigration policies. 63% of Americans disapprove of ISIS tactics. And only 22% of Americans say that the killing of Alex Pretti was justified. If we think that MAGA is at about 25 to 30%, that means that even some MAGA people don't think that the killing of Alex Pretti was justified. I think, here's what I think, going to hear me out here, Anthony, I want to get your take on this, because I know you're hot on gerrymandering. But I think this is a prime example of the way, and we've spoken about gerrymandering in the podcast before, this is a prime example of the way that gerrymandering is failing American democracy. Because you've got all of these members of Congress who are in now gerrymandered conservative seats. And what do they do? They go back home, they're in a feedback loop with their conservative districts and their conservative voters and they're listening to MAGA media and they're hearing MAGA arguments and they think that everything is going well and what they're not hearing because they don't have those people in their districts because they've designed their districts specifically this way they don't have centrist swing voters in their districts who are telling them guys you're going too far And so they go too far, as they have done, and they've got out of step with the American population. They do it on things like gun control. They've done it on things like abortion rights. But here, right now in front of our eyes, the administration is losing the population on the one thing that it was elected to do, which was securing the border, because they're going too far. because actually Americans don't like the scenes of an American citizen with autism this week being dragged from her car as she's on her way to a medical appointment because she has a brain tumor and they're dragging her and cuffing her and she's saying to them, I have a brain tumor, I'm disabled, I'm on the way to the hospital. And what are they doing? They're throwing her against her car and putting cuffs on her. So all the talk about we're going softly, softly on the ground, it's still happening. And Americans are seeing that and they don't like it. And I think it's the leadership getting out of step. And part of this, I think, is because of this gerrymandered situation that you've got members of Congress who are just living in a different world from where the center of the American population is. And I think it's going to come back and hurt them. And this poll is, if this poll is not a wake up call to the White House on that, you can't just say you want to change the optics of what's happening in Minneapolis. You actually have to change the tactics then i don't know what is 51 of americans say that trump's immigration policies are making them feel less safe so what do you think do you think that so there's something there yeah once again i think your analysis is correct but i think that the the thing that i'm seeing and again i could be wrong but i know trump pretty well is that he's panicked he's not gonna tell you he's panicked but he's panicked he's he's looking at the situation and he's saying i'm only going to go into the states that asked me now he's pulling back they pulled 700 ice agents out of they still have 2000 there in a small city but anyway yeah they do but they're dialing back the violence and they're dialing back the abductions okay and so yes i mean they do have that but the temperature is going way down caddy because it is so wildly unpopular and but i don't know but i don't know I mean, let's see. We're recording this on Thursday. There have been several instances this week of that kind of violence against American citizens like this woman who testified. I don't know that the temperature is yet going down. I think it's going to come down. I think it has to come down, but it didn't come down automatically over the course of the weekend. I accept that, but they've signaled this coming down and he's trying to get the heat off himself by disclaiming things because he knows he's in trouble. Mike Lawler, who you know, and I've seen you interview Mike Lawler, got destroyed over the weekend. I saw that. I texted him, actually. He didn't text me back, which he usually does. No, he got destroyed. Okay, he's a MAGA guy, Rockland County, blue collar area. Actually, my wife Deirdre is from that area, Rockland County. uh and uh and he went up there and they were destroying and you had veterans that were up there screaming at him and he asked the cops to remove the veterans and then the other people were chanting let them stay this is our first amendment right to tell you that your mega policies are in basilica so he stepped down on the polls you know you have a 95 percent incumbent election rate this is again the thing i hate about the gerrymandering because these guys He's going to compete anymore. But he's under in the polls now. He's got it. They got a shot to take that back, the Democrats. Yeah, which actually would be a shame because it then makes Congress even more divided. I mean, you actually need people like Mike Lawler, who are a centrist Republican, who, you know, is in Congress. But I think you're going to you're going to lose more of those. I do believe that he's actually an interesting swing voter. And he's actually someone that has worked with the Democrats in the past. So I do agree with that. But the problem remains the fear of Trump. And I know we're going to get into Epstein in the second half, but I just want to explain to people that the people are pissed. The American people, as mad as you are, if you're listening from the UK at Starmer and Mandelson, trust me, the average person on the street is pissed because I live in the area where the people voted for Trump and they're all mad at Trump. And Trump is not stupid, Katty. No, he sees that. He had a pro wrestling crowd in Las Vegas. This is not like a bunch of hippie dippies. This is not a big Hispanic audience. This is a pro