On this episode of the CharlieKirkShow, host Charlie Kirk is joined by Mark Halperin to discuss the Epstein scandal, the Trump administration's response to it, and what it means for the future of the country.
00:00:38.000We have Pete Hegseth coming, Christy Noam, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingram, Ross Ulbricht, Byron Donalds, Tom Homan, Ben Carson, Brett Cooper, Michael Knowles, Brandon Tatum, Benny Johnson, Jack Pesobic, Riley Gaines, James O'Keefe, and more.
00:01:40.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, turning point USA.
00:01:47.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:24.000We're going to find out real quick whether or not we are a movement or this is just a moment.
00:02:30.000President Donald Trump won a popular vote majority.
00:02:33.000And when you are building and when you have won a multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-viewpoint coalition, it's inevitable that you have moments like what's happened the last couple of weeks.
00:02:45.000You're not going to be able to keep everyone happy, including I know a lot of you in the base right now.
00:03:14.000The whole thing was so perplexing to me because you sign the one big beautiful bill on Independence Day, and then on a holiday weekend, going into a news week, you decide to leak it to Axios that it's like, case closed, don't ask any questions, there is no list.
00:03:30.000The whole thing was like, profoundly confusing is the term I used on Newsmax.
00:03:35.000And again, trust me, I don't want to talk about Epstein every single day.
00:03:37.000But it's been very interesting because this week, sometimes news stories go away.
00:03:43.000Sometimes news stories kind of you have a one-day cycle.
00:03:47.000This is a rare occurrence where the news story is actually getting bigger.
00:04:33.000And the story started to grow and it had legs.
00:04:36.000The last 48 hours, this has been building to a crescendo.
00:04:41.000And I would much rather be talking about which we should be focused on, which is mass deportations, which is focusing on dismantling the administrative state, curtailing the size and scope of government.
00:04:53.000When you build a coalition like President Trump won in a popular vote majority, you're going to have different viewpoints.
00:05:00.000But an undercurrent of the entire Trump movement was that we demand transparency from our government because we were lied to during COVID and we were lied to about the Hunter Biden laptop and we were lied to about 51 Intel agents and we were lied to about Ukraine.
00:05:17.000We were lied to about so many different things that we want to try to rebuild trust in our government.
00:05:23.000What's been very interesting and instructive to me is that this is not only a young online libertarian transparency push.
00:05:32.000Instead, this seems like it's spanning multiple generations.
00:05:37.000And you and this audience have an email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, very ticked off and very confused.
00:05:44.000And this is going to be a testing moment for all of us.
00:05:49.000What we do next is going to be critically important.
00:05:52.000Radical transparency has always been the hallmark of the Trump administration.
00:06:41.000But let's take a broader step back, though.
00:06:45.00050 years from now, the most important two fights of whether or not this administration and this presidency will be a success are whether or not we can recalibrate the administrative state and dismantle it down to the bone and to the core, and whether or not we can have 15 to 20 million deportations.
00:07:05.000That is what will determine the future of the country.
00:07:08.000And at that moment, this is where coalition politics matters.
00:07:12.000Because for coalitional politics, you know, some people are upset because we're sending more arms to Ukraine.
00:07:17.000I'm certainly not thrilled about that.
00:07:19.000Some people are upset because of what happened between Israel, Iran.
00:07:24.000Honestly, I think President Trump handled that beautifully, and I think that was a masterclass in a third way of foreign policy.
00:07:31.000But all of this is happening at such a time where the fault lines, and every movement has fault lines, are being exposed in a rapid period of time.
00:07:41.000It's as if this is compressed into a short 10-day window, and no movement can sustain that.
00:07:47.000No movement can sustain within a 10-day window, we are going to flush out all the fault lines.
00:07:52.000And the tragedy, honestly, is that a week ago, President Trump signed his Hallmark piece of legislation that deserves a lot of attention.
00:08:00.000And a week later, no one's talking about the Big Beautiful Bill.
00:08:03.000It should have been a week of celebration.
00:08:06.000It should have been a PR week all about this.
00:09:56.000By the way, this is all on the heels of a very high-pressure transition after the highest stake presidential campaign ever seen after President Trump got shot.
00:12:01.000That's mypatriotsupply.com slash kirk and grab your three-month emergency food kit today with lightning fast free shipping.
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00:12:17.000And part of that shock and awe is that I think that anything that is not proprietary, anything that does not involve the trafficking of kids, at least give us some of the elements of the Epstein stuff.
