Janine Jackson interviewed the Hartmann Report‘s Thom Hartmann about Jeffrey Epstein and the MAGA movement for the July 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: There’s no need to choose: We can and must address the grievousness of the operation Jeffrey Epstein ran, how it was abetted by the banks that process the checks, and the lawyers dismissing the women who were brave enough to come forward, against literally the most powerful people in the country. And at the same time, we can marvel that this is what it takes to get a measurable subset of the MAGA cult to say, “Wait a minute, the guy who said, ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ is a creep?”

The Trump base’s relationship to reality is obscure to many people who are wondering; Why this? Why now? As much as we might want to look away, those questions have repercussions for all of us.

Here to help us with understanding the place of the Epstein story in various narratives, including that of corporate news media, is Thom Hartmann. He is a political analyst, radio host, author of the daily newsletter the Hartmann Report, along with many books, including The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, which is forthcoming from Penguin Random House. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Thom Hartmann.

Thom Hartmann: Hey, thanks, Janine. Thanks for inviting me.

JJ: The MAGA/QAnon relationship to pedophilia is a psychosocial, historical phenomenon that will be studied for decades, I’m sure. We’re interested, today, in the political repercussions, wherein Trump, who could not be more obviously part of the Epstein crime factory, is throwing it all at the wall to hold on to a crowd who live and breathe conspiracy around precisely these things.

So when you’re trying to break it down for people who have avoided this storyline, for various reasons, and are now just trying to get caught up, you need to explain a little history, right? Where do you start, if you want to orient someone to why the Jeffrey Epstein story would be the fissure in the MAGA crowd?

TH: To start with, everything makes sense if you get it that most of the followers of Donald Trump and the MAGA base are actually members of a cult. What differentiates people who live in a cult versus people who are just in normal society is that people who live in a cult live in a constructed reality that does not comport with actual reality. In other words, they are being lied to at a bunch of different levels, and they live in this unreal world. And, typically, it’s an unreal world that’s filled with panics, particularly moral panics.

So if you think back to the Reagan administration, the McMartin preschool, where for a year or so, everybody was convinced that the people were doing Satanic rituals with children and killing rabbits and stuff. And it turned out it was all imagination. But the whole nation was seized with this moral panic. This Pizzagate thing, you know, the Democrats are drinking the blood of children to get their adrenochrome and all this, is another moral panic.

And moral panics lend themselves to conspiracy theories. The McMartin preschool spun off 1,000 conspiracy theories.

Thom Hartmann: “You’ve got people who have been conditioned to live in a world of conspiracy theories.”

So you’ve got people who have been conditioned to live in a world of conspiracy theories. “The election in 2020 was actually stolen from Donald Trump.” “The fluoride in the water is a Communist conspiracy to destroy America.” On and on and on, right? And Jeffrey Epstein is one of the powerful people who control the world, and he’s part of this pedo ring, you know, this international pedo ring, and that probably has a lot of Jews associated with it, because usually these right-wing conspiracy theories are antisemitic, as well as everything else. “The Jews will not replace us,” the “Great Replacement Theory,” is another one. You know, the moral panic/conspiracy theory that Jewish people, wealthy Jews, are paying for Black and brown people to replace white people in their jobs and in education in America.

So what has happened is that Trump, during his campaign in 2016 and again in 2020, used Epstein as basically a foil, saying, “Yeah, you know Epstein? You know he had Bill Clinton on his plane, and he had Bill Gates on his plane, and it’s a bunch of him and a bunch of Democrats.”

And it’s a real testimonial to the power of Fox News to exclude data from the news that they’re sharing with their viewers, that these people never realized that Trump was Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend for a decade, and he’s all over the Epstein files, and any investigation of Epstein has Trump all over it.

And they just didn’t know this. And they were convinced that, when the truth comes out, Bill Clinton is going to get crucified here. And it’s starting to dawn on them that Trump maybe wasn’t the most honest with them, which may hopefully cause them to wonder about what are the other things that he lied to us about? Because there’s certainly a long list.

JJ: But is it really the case? I mean, they seem so separated from reality. And it, to me, it seems like if Trump said, “No, don’t look behind the curtain, actually,” well, as he’s said, “Those files are fake. These files are partial, anybody who says I’m involved….” I’m not sure why they wouldn’t fall for that too.

TH: Because they’ve been sold the counterstory. They’ve already bought the frame. The framework is that there’s this international network of pedophiles, and Epstein, of course, is Jewish. That helps as well. So you’ve got this frame that draws on racism, it draws on antisemitism, it draws on classical moral panic, and they have come to believe it, and it’s been reinforced over and over and over again for well over a decade. And it was conflated in their minds with the whole Pizzagate, Hillary Clinton, pedophile ring stuff.

And so, undoing that, you’d have to go back and say, “You know, what you’ve really believed for the last decade, that Donald Trump has been telling you, and Republicans have been telling you, and all these right-wing talkshow hosts and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, and they’ve all been telling you this, but you know, it was all wrong. It didn’t exist.” That’s just not going to fly. This is too well-established, too solidly established in their brains, for them to simply deny it or walk away from it, or look away from it, even.

JJ: Given that, I wonder what you make about so-called “mainstream media’s” response to this. Because this is obviously a kind of, like I say, sociological thing that’s happening that we can look at, the sort of petri dish of what happened with QAnon and the MAGA cult and their relationship to reality.

But we look to mainstream news media to see that as an event, and to incorporate that into the reality for, if I may say, the rest of us, you know? So I’m mad at news media for the implication that they can flip on and off the switch of outrage. You know, it was also mainstream news media who were like, “The Epstein files are very important. Well, no, they’re not so important. We’re not going to talk about them. Now they’re important again.”

