Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.
Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.
Michael Wolff on MAGA’s Revolt over Jeffrey Epstein
July 21, 202525min 4sec
The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after the financier was convicted for hiring an underage prostitute, for which he served a brief and extraordinarily lenient sentence, Epstein remained a playboy, a top political donor, and a very good friend of the very powerful—“a sybarite,” in the words of the journalist Michael Wolff, “in that old -fashioned sense [that] ‘my identity comes from breaking all norms.’ ” Wolff got to know Epstein and recorded, he estimates, a hundred hours of interviews with him. After Epstein was arrested again, in 2019, and was later found dead in his jail cell in what was ruled a suicide, it has been an article of faith within MAGA that his death was a conspiracy or a coverup, and the Trump campaign promised a reveal. Attorney General Pam Bondi initially asserted that she had Epstein’s so-called “client list” on her desk and was reviewing it, but now claims that there is nothing to share. Do the Epstein files have something incriminating about the President? “The central point from which this grew is the [Bill] Clinton relationship with Epstein,” Wolff tells David Remnick. But the MAGA believers “seem to have overlooked the Trump relationship [with Epstein], which was deeper and longer.” The men were “probably the closest friend either of them ever had,” until they reportedly fell out over real estate in 2004. Now Trump is frantically trying to control the narrative, pretending that he barely knew Epstein. This, Wolff thinks, “may be the beginning of Donald Trump’s lame-duck years.”