wrestling crowd in Las Vegas with people in the crowd chanting, fuck. Am I allowed to say, yes, I am, this podcast. Fuck ice. It's really worth watching the clip. This is a traditionally more MAGA friendly crowd. And they're pissed too. You're right. Abolish ice on their t-shirts. Once again, Katty K cursing on the rest of the world. politics us and anthony scaramucci no cursing the virtuous anthony scaramucci it's okay you can go to church on sunday i had the under on that when the podcast started no i had the under on that when the podcast started but what can i say what can i am winning this i just want everybody to know that i'm winning this okay so but i mean it's pretty remarkable right you've got a pro wrestling crowd anti-ice i'm gonna be trump's pollster for a second okay because i know this is what they're saying to him, your aggregate numbers are negative. Okay. Your approval rating was low to the mid forties, but your disapproval rating is at 61%. You still have strong support among the Republicans, but guess what? The registration of Republicans is shrinking. Okay. It's down to 26%. percent. Okay. So if you've got 91% of the Republicans, that's great, but it's roughly 22% of the population. Your policies like immigration, enforcement, tariffs, and foreign affairs are drawing more criticism than support. Okay. And the independent voters are losing confidence in you. So he's sitting there pretending la-di-da, everything is fine. I don't know if you saw that NBC interview the other night with the new NBC anchor. Bizarre. But I mean, he looked out of it. I think one of his quotes was, what we do with water. As a response to what's happening in ice in Minneapolis. Yeah, it was weird. Worth watching, guys. Right. He goes, well, look at what we do with water. And it was like, what do you mean, what do we do with water? And he goes, oh, well, we bombing the water. I mean, I guess he was trying to get the heat off of ice. And because it is popular the drug interdiction is popular yeah and so trump was getting hit because i know how trump thinks he's getting hit with the thing that people don't like and so he's trying to come up with the thing that they do like and he says look at what we do with water i mean come on the guy is fading caddy okay if you're on this podcast listening and you're saying oh trump is gonna take over he's gonna be a dictator he's gonna run the u.s not gonna happen take a listen of ross Stout that was saying this week. I think it is that thing that you said at the beginning of jumping the shark. They came in. Stephen Miller and Donald Trump felt they had a massive mandate to do these things that the American population is not happy with, that they see as cruel. And all they needed to do is look at Newton's law of politics and realize that nothing is there forever. I think they felt they had a permanent majority. 2004, what did Karl Rove say? There's going to be a permanent Republican majority. Two years later, Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat, is Speaker of the House. 2008, Barack Obama gets elected, expands government. 2010, he gets shellacked by the Tea Party in an anti-government expansion midterm elections. It is swings and roundabouts. And I think they came in and they thought it was going to be different. And they came in, they went too far on the right. And now the public is saying, we don't like it. As Churchill would say, it's not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. Mm-hmm . And this guy's going down, and we'll have to watch how this unfolds, but if he doesn't make a major political course correction going into the midterms it going to be a very nasty situation for him Yeah And this is why guys like Gabe Sherman and others oh he going to call off the midterms because looking down the barrel of the midterms is a Democratic house and lots of investigations. We're going to talk about that in the second half. One other thing I would advise you to look at is just watch the little clip of J.D. Vance being interviewed by the Daily Mail, being asked about Alex Pretty. Did you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Pretty? For what? for, you know, labeling him in a session with ill intent. Well, again, I just described to you what I said about Alex Petty, which is that he's a guy who showed up with ill intent to an ICE protest. I think if J.D. Vance can't find another tone and present himself differently and seem a little less condescending when he's asked a question about somebody who has killed that only 22% of Americans think should be killed, then he's going to struggle in the 2028 election campaign. So just worth watching that clip. OK, we'll be right back and we will talk about the 2020 elections and why Donald Trump is suddenly talking about 2020 quite so much again. And also about Epstein and the fallout, not just in the UK, of course, but here as well and what it means. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. Now it's Mother's Day coming up. And Aura Frames is what I call a genuine upgrade from the predictable gift. Yeah, especially for all of those family moments, right, Anthony? Exactly. My mom in Long Island loves seeing family photos. We put several Aura Frames in her home. I can preload it before it ships so it arrives already full. And keep adding new photos at any time, Caddy. So it's got free unlimited storage. Yes, and it comes in a premium gift box. Perfect gift without the last minute padding. Aura Frames. It really is the most thoughtful gift you can give somebody, particularly your mother. For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.co.uk to get 35 pounds off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames. Name the top frame by The Independent by using promo code POLITICSUS at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames dot co dot U-K promo code politics U-S. This deal is exclusive to listeners, so order yours now to get it in time for