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There was so much hand-wringing over approaching it during the Biden years, and they got so much flack for it. And there was a question of when is somebody going to really tackle Donald Trump's slowing down? You can see it. He is different than he was.
He doesn't have the same amount of energy. He's not as coherent as he used to be. He's always been not entirely coherent. But it's different now.
He's slower. His speech is slower. You can see him falling asleep sometimes, or appearing to fall asleep in the Oval Office. I'm John Nichols.
This is the Daily Beast podcast. And today we have the host of Katie Turr reports. Katie Turr, you will remember, really made her name during the first Trump election. She was assigned to cover him.
The assumption was that he was a joke of a candidate. And of course he became president not once, but twice. And Katie Turr has reported doggedly throughout the 10 years that Donald Trump has been dominating our political cycles. So let's not waste any more time.
Let's get into it. Katie Turr, welcome to the Daily Beast podcast, Julia. I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe I'm here.
I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe I'm here. And I want you to come back regularly. I'm with that too.
So listen, you've been covering Donald Trump since he descended his Golden Staircase in Trump Tower. Since he was a joke. Since he was a joke. And now, of course, he's still a joke, but in a different way.
He's the president of the United States. He's the president of the United States. So what difference do you notice now between his current term and when he first started? He's much more, I mean, Donald Trump has always been very much himself, but he really is himself now in a way that feels pure.
And I think that's partially age. I think when you get older, you just become much more yourself. You don't care any longer and you're less willing to suffer the niceties of the world. So that's part of it.
But also he's surrounded himself now with people who say yes to everything he wants to do. People who compliment and help him with his deepest urges. Whatever he wants to do is right. Whatever he thinks is right.
He is brilliant. He's like AI chatbot. He's like chat GPT. He's surrounded himself with people who are chat GPT.
You type in chat GPT. His caties are wonderful and chat GPT will tell you caties are the most wonderful person who has ever existed. And here are all the reasons why. That's what he has surrounding him now.
So he's a bit like a sort of fable in a way. He's sort of Mira Mira on the wall. He's the fairest of the wall. I think that's a very good description.
And everybody is around him. So let's talk. I mean in his first term when you were following him he would frequently single you out. You wrote a fantastic book about this.
Unbelievable. Where it was a memoir of you're covering him for what? 515 days. I was in 10 days.
I was 5 days off. That's not it. Every once in a while I pick it up and I just flipped a random page. It's a good book.
It's a really good book about a moment in time. It does not. Still to the state feel real. And yet here we are 10 years later.
So here we are 10 years later. He used to pick on you and call you Little Katie. He's picked on a different Katie, Katie Rogers of the New York Times. It's written or co-written.
A long piece about his flagging energy I think. And his work. And the White House is what they've called it. The New York Times has delved into this.
There was so much hand-wringing over approaching it during the Biden years. And they got so much flack for it. And there was a question of when is somebody going to really tackle Donald Trump's slowing down? You can see it.
You can see it during the campaign even. He was talking to Maggie here from about this. He is different than he was. He doesn't have the same amount of energy.
He's not as coherent as he used to be. He's always been not entirely coherent. But it's different now. He's slower.
His speech is slower. You can see him falling asleep sometimes or appearing to fall asleep in the Oval Office. Or I think it was a national prayer breakfast. Well, he was kind of an...
When Dr. Oz was in the office and the poor man who had come to talk about GLP, he was reducing in price, collapsed. And literally his legs were up in the air and Donald Trump was sort of standing there in a day. But earlier in that press conference he was late.
There was that but then earlier in the year during the beginning of the administration when he was at the National Cathedral in DC, I forgot what the event was for. But I believe the priest, it wasn't the National Prayer Breakfast. The priest was admonishing the administration for its treatment of immigrants. Anyway, during that sermon he appeared to be falling asleep there too.
He's different. I mean, he's what? He's 79 years old. He's about to be 80.
Anybody at that age is going to start slowing down. So were you surprised that the Times suggested that his day now starts the midday? That it's basically working out as a mid-day to five? No.
I mean, in the first administration he pushed it back to ten. Or even sometimes even later in the afternoon he had executive time. That became a big point of jokes. What's he doing during his executive time?
He's watching television. He's probably watching you. No, he's watching all the networks. He has them all on his dining room or in the residence.
Remember when Fox and Friends could tell he was watching because there was one light on in the White House? They would monitor one window and that window with a light on. They would call him out and say, Donald, I know you're watching. How funny I did.
I remember him calling in. Yeah, but he would be up at those hours calling in. We're not saying that quite as much. I think part of it is, yes, he is slowing down.
Yes, there are questions about his cognitive ability. Sometimes he slurs his words. Sometimes his speeches make even less sense than they used to. There's a lot of chatter and gossip online over some physical things like the dragging of the leg, the bruise on his hand, the swelling of his ankles.
I don't know what any of those things add up to. But he is 79. Right. And also if you saw them in a relative, you would be concerned.