00:13:21.000We're declassifying just Russia Gate, crossfire hurricane.
00:13:27.000And then do a series of executive orders, go further to break the college cartel, authorize some sort of a military cooperation against the actual cartels, and then sit at the resolute desk and say, we are now marshaling back our focus to this hemisphere.
00:14:39.000Do you understand that when they fly in Air Force One, the entire staff doesn't fly when they go, they don't sleep when you go to Saudi Arabia.
00:14:48.000You're literally sleeping on the floor.
00:16:22.000All of a sudden, say, I'm calling a press conference and you have, can we get that picture of Shotgun 1.0 where he just had folders stacked and he within an hour and a half and he was casually with his Sharpie signing.
00:16:36.000Oh, there's an executive order on that.
00:16:38.000People have been waiting a long time on that.
00:17:10.000I want to see White House aides flood into the oval with the most based, crisp, imaginable executive orders on every possible topic, border, deportations, Sanctuary City mayors, college cartel, school choice, public sector teacher unions.
00:17:28.000We need to keep President Donald Trump right back there on a transparency blitz and an executive order blitz.
00:17:34.000Reorient, recalibrate, and reassert dominance over the executive branch.
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00:20:00.000And if you want to know why I'm not, as is our usual practice, wearing a ripped and wrinkled t-shirt, it's because I had your cousin, I mean, your friend Michael Knowles on my podcast today.
00:20:10.000And as you know, he's an Ivy League dweeb.
00:20:17.000Okay, so there's at least four reasons why you would think the president and the administration would be doing full-on disclosure.
00:20:25.000First, it's the right thing to do for the victims.
00:20:28.000Second, they promised that they would be transparent about this.
00:20:33.000Three, the MAGA movement, as best we can tell, certainly men of its leaders like you are for it.
00:20:39.000But certainly, I surveyed the, asked everyone on Tuway this morning on the morning meeting, go in the chat if you're a three-time Trump voter, say what you think they should do and a very pro-disclosure.
00:20:51.000And four, you know, they've handled it badly in so many ways.
00:20:57.000And just the politics of it suggests that the way to recover from such a poor handling of it would be to comply with the other three things.
00:21:12.000Either they're trying to protect people or there's an intelligence connection that they're trying to protect, as best I can tell.
00:21:21.000I struggle, despite what I said about the two-way community, I struggle with knowing whether there's political damage here for the president in the midterms.
00:21:30.000People say, you know, there won't be turnout in the midterms or his approval rating will go down.
00:21:47.000There are a lot of leaders, including some MAGA leaders who often disagree, who seem to agree on this.
00:21:52.000There's not much support for the president's position, except for people who he hired.
00:21:57.000So I don't really know where it's going or how much damage it will do.
00:22:00.000But I do think that the two ledgers, the two sides of the ledger seem pretty clear.
00:22:05.000And it's incumbent upon them to not put out a statement or say some things on the fly, but to have a long and detailed explanation of why they're choosing the course they're choosing, because the way they've done it so far is only arousing suspicion.
00:22:20.000Based on your reporting, did the Trump administration think it would go away after a day or two with this kind of Sunday night leak strategy?
00:22:30.000And of course, as you know, they're leveraging the credibility of the director of the FBI and his deputy, two people who previously were in the camp of saying there needs to be disclosure and concerned about a conspiracy.
00:22:43.000So I think they were trying to leverage them.
00:22:51.000Part of the issue here is while MAGA media is quite interested, the dominant media, inexplicably to me, is not interested.
00:23:01.000Even though you've got now House Democrats writing a letter to the president saying he should put all this stuff out, I don't know why the press isn't interested in the story.
00:23:08.000It's a compelling story, just as a story.
00:23:11.000The whole thing is, but including this latest episode.
00:23:16.000But also the fact that Donald Trump is split from MAGA.
00:23:20.000So there are a lot of stories about the MAGA split, but there are not a lot of stories on TV, especially where Donald Trump pays attention, even though he doesn't like the dominant media.
00:23:30.000There are not a lot of stories there about the underlying question, which is where is justice for the victims?
00:23:36.000And so part of why they didn't think they'd pay a political price and part of why I don't think they're as concerned as they might be is this is a big topic of discussion on Megan's show, on your show, on X, but it's not a dominant conversation in the country at large in a way that would put more pressure on them.
00:23:59.000I think that it's growing, at least yesterday I started to get non-political-ish people start to reach out as it's starting to penetrate more circles.