Mother's Day. Don't forget to add politics U-S at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to The Rest is Politics U-S. Donald Trump has been talking about the 2020 elections an awful lot in the last month. I've noticed Anthony he was less vociferous about it last year but just in the last two or three weeks I tried to do a kind of search on this just to see how many times and I'm getting anywhere between the range of 30 and 50 where he's talking about elections being rigged and I think what's interesting about this pickup in the number of times that he talked about the elections being rigged I spoke to your friend Chris Christie the former governor of New Jersey yesterday morning And he pointed something out, which is that in early 2020, when Donald Trump could see that the 2020 election was getting away from him, he started saying deliberately that the election was going to be rigged in order to sow confusion and to undermine people's confidence in the election. And ultimately, if he lost the election to be able to say, you see, I always said it was going to be rigged. And Chris Christie was pointing out that the pickup in the number of times that Donald Trump is talking about the election being rigged this time around is that he thinks he might be losing the 2026 midterm elections. And he wants to sow the same kind of feeling that it's been rigged. And what he's specifically saying and has said on Don Bongino's podcast is that state officials should take over and nationalize elections in 15 different states where he says there is corruption in order to protect the process and to protect the Republican Party. Of course, the American Constitution says that the elections are run by the states. They are not run by the federal government. And so this would be anti-constitutional. and you even got leader John Soon, who's the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, coming out and saying, no, these have to be run by states. They can't be nationalized. But I think this is Trump doing the same thing. This is Trump saying that he's worried effectively about the midterm elections, causing, sowing the same kind of confusion about the elections in order to be able to claim that the elections were rigged and potentially try to do something to stop the elections being held in a way that would be free and fair. um what do you think he's doing well he's got the kgb playbook is what he's doing i mean let's go over the kgb playbook so seeds of doubt in the western alliance attack nato suggest that you're going to invade a nato nation uh so seeds of doubt about elections this is something that the kgb has wanted to do in the uk and france and other democratic countries uh dump tremendous amounts of personality profiles into the united states's social media from your internet server farms outside of moscow to try to get people to hate each other uh see if you can play off of the algorithm to create rage uh mr trump is doing all of that and so uh this fits his narrative if governor christie would have also told you that trump was planning broad-based national protests uh the evening of the election he had people in place money spent ready to go to have a national protest movement all over the country about how he lost the election to kamala harris and it was rigged and so let's go over the math because the math is the most important part of this what he's doing is working caddy uh and so 37 percent of the american people right now as surveyed believe that these elections are rigged uh 43 percent of the americans express serious doubts about whether recent elections are honest and open to all voters and so he has done a number on us uh and that wasn't the polling numbers it was less than 15 during the obama era so let me get vlad on the phone vlad my brother how am i doing am i helping am i helping you guys out, yes, I know you're a tiny country with a dilapidated military, but you own me. So how am I doing? Have I been successful at trying to destroy the fabric of the American democracy, which is based on the trust in the system? And what is the answer to that, Katty Kay? How's he doing? Yeah, he has been. And I think it's the way he does it, because American elections are actually quite complicated, much more complicated than they are in other countries. And you've got this process of on the day voting, and then you've got the mail-in ballots, which are counted afterwards. He, and this is what Russia has actually done before too, we know this from the interference in the 2016 election, it actually allows for doubt to be sown. So you then have somebody like Mike Johnson, who knows better, honestly, the Speaker of the House, who stood up this week and said, yes, I am very worried about fraud in our elections. Just look at the 2024 congressional elections. Three Republicans were ahead on election day. And then as the late counting came in, their leads were whittled away and we lost those three Republican seats. A couple of them were in California. And then he says, it just looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No. Well, the reason he can't prove that is because actually the reason those members of Congress lost is that on the day, it looked like they were ahead. But after the polls have closed in a state like California, that's when you start counting the mail-in ballots and the mail-in ballots broke against them. And then those Republican members of Congress lost. And they know that's what's happening. They know the system is working as this complicated American system is designed to work. But because it allows them to exploit the complications in the system to so doubt and confusion. And Mike Johnson standing, I'm saying, can I prove that it was fraudulent? No. But going on television and basically saying he thinks it's fraudulent, isn't that malpractice on his part? Is he just kowtowing to Trump as well? Mike Johnson is a lowlife. Even the congressional members