Is that anything going on? Right. What's up with your hand? Why is that a bruise?
He claims that the bruise is ought to do with the fact that she shakes hands so much. He's not aspirin. I'm an aspirin every day. I've got an aspirin every day.
Why are you an aspirin every day? I've got a family history of heart disease. So I'm an aspirin every day. Would you like to know more about that?
I'm curious. Should we all be an aspirin every day? But so there is some validity to that. I can't tell you how it adds up with.
I'm not a doctor, but I can't tell you how it adds up with the swelling of the ankles or the dragging of the leg or the falling asleep in the Oval Office. But you know, it's a new thing for us to have presidents who are this old. We have Biden and now we have Trump. Biden was a few years older.
He really started to decline in the last few years. He was starting to decline. So what happens with Donald Trump? Is this just the beginning of a precipitous slope down in terms of his health?
I don't know. But he's 79. It's Trump, the new Biden. We're going to have to see.
Shane Gillis, the comedian who does truly brilliant Trump impression, was saying on one of the Bro podcast, that's the best way I can describe them, that I think he used the term Trump has Biden brains or he's getting close to Biden brains. He's got Biden brains. So I mean, the narrative is bubbling. Well, and also because he's so visible, we can see it all the time.
I mean Biden didn't do as many precipvon princes. No. Donald Trump loves the precipvon friends. He loves the central attention.
But the trouble is all our attention is on him. So we are watching this, you know, micromo, by micromo. I mean, when he doesn't appear on camera for a day or two days or three days, everybody starts to freak out and wonder if he's died. Yeah.
I remember that earlier this year. And he came out and said I haven't died. I mean, I think not to get on the bandwagon and to push back a little bit, he is doing much more than certainly Joe Biden did. He is out there in a way that past presidents haven't even been out there.
He does give access. He's constantly on television. So I mean, he might be slowing down for him and slowing down because he's getting up there in age, but he is still very much mobile. I mean, he's doing overseas travel.
He's coming back. He's handing out Halloween candy. Sometimes these trips are one day. I mean, he is very much still engaged.
He's not doing the same amount of travel that he used to. I mean, the domestic travel has certainly declined. He's not doing those rallies. He's not standing in front of a crowd for an hour, two hours, three hours in Grand Rapids, Michigan any longer.
And I think that's telling. But there is, this has got to be relative to him and not necessarily relative to Joe Biden. I went to the Christmas party during the Biden years and he came out at like eight o'clock and he gave a speech to the assembled room of journalists and you could not understand what he was saying. Right.
And do you think that journalists have learned from that moment and are now going to be less afraid of actually covering things that are sort of evident in plain sight? I think so. I think it is still tricky to wait into because, again, we're not doctors and it's really difficult to diagnose somebody from afar and you want to be careful with that. But I do think that there is, we have a job to acknowledge the reality in front of us and when somebody is behaving different or slowing down or doesn't make sense or is hiding information.
And we talked about his MRI and we've given you all the information about his MRI, he says, but doesn't give you actually any information about the MRI. I think it's a reporter's duty. I mean, it's part of the job to point out, hey, you got MRI, we don't know why. Right.
Right. And it's the second time you've been to Walter Reed this year. I think. Yeah, exactly.
So you've been very, he was very cagey about his COVID diagnosis as well during the first administration. Right. And how sick he was. And the needing of the monoclonal antibodies.
So he's gone after Katie Rogers who wrote the piece, said she's ugly inside and out. He called you little Katie. He called a Bloomberg reporter recently, Piggy, quiet Piggy. First of all, I was quite surprised that nobody in the, I think it was on the airplane that he called the reporter Piggy.
I was quite surprised that none of the male correspondents, or perhaps they didn't, I didn't hear it, just say, hey, Mr. President, that's not okay. What does it feel like when you are the butt of that angry presidential attention? Oh my God, it feels like a wave is crashing on you.
You try to ignore it. I certainly, it became so routine during the campaign for me for him to call me out that you just, you keep going about your job. You stand up, you smile, you give your report. I would wave to the crowd because I think if you show any weakness or you show your offended, it's so much worse.
So you have to have security to get you to your car off to, he began picking on you. Yeah, the Secret Service walked me to my car after one of the events where I got really ugly, which I think is insane. And then we had security full time with us wherever we went. That was a completely new thing.
And at the time it was a very big deal. What kind of country are we living in where reporters need armed security to go out and do their jobs? This isn't, people would say this isn't Russia, this isn't some third world country, this is the United States of America, and it shouldn't, you shouldn't have your life threatened when you're doing the basic job of journalism. And Donald Trump was sure that that new era in.
And it was scary. And there were a lot of people saying this was not okay, we can't live like this, we can't accept this. But then he was elected president. So all of that now became normalized.
So why don't the guys on the plane or the gals on the plane speak up in defense of the reporter? That's because it's become normalized. And does he do it as much after men as he does after women? I mean, the administration will say he's an equal opportunity, insult her.
