Sarah McCammon / Tamara Keith / Domenico Montanaro (primary hosts; multi-voice label primarily Sarah McCammon)

Welcome.

Hey, great to be with you.

I want to pick up where we left off in the first part of the podcast with Jeffrey Epstein.

So these documents that have just been released include references to President Trump, quite a few of them, both before he took office and during his first term.

Domenico, how is Trump's base reacting to what's come out?

You know, I think that they've been kind of on their back foot on a lot of this, Republicans in general.

And I think that his base has wanted to see the release of these files.

And a lot of that was because Trump himself campaigned on saying that he was going to release these files because he.

There is this one sect of the Republican base that believes that there's this cabal of pedophiles that are high up in the federal government.

And any day that Trump is having to talk about Epstein and his relationship with Epstein is not a great one for him.

And his base, I think, in a lot of respects, is confused on how to react to him.

Some people want these files completely released.

Other people are going along with what Trump is saying and saying that this is a Democratic hoax.

Yeah.

And what you're talking about there is the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is this idea that moneyed elites run the government and business and they're secretly a cabal of pedophiles.

And then here is convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who is associating with people in positions of power.

And many in the MAGA base say these files are a hoax.

Just help us make sense of this apparent disconnect.

Well, President Trump says these files are a hoax, but what he means by it being a hoax is not that they aren't real, but that Democrats are trying to draw attention to this to hurt him.

Thank you very much for having me.