Heather Digby Parton talks about her recent commentary, “Donald Trump’s Enemies List Keeps Growing,” the Epstein files controversy, his increasing number of “pay-to-play” pardons and convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists pardoned by Trump who have since been re-arrested for new crimes including child molestation, sexual abuse and threats to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
And so I read a thing today from JV Last at the Bulwark. I don’t know if anybody reads The Bulwark, but it’s got some pretty good stuff. And he said today that he thinks that the reason this happened is because the whole Epstein file thing, it comes out of a big conspiracy on the right. And that’s where Marjorie Taylor Greene comes from, the whole QAnon thing.
And that was always about this big international cabal of pedophiles and Hillary Clinton and Pizzagate and all this stuff was part of that. So when the Epstein files thing happened, it kind of hit them over the head with a two by four, because suddenly here it was, right? They’d been talking about this conspiracy for years, and suddenly here comes this story that did implicate all these people. Where this becomes a problem for Donald Trump, beyond the obvious, of course, which is that he was great friends with Epstein and is all over the files, no doubt, certainly all over the emails that we just saw released last week. But the problem for Trump, according to JV Last is that conspiracy theories, you’re either in or you’re out, you’re a believer or you’re not. And Trump’s on both sides of that. He’s always been kind of the conspiracy theorist president buying into all this stuff.
That’s one of the reasons why he’s so beloved by his MAGA following. And on this one, he’s in the conspiracy. So he’s been on the back foot here this whole time. He’s just does not seem to be able to find any place to control it. And I don’t think he still is, even though he’s now saying that he’ll sign the bill. I mean, everybody knows he could release the files tomorrow if he wanted to, but he clearly does not want them to come out. And that just of course spurs more suspicion that there’s something going on there.
So I thought that was an interesting sort of look at that. I don’t know if this indicates that there’s a real, this particular thing indicates there’s a real break within MAGA. There is a real break within MAGA, but it’s not this, it’s about Nazis and non-Nazis. There’s the big break in MAGA. Tut this one, I’m not sure if it signals it, but I do think that his attempt here to try and bring himself back into the MAGA-fold is an indication that something has gone very, very much awry among his own followers.
SCOTT HARRIS: I’ve been reading and I had some thoughts myself, of course, on the fact that the House and Senate could pass legislation to release the Epstein files. But of course, Trump has the veto power and it’s almost certain that the House and Senate would not muster the two-thirds votes in each house to override his veto. So this may be a deadend anyway.
Well, who was a Democrat when all this was taking place, Donald Trump, because he used to be one. So I don’t think that’s really the great excuse that he thinks it is. And in any case, last July, the Department of Justice came out with a big report that said that they had looked at all this, they had thoroughly investigated everything they had. They went over and they did, they sent in like 100 and some FBI agents to go and comb through the files in some site out in Maryland. And I don’t know if they looked at all the videos or what they did, but they actually did have people doing it and they came out and said there was nothing in there, and there was no reason to pursue any third parties. That they found no evidence, nothing that would “predicate any kind of investigation on any third parties.” That was just four months ago.
And so now they’re going to do a big investigation on all these people. The whole thing is just a setup. Try to keep the files out of the hands of the people. I dunno about you, but I am not thinking there’s going to be any big release of any files anytime soon. Maybe I’m just being a cynic.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, the doublespeak is not surprising, but I wonder if, as you alluded to earlier, whether Trump’s big supporters out there all these years are going to kind of just accept all this as a rationale for not releasing the …
So when Trump now is looking at potentially invading Venezuela and doing all this stuff down in the Caribbean and in Eastern Pacific with his drug war, that does not sit well with her at all. So if she is indicative of any part of the MAGA movement that is sort of sees themselves as purists, real MAGA, however you want to define that, I did suggest that this whole thing, this whole thing could end up dividing him from his people, which may be why he seems so panicked right now with the Epstein thing. All today, when he was talking about this whole thing to the press, he kept saying, “Alright, we can do the Epstein thing. We’ve got it. We’ll go ahead and release the files, but don’t talk about it because we want to talk about how great I am and how great everything’s going.” Only Trump would say something like that, but that’s what he’s concerned with, I think, is that it’s that not only is it dominating everything, but it’s making … maybe he’s worried that his own followers are having second thoughts as they’re seeing everything else.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, absolutely. As they open up their potential bill next January for their healthcare insurance. Wow, that’s a stunner really. We’re speaking with Heather Digby Parton columnist for Salon.com, and she also runs the daily blog at Digby’s Hullabaloo. This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris here and listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport and Heather, as you wrote about, there’s a long list of Trump’s perceived political enemies who he’s demanded his Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecute.
And on the other hand, Trump is using his pardon power to reverse the convictions of over a 1,000 supporters, including the 1,500 or so MAGA insurgents, i surrectionists, who he incited to storm the Capitol to reverse his 2020 election loss. Of course, that happened on Jan. 6, 2021. This is all of a piece of authoritarianism. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a noted historian on fascism and authoritarianism, talks about how of these dictators, they blatantly use their power to punish their enemies and protect their friends. Trump is following that playbook very closely.
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON: Very closely. I mean, it is by the book. The assault on the rule of law that we are watching happen. And of course, part of that authoritarianism is always in the name of enforcing the law, right? They’re always kind of walking around going, we’ve got to deal with the criminals and the communists, and God knows whatever else, whoever the “other” is in the enemy. But basically, it’s a complete devolution of the rule of law as we have known it and it’s coming from a dozen different directions. So far, the judiciary, at least at the lower levels and at the mid-upper level—save the Supreme Court—have been holding the line pretty well. We don’t know about the Supreme Court yet. They’ve done some things that really indicated that they were going to go the other way and join the authoritarian onslaught because of the way that they’ve dealt with the emergency docket and giving Trump the benefit of the doubt on almost every case, which is not the way it’s supposed to go.
And then you see Trump just blatantly using the Department of Justice, which is absolutely crumbling under this administration.
The piece I wrote that you referenced, I noted that Carol Leonnig, I think most people who follow this kind of stuff know who she is. She’s an investigative journalist formerly with the Washington Post, and I think she’s now with MSNBC and she just wrote a book. It’s about the sort of crumbling of the Department of Justice and whatever integrity that it once had. And when I first read the picked up the book, I thought it was about the current situation. It’s not. It’s about the first Trump administration, which I found very surprising. And it started then and there were still some backstops that kind of kept it going.
And then the Biden administration came in and Merrick Garland and his people in his very gentlemanly way went out of his way to sort of insist that things go back to the sort of deliberate, very cautious, very studied way of doing things, following the norms to the absolute “T”, always giving the benefit of the doubt to the presidency. And it was a disaster because it ended up delaying all the cases and it ended up rewarding people who didn’t deserve to be rewarded. And it’s brought us to where we are now. It is a travesty, and it’s very, very, very disturbing. It’s exactly what you say. I mean, this is the authoritarian playbook. Absolutely. And it’s scary to see this happening before our eyes.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, no, it is. And I was thinking about tariffs. Tariffs are another great opportunity to grift and to blackmail companies to say, “Hey, do something for me and I’ll take this tariff off.” And Trump is the sole decision maker on these tariffs. He wakes up one morning, he says, “Hey, a tariff on this, a tariff on that. I don’t like this. I like this.” It’s insane. There’s no rationale. It’s hard to even use words to describe what we’re living through.