And there's, I guess, some truth to that, certainly. He does go after men that he doesn't like. I mean, he went after Jonathan Carr recently in a sort of crowd of reporters. Yeah, of course.
But the way that he talks about their physical attributes for women, I think is different. And what do you think? For not physical attributes, the way that he puts a woman in a physical way. Right.
And what do you think that's about? What is he actually saying there? I think he's saying, you know, you don't matter. Why would you think that you have the authority to question me?
He's diminishing them. Right. And what is the, I mean, you said when he did it to you, just keep on doing your jobs, nothing else you can do. Of course.
What do you think Katie Rogers thought when she saw him sounding off in a fury? Just saying she's an ugly person inside now? I don't know, but I imagine that she thinks that the way everyone does, which is I'm not looking forward to the flood of threats that are now going to be coming my way. And it's not just angry, vitriol online, although that can feel very isolating.
It's the, it's what comes with it now. It's the personal threats to your safety that anytime he singles you out, you have to, or his crowd singles you have to embrace yourself for. And then thinking about what you need to do to make sure that, you know, one crazy person in that crowd doesn't act on, doesn't act on trying to silence you. Right.
So let's talk about another theory which I didn't know about, which is referenced in Katie's piece today, about Trump believing that we are basically human beings like batteries and that we have a finite amount of energy. Can't believe you only just learned about this. I can't believe it. It's like, it's like hearing about a theory from Victorian England.
This is literally what Victorians used to think that we were like batteries. We had a finite amount of energy and this is the reason why he doesn't exercise. He puts a leeches on his body at night and we're here to suck out the bad blood. No, he doesn't.
No, no, I know. But I was going to say that there's probably quite a lot of work for the leeches to do. Can you explain this? You knew all about it when I referenced it to you.
So this is one of the weird theories that Donald Trump has about health. It's, he's been talking about it for a long time. It's part of it was why is the President of the United States not exercising? Obama exercised, Clinton exercised, you saw him talking.
George W. Bush exercised. But why is Donald Trump not exercising? It looks like he needed to exercise or that's what doctors would say.
And his push back to that was I move my arms a lot on stage when he's doing that. Yeah, when he's doing that when he's giving a rally speech is but also I don't need to exercise because exercise is actually bad for you because your body is like a battery and you have only a certain amount of energy in a battery the way you do in your body or your body the way you do in a battery. And when that energy runs out, you're dead. You're gone.
So why expend extra energy running a triathlon or playing physical sports or lifting weights? You're just hastening yourself to the end. Right. Well, he's clearly got very good DNA because he eats McDonald's, he'd steak, he doesn't appear to eat any vegetables.
I know so many my cardiologist says if you eat hamburger more than once a year, you're going to drop dead. I'm looking at the President of the United States. So housing McDonald's. Yeah.
It's remarkable. So this is not a great time for him. You made the point that he's surrounded by yes people, but he's got Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was one of his biggest fans is leaving his polls are bad. Really bad.
Even though he keeps saying they're great. Grace reprises are high despite the fact he keeps saying they're low. And there's clearly a buildup of steam about the health premiums which are going to in some cases double or triple for people. Or quadruple or quintuple in fact.
Geez. Okay. So that's even worse. We highlighted a couple in Oregon, Eugene Oregon yesterday who read $400 a month now.
They were tireies for their health insurance. It's going to go up to $2,400 a month in order for them to pay for their health care. That's unaffordable. Well, it's unaffordable and also it's so foolish politically I would think because this impacts people in every state.
It's not just a blue state. Thank you for saying that. It is so confusing to me. I do not understand the basis by which Republicans do not want to give Americans health care.
Do not want to fund health care. It doesn't make sense for the economy because just getting people sick and forcing them on to the health care system becomes a drain on it. But then also the people who use the Obamacare subsidies most are in deep red states. We have a map that we show every time we talk about this.
And it's kind of become tired but I want to show it every time because the deepest red places are the places where the subsidies are used most. So you see Texas. Lots of people on the Obamacare subsidy in Texas but Republicans in Texas by and large don't want to extend it. It doesn't make any sense because you're a electorate wants it and you're there to represent your electorate.
You're there to make sure that your electorate gets taken care of. And yet this is an arena where you say no. I'm going to ignore the needs of my voters and I'm going to instead prioritize the needs of who is it. The special interest.
What is it? Well, it's a consequence of the big beautiful bill, right? And it's about giving the ultra-rich a tax break. So they get a huge tax break and the way they finance the tax break is by not continuing with the health care subsidies.
But again, that is not representing their constituents. I mean, I think that's why Marjorie Taylor-Green says there's going to be a democratic win of the House in the midterms, right? Healthcare has been kryptonite for Republicans. The last time the Republicans were swept out of the majority was during Donald Trump's first term midway through and it was because of Obamacare.
