Reports from Trumplandia: The "Trump vs. Charlie Kirk" Edition

From Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's 6-10-26 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files":

The Justice Department had struggled with just how to dispose of the Epstein matter since the beginning of Trump’s second term. The issue was all-consuming for the president’s political base, but also potentially compromising for the president himself in ways that officials in the new administration didn’t fully understand. Any path forward would be fraught.

Some of that complexity was self-inflicted. In the engine room of the MAGA movement, the Epstein files were potent fuel. Elon Musk had used his social media platform to repeatedly question why a client list had not been released. Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance had invoked the Epstein files as a broader campaign message to argue that “powerful people” were hiding the truth from Americans. Tucker Carlson and the young conservative leader Charlie Kirk had each insisted that the government should release the documents and each floated the idea that there was an expansive cover-up in progress.

Trump himself had been cagey. On the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in September 2024, when asked about releasing the client list, Trump responded, “I’d certainly take a look at it,” adding, “I’d have no problem with it.” The list “probably will be” made public, he said, but he sounded less than enthusiastic. In private, Trump later told Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that a release of Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. He repeatedly insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the whole saga was “fake news” designed to harm him politically.

But his posture was overtaken by the growing frenzy among his supporters. Throughout 2024, Greene had made it her mission to force the release of the files. And there were so many others. The far-right influencer Laura Loomer, the conservative activist Scott Presler, Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok. But when it came to propagating the Epstein files as evidence of a “deep state” capable of evil, two podcasters were not to be outdone: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino.

Patel — a National Security Council director for counterterrorism and Defense Department chief of staff in the first Trump administration — had repeatedly claimed in podcast interviews that the government was hiding Epstein’s “black book” or client list, and he frequently asserted that the F.B.I. was deliberately withholding names to protect the powerful. Patel promised that a second Trump administration would release “everything” to restore public trust.

On “The Dan Bongino Show,” Bongino’s background as a Secret Service agent had lent authority to his claims of a cover-up. “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” he’d asked his large audience of MAGA devotees. The release of the client list would “rock the political world,” he predicted. The “Washington swamp” was “not telling you the truth.”

And so as they took office in 2025, Trump’s advisers were subject to intense pressures of their own making. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly made things much worse [...].

The relationships at the top of the Justice Department were by now beyond dysfunctional. At another July meeting, in [Susie] Wiles’s office, Bongino and Patel told the chief of staff they suspected that Bondi had leaked negative stories about them.

“Blondie fucked this whole thing up,” Bongino later told a confidant, echoing Loomer’s derisive nickname for the attorney general. “She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong. And I gave up everything.” Bongino complained that he had given up his high-rated show and millions of dollars, “and now it’s all disappeared, because people think we screwed something up with Epstein.”

Bongino paused.

“This is going to be President Trump’s Iran-contra.”

On July 12, the president took to Truth Social to defend Bondi against criticism and to urge his “boys” and “gals” to stop wasting “Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” Trump told aides he was very unhappy with some of his most influential supporters, including Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, all of whom were publicly urging the administration to come clean. Kirk had held a Turning Point USA event the previous day that turned into an Epstein grievance fest, with one speaker after another bashing Bondi over her handling of the situation. Trump had called Kirk and scolded him.

Nobody in Trump’s orbit had a better feel for the younger part of the MAGA base than Kirk, who saw that the Epstein cover-up, as it was now viewed, was capturing attention to an alarming extent. 

To read the entire article, click HERE.