of the Republican side that I talked to say that he's a lowlife, okay? And he's just basically an ass kisser for Donald Trump. I thought he was an upstanding, God-fearing, respectable politician who lives by the Bible, he says, Anthony. He lives by the Bible. Yes. Yes. There you go. So, Katty Kay, if you read John le Carré and you talk about the KGB, the KGB has something that they call active measures. What are active measures? They are protocol and policies that they're trying to put in place in the West to instill doubt. And here are the four major tenets of active measures. Ready? Erode trust in institutions, deepen polarization, convince citizens that truth is unknowable, and last but not least, And this is the big one. Create everybody lies cynicism so that you see your democracy is no better than our system. You're being handled by elites just like, quote unquote, us here in Russia. And this is working. Division over unity, doubt over confidence, anger over trust. and Donald Trump is doing a masterful job of this. And so he's either with these guys or let's use another word that the KGB would use. He's either with these guys and we'll talk about Epstein in a second or he's a useful idiot of these guys. Okay, so it's one or the other. And for me, I'm very upset about this because the average person on the street is already economically disadvantaged and who once felt economic aspiration in the country feels economic desperation. And now a very large group of them feel that the elections are rigged. Do you think it works as well this time around as it did in 2020? Or are enough people wise to what he doing that actually they will push back against him It interesting to hear John Thune saying OK guys we not going to nationalize the elections and in a rare moment standing up against Trump. Do you think we're actually going to have people push back against this idea that the elections were stolen in 2020 and could plausibly be stolen in 2026? I feel like it's an old story, and I feel like it's a sign of Donald Trump's desperation and fear that the Republicans are going to lose, which would mean he would get investigated. He could even get hauled before Congress, like the Clintons are going to do because of the Epstein files. And I feel like it's a playbook that people are more weary of and wary of than they were in 2020. I think it's an outstanding point. And to buttress your point and provide more evidence, the Department of Justice, and again, prior to Trump's Department of Justice, did push back. uh state courts and local election officials did push back they rejected these fraud claims okay they didn't do it in the charismatic donald trump way but they did do it in a procedural way uh republicans like cheney romney larry hogan they've all pushed back but there's no republican figure that's matched trump's emotional or media power okay that's the problem and so thune is saying something that I like, but I don't know. Thune, a little bit like Mitt Romney, right? These guys are good looking tall guys, but they're like Ken dolls, Kat. You know what a Ken doll's like? Flat in front, Kat. Okay. When you pull the pants down on a Ken doll, you got nothing there. I'm just letting you know what these guys are like. Poor John Thune. Poor John Thune. Yeah. I find it astonishing that you could be a good looking guy, Senate majority leader, big tall guy, and be a buffoon for Donald Trump. And look, all of these people must be thinking there is going to be a future to this party that does not have Donald Trump at its leadership. And at some point, they're going to have to decide which side are they on. Are they going to be on the J.D. Vance side where right up until the end, they're going to echo the MAGA talking points thinking that is going to be enough to get them the nomination for the presidency or even the presidency itself, knowing full well they are not Donald Trump. And it is Donald Trump who's sui generis, Donald Trump who has this control of the base and that actually the MAGA base is never going to embrace J.D. Vance even the way that they embrace Donald Trump. And for somebody like John Thune, I would have thought they could start seeing that this is a time-limited proposition and they need to be able to stand up in a different way if they're going to have a future in politics at highest levels. But that's just my thinking. I agree with you and I would say to you that the damage is real, but I don't think it's irreparable yet. But the most significant damage to me is the psychological damage where I can look you straight in the face and go through the polling averages and tell you one in three Americans now doubt election legitimacy. Okay. So that is at a historic high. And we would have to then get leadership in place to say, here are the decentralized protocols that we're using. Here is the, you know, maybe we use the blockchain, other types of technological protocols to prove to people that the stuff is irrefutably legitimate. But then again, which of our politicians and the current crop of politicians is going to want to do that? But I'm, I'm worried about it. But the good news for America is Trump is not going to be able to nationalize these elections. But he has sowed the seeds of doubt. Okay, so talking of Russia and Russia's influence in the United States. I think that brings us to Jeffrey Epstein and all of the latest on the investigations into whether Epstein was actually working on behalf of Russian intelligence. And I know that you've got thoughts about that, Anthony. Well, listen, I'm not going to say on this program with 100% certainty that Jeff Epstein was a Russian spy. I'm not going to say that. The prime minister of Poland is looking into it. Uh, there is a fire brewing somewhere and there's smoke now in the house. And now the question is, where is the fire? Is the fire in Russia or another part of the world? I'm not exactly sure, but I just want to say these five or six things before we leave this program. Number one, okay. This operation does look like classic Russian Compromat tradecraft. 