They tried to repeal Obamacare. They said they had a plan to replace it. They never had a plan to replace it. They were not successful in doing that and the Democrats ran on that.
They ran on the Republicans trying to take away your healthcare and they lost. And this looks like it's going to be a repeat or that. I mean, he campaigned saying, I have a concept for healthcare but we haven't seen the concepts. Well, there was going to be an outline the other day.
They went from a concept to an outline but never revealed it after a big GOP revolt. Speaker Mike Johnson calling the White House and saying nobody wants this. That being said, there is reporting out there from a number of outlets that say that what we're going to see in this next year in Congress are going to be a number of discharge petitions, including ones on healthcare. What is a discharge petition?
What is a discharge petition? It's what happened with the FC file. So in the House, you need the leadership to bring a bill to the floor. They've got to put it on the agenda.
In order to circumvent that, you can get a majority of House members signing off on a petition to force the bill to the floor. So it would just happen with the FC. The FC bill to get to the floor. They needed all of the Democrats and I think four or five Republicans.
Right. And they got that and that's why it ultimately went to a vote. So we could be seeing more of those on healthcare. Democrats getting on board with it and then are there going to be five Republicans, six Republicans or even more signing on to say no, we think this is important.
We need to extend those subsidies. It's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene who's worried about it. There are Republicans in Congress who do see the tidal wave coming and do understand that. These subsidies without them, people are going to get very upset.
It's like, is already unaffordable? You become even more unaffordable acutely so when these subsidies go away in January. Well, I can't imagine any of them will get reelected because it's, and also this is a payment that people make every single month. And if your healthcare premiums are going up, as you said, with a couple in Oregon that you talk to, 4x, that's literal money out of your account every single month.
It's not like a one off payment that you kind of cringe for and then you forget about it for you. This is every single month. Before you just don't get healthcare. Well, you don't get healthcare.
And then you're just hoping that for this year without healthcare, you're going to be okay. Right. And you wake up at three in the morning every night hoping that you're not going to get ill and then you're worrying that the worrying is going to cause stress and you're going to get some sort of illness from that. Of course.
It's shocking. It's just such a shocking state of affairs. So look, you speak to tons of people. You speak to Republicans.
You speak to Democrats. What are you hearing among the Republicans about how they manage Trump? It's flattery. Flattery.
It's always been flattery. Tell him he's great. Tell him his poll numbers are wonderful. Tell him he solved and stopped eight wars that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
It's always that. So when he says out loud, my poll numbers are the best they've ever been. They're absolutely fantastic. When we know that all the recent polls have had him at his lowest, does he actually believe they're good?
He's always been shown selected polls. You know, during the first campaign, he watches television all the time. And there's lots of stuff that he's shown like a Rasmussen poll or some other poll that shows the numbers are different or internal polls that are cherry-picks. I mean, he's shown different information.
He sees what we're reporting on television. That's why he calls us fake news. So he literally lives in his own information bubble. I mean, not just say how sort of denial-like.
That's generally how it's tended to be. You know, I don't have a full insight into exactly what's put in front of him on his desk, but that has been the standard operating procedure with Donald Trump now for many years. So he might be getting some bad-looking polls. And you do see him acknowledge it to a degree because he's talking about affordability more.
Right. He's now trying to claim the Democrats made up this word affordability. Nobody even talked about affordability for the Democrats brought it up, but no, everything actually is great. So he's trying to will the country out of this feeling they have or the reality they have that prices are up by saying, no, they're not.
Everything's wonderful. And he has had that power in the past to impose his own reality on everybody else. He has been successful at it. There are real questions about whether this time is going to be different because people are still very upset.
They do feel like their lives have gotten more expensive and their wages have not matched that. There was a really interesting analysis of the poverty line by an economist. And I'm going to be interviewing him soon. But he talks about the hangover from COVID.
And the reason why everybody felt better about their finances in COVID is because they weren't paying for transportation. They weren't paying for childcare, two of the biggest expenses that we experienced in daily life. So suddenly, they had an extra $30,000 because they weren't paying for daycare. They had an extra $20,000 because they weren't driving.
They weren't commuting. And their $80,000 salary, their $100,000 salary felt flush. And now that we're back after COVID, all of those prices have come back. All of those costs have come back.
Healthcare is going up, but also childcare and transportation is back. And with food prices going up, you don't feel flush any longer. You feel angry about how everything has gotten more expensive and how you can no longer keep up with it. So you had to move on where you felt good.
And the taking back of that financial power, that ability to save, the ripping it out of your hands, really makes you pissed off. And that's why Biden had to deal with it. And Trump is facing the same headwinds. That is interesting.
And also people shopped less because you couldn't go out to the shop. I mean, there was a lot of online shopping. There was a lot of online shopping, but it's fine for sellers in robes and sweatpants. Well, that's true.
And also people doing up their homes. So there was a boom in the kind of home industry. I'm on the board of Sonos. And everybody was re-equipping their homes with better sounds.
But you didn't have that incidental shopping in the way that you do now things are back and we're all out and about. And also people weren't spending on travel. They weren't spending on restaurants. So all of that sort of extra spending.
And you see a lot of spending on that now too. And that's all gone up because food's gone up. So that's travel expensive. Revenge travel.
Revenge travel. That's a great term. OK, so the other thing that's going on with Trump and that it keeps coming back, despite all his efforts to distract, is the Epstein files. What, do you have any sense of what even are the Epstein files?
I mean, the Epstein files are all of the investigative material that the FBI and DOJ collected when they were looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged crimes. There's an idea out there among great conspiracy theorists, but also among a lot of regular people who are not totally looped into the conspiracy world. That there's going to be more there. This is a guy who was exceedingly wealthy.
Can't really explain how he got so wealthy. Who had a ton of powerful friends, was friends with presidents, was friends with royalty, was friends with billionaires, every, you know, the who's who of the 90s and the early 2000s. And at the same time he was friends with all these folks. He had his own private island where he was abusing girls.
And everyone seemed to know about it. And he was Donald Trump's best friend for 10 years. He was all day sort of falling out of a piece of property in 2004. And there's a ton of video of the two of them together, partying, dancing, at Mar-Lago.
He was at Donald Trump's weddings. They were very close. And this idea that everyone kind of understood what Epstein was doing. And some of them maybe have even taken part.
And when he got arrested for it initially and then got that sweetheart deal, well, why did he get a sweetheart deal? Who did he know? And what did he have? Was he, did he make some sort of backroom deal on information?
Or did he have leverage over some big powerful people that really didn't want to see him fully punished because they were worried about what he might reveal about them? So there are these questions that have been festering now for a long time. And when Donald Trump came into office, he appointed his labor secretary, a man named Alex Acosta, who was a prosecutor in Florida who gave him that sweetheart deal. And then all of a sudden the Epstein stuff started to explode again.
And the appointment of Alex Acosta came under scrutiny. And Donald Trump ousted him and tried to separate himself from Epstein. And did so successfully. So much so that the belief among the Maga world was that Donald Trump was actually the one who exposed Epstein.
He was the whistleblower on Epstein. And he was going to unravel this disgusting pedophilia ring that was operating in the highest levels of government, the highest levels of society. And Epstein was a part of it and Donald Trump was going to reveal it. That's why we have to elect him again in 2024 because he's finally going to get to the bottom of it.
Right. And then he didn't. And then he came in and his DOJ said, yeah, we have the files. We're going to release them and then didn't hand it over a bunch of binders full of nothing to a bunch of these conspiracy theorists who had been shopping at the bit.
And then there were renewed questions. Why exactly are they not revealing the information that they promised? And does Donald Trump know about this? He must not know about this.
He's always been insulated from it, which I find to be fascinating, totally fascinating because there's all these images of Epstein and Donald Trump together. And he has the power, the unilateral power to release all the information. If he wanted to, yet he's not going to do it. So I think the natural question is what is in there?
Is there more incriminating emails, more embarrassing emails? Are there financial transactions? What? I mean, the girls by and large have said that they didn't see Donald Trump behave badly.
There's one that says that she was groped or assaulted by Donald Trump. He's denied this. But if it is really, if there's nothing there about Trump, but if it really is all about the Democrats, why hasn't Donald Trump released it? Well, and why also?
And by the way, that was one of the best explanations of the Epstein files and the whole story of Epstein that I have heard concise, chronological, very clear. What do you make of the fact that Trump's former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who's now the number two at the Justice Department, personally went down to meet Jeffrey Epstein's former partner in crime, who was sentenced. He'll end up talking about it, but he was sentenced for 20 years for sex trafficking. And then moved her from her jail in Tallahassee.
He's a prison to help you in Texas. What the point of that was? What was the point of it? What are you getting out of Gellain Maxwell that you haven't already got out of Gellain Maxwell?
What do you want? Maybe it's a better question out of Gellain Maxwell. And they released a transcript and in it, she exonerates Trump. She says how nice he was and how she never remembers him doing anything.
She doesn't remember him much really in relation to Epstein or showing up at the various properties. But that's contradicted by the emails that she's sending to Epstein. The ones that were released by the estate. The one in 2011 where he says Trump is the dog that hasn't boxed.
And then he says Virginia Jew free. It's redacted in the email. But then the Republican say it was Virginia Jew free. Trump spent hours with Virginia in my house.
Yeah. And this was pointed out and Todd Lynch responded that it was George Conway, I think. You don't really know how to be a prosecutor. You don't know what you're talking about.
But yeah, she was moved to a minimum security or lower security prison. Club Fed, as they call it. It's white collar crimes. It's not sex trafficking.
You don't go there if you're a sex trafficker. She's in there with Elizabeth Holmes, who was the founder of the board member behind the whole. But you weren't sex trafficking girls. Yeah, exactly.
