How the Epstein Conspiracy Theory Took Over Politics

The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt for the latest installment of “How Bad Is It?,” a monthly series on the health of American democracy. Their guest is Roy Wood, Jr., the host of the satirical program “Have I Got News for You,” on CNN. The group discusses the significance of CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” a recent episode of “South Park” that is searingly critical of Donald Trump, and the President’s deployment of lawsuits and the administrative state to try to intimidate his critics in the media and entertainment industries. “There's always going to be these petty, ticky-tack battles that the Administration fights,” says Wood. “But I don't think that's gonna stop the comedians from doing what Trump hopes this would do, which is silence them.”This week’s reading: “‘South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President,’ by Tyler Foggatt “What the Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Means,” by Vinson Cunningham “How the Israeli Right Explains the Aid Disaster It Created,” by Isaac Chotiner “Should Police Officers Be More Like U.F.C. Fighters?,” by Sam Eagan “Is Brazil’s Underdog Era Coming to an End?,” by Shannon Sims Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected]. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The city of Los Angeles has declared itself a sanctuary city, where local authorities do not share information with federal immigration enforcement. But L.A.—where nearly forty per cent of residents are foreign-born—became ground zero for controversial arrests and deportations by ICE. The Trump Administration deployed marines and the National Guard to the city, purportedly to quell protests against the operation, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, spoke of the government’s intention to “liberate” Los Angeles from its elected officials. This week, David Remnick talks with the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, a former congressional representative, about the recent withdrawal of some troops, and a lawsuit the city has joined arguing that the Trump Administration’s immigration raids and detentions are unconstitutional. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against the government.)  “I’ve described L.A. as a petri dish,” Bass says. The Administration “wanted to . . . show that they could come in and do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and however they wanted. They were putting every other city in America on notice: ‘mess with us will come for you.’ ” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable’s Evan Osnos interviews Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, about the publication’s scoop-filled coverage of DOGE, and what Elon Musk’s experience in Washington taught Silicon Valley leaders. “They know that they can operate with relative impunity, and they are now lining themselves up next to a President who will allow that to continue to happen,” Drummond says. Plus, a discussion of how artificial intelligence will shape our society and democracy, and transform the workforce in the years to come.This week’s reading: “Trump Redefines the Washington Scandal,” by Susan B. Glasser “Donald Trump’s Tariff DealmMaker-In-Chief” by Antonia Hitchens “Are the Democrats Getting Better at the Internet?,” by Jon Allsop To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The New Yorker contributor Jon Allsop joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how President Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files has fractured his base, and how the Democratic Party has increasingly weaponized the Epstein conspiracy theory in its attempt to combat the MAGA movement. How do we proceed given that our country’s politics are increasingly defined by conspiratorial thinking?This week’s reading: “Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Three Conspiracy-Theory Theories,” by Jon Allsop “Behind Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein Problem,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “What the Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Means,” by Vinson Cunningham “Coldplaygate Is a Reminder That There’s No Escaping Going Viral,” by Kyle Chayka “In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods?,” by John Seabrook To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected]. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after the financier was convicted for hiring an underage prostitute, for which he served a brief and extraordinarily lenient sentence, Epstein remained a playboy, a top political donor, and a very good friend of the very powerful—“a sybarite,” in the words of the journalist Michael Wolff, “in that old -fashioned sense [that] ‘my identity comes from breaking all norms.’ ”  Wolff got to know Epstein and recorded, he estimates, a hundred hours of interviews with him. After Epstein was arrested again, in 2019, and was later found dead in his jail cell in what was ruled a suicide, it has been an article of faith within MAGA that his death was a conspiracy or a coverup, and the Trump campaign promised a reveal. Attorney General Pam Bondi initially asserted that she had Epstein’s so-called “client list” on her desk and was reviewing it, but now claims that there is nothing to share. Do the Epstein files have something incriminating about the President?  “The central point from which this grew is the [Bill] Clinton relationship with Epstein,” Wolff tells David Remnick. But the MAGA believers “seem to have overlooked the Trump relationship [with Epstein], which was deeper and longer.”  The men were “probably the closest friend either of them ever had,” until they reportedly fell out over real estate in 2004. Now Trump is frantically trying to control the narrative, pretending that he barely knew Epstein. This, Wolff thinks, “may be the beginning of Donald Trump’s lame-duck years.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable’s Jane Mayer interviews Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, a co-host of the “Strict Scrutiny” podcast, and the author of “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.” Litman analyzes the wave of victories that the Court has given President Trump’s second Administration—on both its regular docket and its so-called shadow docket—and how outside influence seeps into the Court’s decision-making. Plus, how to parse the dissenting Justices’ language to understand what is happening behind closed doors at the Court.This week’s reading: “Trump Has a Bad Case of Biden on the Brain,” by Susan B. Glasser “Can Trump Deport People to Any Country That Will Take Them?,” by Isaac Chotiner “Sick Children Will Be Among the Victims of Trump’s Big Bill,” by Rachel Pearson “Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Three Conspiracy-Theory Theories,” by Jon Allsop  To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In conservative economics, cuts to social services are often seen as necessary to shrink the expanding deficit. Donald Trump’s budget bill is something altogether different: it cuts Medicaid while slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, adding $6 trillion to the national debt, according to the Cato Institute. Janet Yellen, a former Treasury Secretary and former chair of the Federal Reserve, sees severe impacts in store for average Americans: “What this is going to do is to raise interest rates even more. And so housing will become less affordable, car loans less affordable,” she tells David Remnick. “This bill also contains changes that raise the burdens of anyone who has already taken on student debt. And with higher interest rates, further education—college [and] professional school—becomes less affordable. It may also curtail investment spending, which has a negative impact on growth.” This, she believes, is why the President is desperate to lower interest rates; he has spoken of firing his appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he has called a “numbskull” and a “stupid person,” and installing a more compliant chair. But lowering interest rates to further political goals, Yellen says, “are the words one expects from the head of a banana republic that is about to start printing money to fund fiscal deficits. … And then you get very high inflation or hyperinflation.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable’s Susan B. Glasser interviews the Russia expert Fiona Hill about Vladimir Putin’s long reign and Trump’s dismantling of American institutions. Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, previously served in the National Security Council and National Intelligence Council. She gained national attention as a star witness during the first impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, in 2019. Additionally, Hill, who is also a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, talks with Glasser about the Trump Administration’s war on academic institutions.This week’s reading: “Did Trump Really Just Break Up with Putin?” by Susan B. Glasser “Why a Devoted Justice Department Lawyer Became a Whistle-Blower,” by Ruth Marcus “Sheldon Whitehouse’s Three-Hundredth Climate Warning,” by Elizabeth Kolbert “The Supreme Court Sides with Trump Against the Judiciary,” by Ruth Marcus Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the damage that President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will cause in rural America. Beshear paints a picture of how Democrats can win back voters without compromising on issues such as abortion or trans rights, what the party can learn from Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary, and the importance of communicating with the public using everyday language. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics” by Kyle Chayka “The Texas Floods and the Lives Lost at Camp Mystic,” by Jessica Winter “Is There Still Time to Be Hopeful About the Climate?,” by Daniel A. Gross “The War on Gaza’s Children,” by Isaac Chotiner “4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment,” by Bill McKibben To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected]. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The New Yorker staff writer Rivka Galchen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a class at the University of Chicago with a tantalizingly dark title: Are We Doomed? It’s in the interdisciplinary field of existential risk, which studies the threats posed by climate change, nuclear warfare, and artificial intelligence. Galchen, who spent a semester observing the course and its students, considers how to contend with this bleak future, and how to understand the young people who may inherit it.This episode originally aired June 5, 2024This week’s reading: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics” by Kyle Chayka “Do We Need Another Green Revolution?,” by Elizabeth Kolbert “What Therapists Treating Immigrants Hear,” by Geraldo Cadava Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices