‘Daily Blast’ podcast host Greg Sargent said President Donald Trump undermined his own argument in a rambling speech about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
“[Trump] claimed to know about elite Democrats and liberals who had visited Epstein. But … [i]f this is what the Epstein files would reveal, then why isn’t Trump ordering their release?” Sargent wondered. “Every time Trump says such things, he wrecks his own Big Lie: that the Epstein scandal is a Democratic hoax that actually implicates Democrats even as he won’t release the files.
“I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I never went to the island, but [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers, I hear, went there. He was the head of Harvard. And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them. I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island.”
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“Trump is saying two things about this whole scandal,” Sargent told his guest speaker, Contrarian co-founder Jenifer Rubin. “First, that the Epstein files are a DEM hoax, that they’re actually filled with dirt on elite Democrats. And second, he won’t release the Epstein files. … It astounds me that Trump presses ahead with this nonsensical argument, which actually refutes itself and is damning to him.”
Rubin said there was no ethical reason to deny the public the files, so long as victims’ names are omitted. She also warned that the Epstein information is going to leak out regardless of Trump laboring to contain it, and it will bite the party working hardest to hide it.
That party, she said, is not Democrats.
“Essentially, what’s the number one rule in Washington? Everything leaks. You cannot have this many people involved in something so scandalous and keep it bottled up,” said Rubin. “So it’s either going to come out in drips and drabs, or it’s going to come out and flood the zone — but it’s going to come out one way or the other.”
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She said she was willing to bet “there’s a limit to what [Republican voters] can stomach”, and they “might stay home in 2026.”
“That is the real danger to Trump, that he takes what would be a bad election — because it’s a midterm election, because of the big awful bill, because of his abominable ratings and approval on a whole range of issues — and turn it into a catastrophe for Republicans,” said Rubin.
Sargent said House Speaker Mike Johnson may be feeling this fear as well, having recently spoken out against a scheme to pardon convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell as ‘a warning’ to Trump about midterm fallout.
“If you’re asking my opinion, I think 20 years was a pittance. I think she should have a life sentence at least,” Johnson told NBC News’s Kristen Welker on Sunday. “… It’s hard to put into words how evil this was, and that she orchestrated it and was a big part of it, at least under the criminal sanction, I think is an unforgivable thing. So again, not my decision, but I have great pause about that, as any reasonable person would.”
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This, said Sargent, is "a loud clanging alarm saying, ‘Do not do this. It will absolutely f———— us in the battle for the House."'
“Absolutely,” Rubin answered. “When you have something with 75 percent of Americans saying, ‘We smell a rat’. … We are so divided, but on this, Americans could actually agree. This is utterly unacceptable. It’s grotesquely perverse. And it’s not a trivial matter."