So why? I think those are all really big questions. And they do cast just another dark shadow over Donald Trump's involvement and over his reluctance to release the information. Katie, hold on one second.
We're just going to take some abs. And I'm back with Katie Turd discussing really, well, it's a masterclass on Trump's second term. Why do you think he finally set really sleep steam files? He was trying to lead the parade.
He saw a mob coming after him. And instead of allowing the mob to overtake him, he turned around and led the mob out like he was leading the parade. You had a jailbreak. Fantastic.
You had a jail. Good. I can't take that for a few times from a few people. But it is great.
That's why I used it. He saw them all coming and decided to lead them. Exactly. Fantastic.
Yeah. The what happened in Congress was you had Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey just being completely headstrong about the Epstein files. And standing with the victims and refusing to back down on it, refusing to succumb to the pressure of the president of the United States. Marjorie Taylor Greene now is Marjorie Trader Greene.
Donald Trump is going after Massey, going after his marriage, making fun of him and Massey's laughing it off. He called the White House called Lauren Bolbert into the situation room. Why not into like just some office in the West Wing, into the situation room in order to pressure her to try to take her name off the discharge petition. He kept calling Nancy Mase.
The president of the United States was playing phone tag with Nancy Mase, who by the way wants to be governor of South Carolina. He couldn't get her on the phone to get her to take her name off the discharge petition. So when the imagine being Nancy Mase and having Donald Trump call you what she's saying to her assistant, I'm not here. Tell him you can't find me.
Tell me you don't know where I am. Exactly. Can you imagine that dodging a phone call from the president of the United States? Well, I can if it's Donald Trump.
But if you're a Republican and you need him, especially if you need him to endorse you, if you want to run for governor in South Carolina, that takes some real guts. So when the Arizona rep got finally seated after her special election, the discharge petition has enough votes to go to the floor. And I had Don Bacon on. I asked him, is this going to pass?
And he said, absolutely. There's going to be a jailbreak of Republicans, maybe a hundred Republicans who are going to vote for this because jail break because that's what it feels like being well being imprisoned by Donald Trump's personality. A jailbreak of Republicans coming out and voting yes because they don't they understand their constituents and they don't want to be the ones saying no to releasing files about a pedophile. And then when when they when they was obviously was going to be a flood of Republicans, Donald Trump over the weekend suddenly reversed himself after all this pressure after months of calling anybody who wanted the informational loser and saying he didn't want their support anyway.
He suddenly says, no, I think we should all we should all see the files and I encourage all the Republicans to get behind this. And so not only do you have all but one of the Republicans in the house, you had every single Republican senator as well saying yes to this he had no choice. Right. It's slightly reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld, which I don't know if you remember where George pretends that he has a house in the Hamptons and all his friends know it's not true.
And so he hires a car and he says, right, we're going out to my house in the house and all along the drive out there. You're trying to figure out how is he going to get out of this? Because at the end, we know that he doesn't have a house. And there's there's a very much a feeling of that with Donald Trump here that we know he's in them.
We've seen that he's in them. Elon Musk said that he was in them. He tweeted that he was in them when they were having their spat and he then deleted the tweet. So it's just very curious to know what we're going to find.
And also, odd for Cash Patel, who's the head of the FBI and his number two, Dan Bon Gino, who before they joined the FBI, were constantly stirring the conspiracy of the Epstein files, which now doesn't even feel like a conspiracy anymore. No, and that's true. We had a reporting yesterday from a kindlingian, Carolinig, and I believe Laura Burund-Lopez about Cash Patel's future and how the president was thinking of replacing him. So let's talk about Cash Patel, because obviously one of the things he used to do before he came in, he was a t-shirt salesman.
But he was also very active on X constantly going after Christopher Ray, who was then... He's a former FBI. No, he's a former DOJ prosecutor. Right, but going after him for misuse of the government jet, which you have to take at a certain point because it's about your insecurity.
He's now commander in Norma's pressure himself because he's got a girlfriend who's a country singer, and the government jet appears to be ferrying her. And she's got a SWAT team protecting her, by the way, as well, which he is concerned isn't doing good enough job, right? I know that he says that she gets threats, and that's why he justifies a SWAT team protecting her, which is extraordinary and not normal for a girlfriend to get, for a girlfriend of the FBI director. During the first administration, when we saw a turnover in the cabinet, it often was tied to misuse of government funds, using a private plane.
That took a few of the cabinet members down the first time, so it wouldn't be surprising if Cash Patel's misuse of funds, you know, using that jet, giving her a SWAT team escort. That's what did him in. There's a history there of Donald Trump saying, you can't. This is this bounty is not for you.
This is this is this is this is this bounties for me, not for you. You can't you can't use it the way that I use it. You don't have that same authority. That being said, after we reported that the White House put out a Caroline Levitt claims she showed the reporting to the president.