100%. And we did know this, that the Russians, even as early as the 80s into the 90s, were targeting business leaders and influential people, anchor people, journalists, et cetera, in the West to see if they could turn them and compromise them. Number two, sexual entrapment, documentation of it, prevailing secrecy and the potential exposure of that secrecy is a very interesting way to manipulate politicians, financiers, academics, and believe it or not, even once royalty. So for me, it fits the narrative. Again, I'm not saying it doesn't prove Russian control, Caddy, but the structure of the operation mirrors a Russian intelligence methodology more than a criminal trafficking ring, drug trafficking or otherwise. So no one has yet to convince me or explain to me that this is not a Russian intelligence operation. So anyway, I want to leave you with that thought and get you to react to that. So I had a couple of conversations back and forth last night before the program with very senior people in the intelligence world in the US and in the UK. And the feeling I got was that they don't take seriously what Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who was implicated in the Steele dossier, is saying that this was Jeffrey Epstein feeding Compromat to the Russians. They don't feel that steel is reliable, but they are interested that the prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, is launching an investigation. This is what he says. More and more leads, more and more information and more and more commentary in the global press all relate to the suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-organized by Russian intelligence services. And the people that I have spoken to are interested in what Tusk is saying. Now, some of them have put a caveat, which is that Tusk has his own domestic reasons for going after the Russians and for going after the hard right in his own country. So he could be saying this without hard evidence. He could be launching this investigation. It doesn't mean that he has the hard evidence. But I think the feeling is that Epstein would have come to the attention of the Russians who were regular business clients of some of Epstein's friends. They would have wanted to get hold of compromising material on senior politicians and business figures, exactly like you say. But just as you are saying, there is not the evidence as far as I have been able to find out that Jeffrey Epstein was an actual spy for the Russians. He may have been what's called, you know, agent light or agent adjacent, where some of the information he got was fed back to Moscow through various routes or just through the friends that he hung out with. And that that way they had some kind of compromise on people because Epstein had gathered it and he passed it on to people. And if he was in with the Russians, would the FBI have known about it and therefore warned off some of these powerful people? That was another question. Gordon Carrera, our colleague on The Rest is Classified, texted me that he was raising that question. So I think there are a ton of questions here. I think it's really interesting that Tusk has felt that he wants to open this investigation. Some of that may be for domestic reasons, but it could also be that he thinks that this really genuinely was a co-conspiracy co-organized by Epstein and the Russians, which would have massive implications, of course, if that were ever proven. Last question. Trump has been effectively insulated by his Department of Justice, and they have said publicly that there's going to be no crimes no one's going to be charged anything etc etc but in the uk it seems very different and what are your thoughts about the way the culture in the uk is handling this and the culture in the united states look i think it's what you suggested and i thought it was such a good way of putting it on the podcast earlier this week that there seems to be a culture here where rich and powerful people are protected and ordinary people are victims and there's an enormous amount of anger about what we said on the podcast earlier which is that the names of the victims were not redacted and their faces were not redacted but in the uk this has clearly put keir starmer in an awful lot of difficulty over the appointment of the former british ambassador here and has put the royal family in an awful lot of difficulty but there is more willingness to go after epstein's associates in the uk than there seems to be here All right. Good stuff. I mean, I'm with you. Okay, that's all we have time for. We'll be back next week, of course, with more because the news never seems to stop coming. Do, of course, send us your questions. We love answering those. If you have not become a founding member, please do join us. You'll get early access to live shows. We've got some exciting announcements coming up about those, especially here in the US. And you will get our bonus episodes. We've got a great new series that is coming up. I'm not going to tell you more, but that's The Cliffhanger, a great new series that is coming up soon about somebody that you might be interested in. So join us at TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com. Thanks, everybody, for listening. See you next week, guys. Thank you. hosts of The Rest is Classified. And in our latest series, we're going deep inside the 2016 election to reveal the true story of whether the Russians helped Donald Trump take the White House. This is the unbelievable story of how Russian spies first hacked and then leaked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, how Julian Assange got involved with Putin's spies, and how 2016 marked the point that the world changed forever. Get the full insider scoop by listening to The Rest is Classified, wherever you get your podcasts.