TH: Going after Barack Obama, our first Black president, and calling him “Hussein” and all this other kind of stuff, you know, it’s just classic Trump racism, and that does play well with his base, because I think the one major common denominator that runs through his base is white supremacy, particularly male white supremacy, Christian male white supremacy.

But the mainstream media has acknowledged that Trump is in the Epstein files for years. It comes and goes as a media fad, but they’ve acknowledged it.

It’s just that the people who are the MAGA base, that 20% of the Republican Party, that maybe 7% or 8% of the American population, they’ve never experienced that, because they don’t read or listen to or watch the mainstream media. They live in this isolated bubble of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and Breitbart on the internet.

And social media, of course, has really closed the door even tighter for them, by running algorithms that are designed to keep you in your bubble. Both Facebook and Twitter do that aggressively to make more money for their owners, of course. These people are just befuddled, baffled. And I think that’s something that we really should be taking notice of, how poorly informed the Republican base is.

JJ: I understand where right-wing media might be, but so-called “mainstream,” elite, corporate media, New York Times, Washington Post, they have a job to do, too, which is to locate this disinformation in a reality frame. And I guess I’m not seeing that. I guess my problem is I see things like “Trump Is Easing His Base’s Fury,” and that just seems like not telling us what we need to get from a free press, in terms of this nightmare, frankly, that we’re living through.

TH: I agree with you on that. I mean, the New York Times has been sanewashing Trump for years; this is what they do. Things that Trump has done and said recently, that had Joe Biden done them, would have been a full week’s news cycle, just largely get ignored. Just blatant lies, manufacturing stories, like the story about his uncle and the Unabomber. He literally just made it up out of thin air, and it was impossible. And yet the media did not harp on that. If Joe Biden had done that, if he had just made up a story out of nothing, they’d be calling for his impeachment or his resignation.

Trump has always had a special relationship with the media. Partly they’re afraid of him, partly they depend on him. He generates eyeballs and clicks and likes and views, and that makes them money.

JJ: You noted recently that the kind of “what aboutism” just isn’t landing this time, in terms of the Epstein story. When folks are saying, “Well, Clinton did it too,” people are like, “Well, yeah, OK, if Clinton did it too, he should also go to jail.” You can’t pluck the same thought-ending strings anymore, particularly with young people. And I see hope there.

TH: Yeah, I do too, and I think it certainly is the moment that some people, the hold of the cult on them has been weakened. You’ve got a dozen members, Republicans in the House of Representatives, who are willing to vote against Trump and demand the release of the Epstein files. This is why Mike Johnson just cut and ran, you know why he shut down for the end of this month, all of next month, and into the first week of September, is because he’s afraid of this topic coming up.

I think it’s going to backfire on him. I think it’s going to be just as hot in September. I think everybody’s going to kind of take a month off, and then just come back with some ferocity. But I could be wrong. It may be that Trump will actually succeed.

My big fear is that Trump will do what dictators are famous for doing when their approval ratings are in the tank. What Putin did, for example, with Ukraine, and what George W. Bush did with Iraq and Afghanistan, is he’ll declare a war someplace, as a way of distracting us. And that could be, particularly if he decides to go to war with China and Russia, that could be civilization-altering. I believe that Donald Trump will do anything to protect himself, and that’s the danger.

JJ: And I’ll just add, finally, that the way a lot of people will understand that danger will have to do with media. That will be the way that people understand what’s happening, and what it means for them. And news media are not neutral town criers, not to put too fine a point on it, but they are not simply telling us what’s happening; they’re also telling us how to feel about it, and I think, if we want to have a positive vision of what could come after, I just wonder, in terms of media, where do you think that conversation could happen?

TH: In my opinion, the big problem with media goes back to the Telecommunications Act of ‘96, and Reagan’s doing away of the Fairness Doctrine in ‘87, or in ‘86, I guess it was. Because we used to regulate how many radio stations an individual billionaire or a corporation could own, and not just radio stations–radio, television and newspapers.

And that all got blown up in ‘96, when Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act. Within a year, Clear Channel had gone from being a little regional cluster of stations in the Southeast to having over 1,000 stations, and Sinclair Broadcasting now runs kind of a semi-monopoly.

And this CBS merger is another example of just insane monopolistic behavior that’s not good for America. It’s not good for business, it’s not good for the media, and it’s definitely not good for our democracy.

So that’s where my biggest concern lies right now, that and Brendan Carr being the head of the FCC, when he’s just an open Trump toady and will do whatever Donald Trump tells him to do, including investigating the big three networks, and all this other stuff that he’s doing right now.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Thom Hartmann. You can get started on his varied work online at HartmannReport.com, and the new book is The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink. That’s forthcoming from Penguin Random House. Thom Hartmann, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

TH: Thank you, Janine.

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The debate, AP tells us, is just between Republicans who “defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises,” and Democrats who, “for their part, accused Musk of leading a coup from within the government by amassing unaccountable and illegal power.” Tomato, to-mah-to, you understand.

Musk locking federal workers out of internal systems, denying them access to their own personnel files, with their pay history, length of service and qualifications: Why, that’s just “Musk’s penchant for dabbling.” He’s been “tinkering with things his entire life,” the wire service says. He learned to code as a child in South Africa, you see, and “now Musk is popping open the hood on the federal government like it’s one of his cars or rockets.”

Popping open the hood of democratic processes to tinker with them? If you rely on reporting from nominally neutral outlets like Associated Press, you might imagine that’s only a concern of partisan Democrats, not regular folks like you and me.