The president laughed, called it fake, and then happened to have Cash Patel in the Oval Office and said, let's take a photo to show them that everything's great. And so there's a photo of them that she released to try to push back on the reporting. But Kendall Aynn said that even amid that, after the reporting came out, he got a number of texts from his sources within the FBI saying that it was true and that the rumblings were there and they were getting louder. And perhaps his position was under threat and would come to an in soon.
But you know, when Donald Trump feels like he's being pressured to do something, or when he feels like it's been released, the information that he wants to get somebody out has been released, he'll backtrack. And support the person in order to prove that the reports were false. Right, and that he doesn't want to do what the press is pushing him into doing. And yet at the same time you know that a presidential hand around the shoulder offering support is worth nothing.
I mean, he would say I've got full confidence. The words you never want to hear about yourself someone's saying, I have full confidence in them because you're like, the end is near. It's just a weird signaling. So the other thing that has laid Donald Trump a bit low, and you saw him sort of slumping off in poor Melania in her wonderful high heels trying to stay upright on the lawn as they go to Marine Force One.
Asperdals were made for, by the way. Exactly. Although I suddenly thought, oh, that's why they've ripped up Jackie Kennedy's Rose lawn and paved it. So Melania controlled around in her very high heels, which she does admirably actually.
I can't do that any longer. Anyway, the point I was getting to was Lindsey Halligan's failure to nail James Comey and Tish James. Yeah, I explored this yesterday on my show and whether the failures in court, including the Comey, James thing, will damage him in Congress. This idea that he's invincible, this infallibility, and this inevitability that Donald Trump has, that he's all powerful, that he has full control over every aspect of government and is marching us toward authoritarianism.
Not for the first nine months of the administration has scared people. And lots of folks have gotten in line. You look at all the business leaders who have shown him at the White House bearing gifts, but the way in which Republicans haven't said a peep about losing their authorities, like the power of the purse or the power of the tariff, and the fear that's been pulsing through DOJ. Go against Donald Trump, you're going to get fired.
These embarrassing moments in court, these embarrassing failures in court as evidenced by the Lindsey Halligan thing, doesn't it just kind of show that they're a bit bumbling and that they really don't have control? They are incompetent. They're incompetent. And they can't get people to really, they can say they want somebody prosecuted.
They can say that they're a crook. They can say that they're disgusting and should be in jail. But you need to present evidence in a court of law. You need to follow procedure in a court of law.
And when you can't get somebody who is qualified enough to do the basics, that does kind of prove a measure of weakness. Well, she has fantastic hair. I don't think that Donald Trump is going to call Lindsey Halligan, who was a runner up in Miss Colorado ugly or little, or any of the, or Peggy, he's definitely not going to call her Peggy. But she turned out to be pretty damn incompetent in the courtroom.
Yeah, I mean, she didn't know how to get an indictment. And it's so bad. In fact that they may never be able to bring the Comey case again because the judge dismissed it without prejudice. I'm not a lawyer, but I think that means that you're allowed to bring the case again.
But in the case of Comey, there's a footnote in the ruling that says you can't just bring a indictment against somebody to stop the statute of limitations. And it was about to run out on court. So I think it was five days. And so now the case is going ahead.
The five days they've run out the clock. They were trying to, and there's usually a grace period of somebody gets thrown out. But because the indictment was, I guess not real, not valid. You've lost your time.
It's up. It's over. And there are now questions about whether the government would be successful if they did try to bring the Comey case again. But if they lose the ability to bring the Comey case again because Lindsey Halligan messed up because she didn't understand how indictments work.
But that's not even what they rolled on. They rolled on her not being legally appointed. Because Donald Trump put somebody into that position who was not allowed to be in that position. That would be second interim attorney, which shouldn't have happened.
It's all very legally complicated. But essentially he's got to nominate somebody. And that nomination has to get through the Senate. It's got to get through in Virginia, a couple of Democratic senators who are not just going to rubber stamp somebody with no qualifications or somebody who seems to hatch a man for Donald Trump.
Or it's got to be appointed by, I think it's judges. I think it's very legally complicated. Regardless, she was not legal. She couldn't even bring the indictment if she wanted to.
Somebody else would have needed to sign their name. But again, they couldn't get anybody else in the office to sign their name to this indictment because they didn't think that the crimes Comey was accused of were actually prosecutable. They didn't believe that they could get a conviction. And when you are a lawyer in DOJ, if you don't believe you can get a conviction, because the evidence is not there.
Don't bring the case. It seems to me, we talk a lot about Donald Trump being a brilliant television producer. And this is the sort of episode where he is forcing his will onto the DOJ. And in a television show, that would be very dramatic.
But in real life, there are consequences. It doesn't make sense. That's not how it works. And it's been thrown out.
So actually, it's a good example of the institution holding the Constitution. Oh, the institutions are folding. There's no gatekeepers. There's no guardrails.
But actually, that's exactly what happened. If it goes to the Supreme Court, who knows? Who knows? Who knows?
