Transcript: Tucker Carlson’s Harsh New Takedown of Trump Rattles MAGA
Sargent: So you’re monitoring this stuff pretty closely. You just listened to Glenn Beck—better you than me. Now you say that the audience is on the verge of tears over the Epstein scandal and the way the Trump administration is covering it up from their point of view. Where are these audiences with regard to Trump? Are they telling themselves that Trump is at the core of this cover-up as well? That’s where it really breaks down for me in trying to understand what’s going on with these people. How do they square that circle with themselves? Trump is infallible, yet his administration is covering up the Epstein scandal, which is the biggest scandal of the last 50 years in their view. How do you make sense of that?
Hemmer: This is where all of the chaos is coming from because people are trying to figure out where to fall on that issue. Some folks have said, Look, Trump has betrayed us. The only way that he could possibly ever win us back is by changing his position on Epstein and releasing everything. And by releasing everything, they mean releasing documents that prove that [they] were right about the Epstein conspiracy. And then they go further and they say, Well, if he’s not willing to do that, then it is because he himself is implicated in these Epstein files. So that’s one group who’s like, We’ve just been betrayed.
Others are like, I know I should trust Donald Trump, but he has let somebody like Pam Bondi, the attorney general, make all of these mistakes and hide all of this material from us. And he’s not stopping it. And in fact, he’s going on Truth Social and defending her. I don’t know what to do with this. And this is, in fact, where people like Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly are with their audiences. They’re like, Look, we’re not attacking Donald Trump, but how do we make sense of this? And then you have people like Charlie Kirk, like Scott Adams—the Dilbert-cartoonist-turned-influencer—who say, Look, this is the way government works. We voted for Donald Trump. We have put our trust in him. He has earned our trust. He took a bullet for us. How dare you question him? That’s the range of reactions. And the person who is able to reconcile those different groups is the person who is going to come out of this stronger.
Sargent: So you mentioned that Trump is out there defending Bondi. You’re referring to a tweet that Trump unleashed over the weekend. It was this long rant in which he tried to tell MAGA, Forget about this Epstein stuff already. And Trump blamed Dems for it, saying “they created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.” Nicole, what’s amazing about this is this bottomless contempt Trump has for MAGA. MAGA spent years claiming something nefarious had happened with Epstein’s suicide. That was how the Epstein files came to be. They created it. MAGA created it, right? And now Trump is just essentially saying, Forget what you’ve said for years. Just blame it on Democrats. Hah.