So, final question, because I feel like we've been very thorough on everything that's going on right now, is, has there been... And certainly it feels as if there has. But I know you're watching it much more closely than I am. More griffed in this second term, because I took notes to my name.
Oh, excellent. There's been a lot of alleged griffed. I'll be careful when I'll say alleged griffed. Okay, so, Donald Trump has crypto behind him right now.
He's made $800 million from crypto sales in the first half of this year. Wow. This is a man that's embraced crypto and away no president has before. Well, I'm not sure any.
I'm not sure Biden would have understood what crypto is. Donald Trump understands what crypto is either. But he understands it enough to my $800 million. Do you remember the Virginia Golf Course Auction earlier in the term?
No. So, Donald Trump held, or his family held an auction for holders of his meme coin. Again, meme coin. It's a thing that's digital and you can buy it.
It's like, whatever. Right. And it's sounding like an NFT. I mean, it goes to NFT.
The highest bidder, high spitters, would get tickets to this event at his Virginia Golf Course where he was going to make an appearance. The highest of high spitters would get access to the president. You know, I think that in past presidencies, we might lose our minds over that. Right.
I mean, I think we'd lost our minds over that with the Trump Hotel during the first term and talked about the emoluments clause and gave everybody a crash course in a very archaic term from the 1700s that nobody had thought about for 250 years. But now, now this B is a two day news story and then it goes away. The winners, by the way, went to the Golf Course. I think he made $148 million off this.
Wow. Winners went to the Golf Course and were let down by the access that they got to the president. So it has Trump University, the Central Trump University, all over it. Of course.
There's the ballroom. There's the ballroom. There's the ballroom. $300 million raised for this ballroom, ripping down the East Wing and building this ostentatious gold and marble ballroom at the White House.
And how have the plans even been certified and approved? I don't think he cares. Do you think he's actually going to build something like that? Well, he has to.
There's a whole in the property. I know there's a whole, but I mean, have we seen the beginnings of any building? I think there's still a demolition stage, but I'd have to go in and see what we can find. And the people that Treasury were told not to take pictures and you only get a bit of a smush view from the positions that reporters can see at the White House.
So I'd have to go see what the updated images are. But again, $300 million is raised by private donors, but a lot of these private donors have business with the federal government or have business with Donald Trump or want to get close to them. And there's so billionaires, there's sports teams, owners, there are financers, tech bros, the tobacco companies, media companies, Comcast, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, all these people who have business with or have business with the federal government needs distinction. So it's pay to play.
It's pay to play. There's that? The pardons, the pardon the finance guy. There's a guitar we play in $400 million, which is going to cost some money in order to make safe for the President of the United States to fly in.
I think by the way, that's 100 times more than every foreign gift given to the United States since 2001. Wow, a hundred times more. Yeah, he got a gold crown from the leader of South Korea, which felt very on the nose. And then there's, I think what is most egregious and makes no sense politically.
Donald Trump talking, especially he did this during the shutdown, and people were in breadlines, when they were at food pantries, when they were not getting their paychecks. He talked about how he deserved and might sue his DOJ for $230 million as recompense or restitution for the investigations that Jack Smith launched against him. And by the way, the Senate snuck in during the shutdown, and the government shutdown, a little provision that would allow senators to also sue the DOJ for having their phone records seized legally, by the way, by Jack Smith during his investigations, which just smacks of self-dealing. It's potentially could be hundreds of million dollars that the DOJ, which by the way, categorically believes that the 2020 election was stolen.
That's what you have to believe to be at the head of the DOJ. And so categorically believes that these investigations were hoax. Right, I have missed that detail about the Senate's launching compensation. They were in charge of saying yes or no to paying Donald Trump and these senators, and that money joint comes from us, comes from taxpayers.
I'm just thinking of how much tax I pay, and I do not want it to go to Donald Trump's compensation for. Yeah, so it's how I'm getting the deal. But they can have hundreds of millions of dollars. Katie, let's take a break for our sponsors.
And I'm back with Katie to, in theory, Katie, the Democrats should be romping home with this theory. In theory, do you feel they are on top of all this in the way that you've just laid it out? I think you see glimmers of it. I think they have been better at marshalling a response lately on healthcare in particular.
They were very good on getting on message during the shutdown. And even though they were the ones that signed on to ending the shutdown without the subsidies, when you look at the polling, broadly Americans are blaming Republicans for the shutdown, and broadly Americans are blaming Republicans for affordability issues, which include, or Trump, which include healthcare. So they've been better at it lately. They're still trying to figure out exactly how to go after Donald Trump in terms of the term oligarchy.
And the Bernie Sanders wants to use it all the time. AOC uses it. Mom Donnie has been very successful in just hammering affordability, affordability, affordability. But I don't know.
I think there's still quite a bit of time. And who knows? Democrats are, they have a tendency to chase the bouncing ball, or the next sparkly thing. And Donald Trump, part of his success is that he floods his own.