00:24:07.000So again, I don't want to spend our entire conversation on this, but I do find it to be interesting.
00:24:13.000I would say the last point on this, and we'll go to another topic, is this is one of the few instances, and maybe you can correct me, where it seems as if the president is 180 from his base.
00:24:24.000The only one I could think of is maybe the vaccine and the years after that, when he would go to rallies and sometimes get murmurs and even booze at times.
00:24:33.000Can you think of other examples potentially and how do those usually rectify?
00:24:39.000They just kind of go away as they're an addressing.
00:24:42.000Well, I know you want to move on, and I've got so much to say about the thing he's just passing, but well, okay.
00:24:48.000So first of all, he's certainly adverse with the base on amnesty, path to citizenship, path to legal status for people who came to the country illegally.
00:24:58.000So that's another one right now where he's at least flirting with doing it differently than the base.
00:25:06.000So my monologue on my show today is about how Donald Trump makes decisions.
00:25:12.000And I think he's an extraordinarily underrated decision maker.
00:25:15.000And he's extraordinarily different than the other presidents I've covered in many of the ways he makes decisions.
00:25:21.000And one of those things is no decision's ever final.
00:25:25.000He'll make a decision, and then he'll make a different decision.
00:25:28.000And sometimes it's 180 degrees different in response to it.
00:25:32.000I know that the people who feel passionately about this feel passionately about it.
00:25:40.000Number one, it doesn't affect their lives directly.
00:25:44.000You could say that it affects their trust in the president or their trust in his commitment to transparency or justice.
00:25:51.000But in the end, it doesn't affect their pocketbook directly.
00:25:54.000It doesn't affect their daily lives directly.
00:25:56.000And so I think the chances of it, so the Risks of being at odds with some of MAGA are lower.
00:26:04.000Number two, whatever reason caused them to choose the course they've chosen so far must still be there.
00:26:13.000I was quite struck, I've said this several times already.
00:26:16.000The way he tried to shut the reporter down, asking about the other day, I thought was a massive tell.
00:26:21.000It wasn't his usual, you're the fake news, you're asking questions that don't matter.
00:26:25.000Because as you point out, this does matter to a lot of people who care about him and who he cares about.
00:26:31.000But if he simply sticks to whatever rationale he has for the course he's chosen and other news occurs, which has already happened, and it never catches on with the mainstream dominant media, and if he can please MAGA some other way, I think he could stick to this.
00:26:49.000And again, I'd say, I'd like him and I'd like the attorney general and the FBI director, I'd like them to explain not just the facts of what they did better, but the reason for what they did better.
00:27:00.000To say there's nothing to see here, we all know anyone who's followed this at all knows that's not true.
00:27:06.000So I think that MAGA is very understanding when the president explains things, but he hasn't explained it.
00:27:14.000And so, yeah, again, in the attempt to move on, we're going to stay on the topic.
00:28:05.000Let's get them on a Zoom and let's let the White House hear their voices because the fact that young people care about this more than older people, which you and I are hearing anecdotally all over the place, I'd love to give voice to that because that is the big issue.
00:28:21.000And again, I'm not minimizing the responsibility our society has to the victims at all.
00:28:26.000But the longer term issue that runs parallel to that is trust in government.
00:28:31.000And it's a thing that needs to be put in sharper relief.
00:28:35.000Younger people really care about this more than older people in general.
00:28:39.000And the reasons for that relate, at least in part, to their incredulity that a government, particularly a government if they're MAGA, who they voted for and trust, could so fundamentally betray what they thought was going to happen and should happen.
00:28:56.000Let me just elaborate more is that this is a generation that they view they have been wronged by every power institution as long as they have been alive.
00:29:08.000Well, the reason I want to do this so much is because it's crazy.
00:29:12.000We live in a society with all this media and you've not heard that a single place, right?
00:29:18.000Like one or two voices maybe on your show, my show, somebody you and I have talked to, but the country needs to see 12 young Trump voters saying, Mr. President, this is wrong.
00:29:42.000And I'll tell you, it's a more structural issue because what I am concerned about, and I trust everyone, I trust Cash and I trust Bongino and I know them quite well.
00:29:55.000But I care about keeping the coalition together as a MAGA guy and as one of President Trump's greatest defenders on a daily basis, multi-platform, that I am concerned that the coalition that we have built, especially under 30, is going to be put in jeopardy.
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00:33:36.000I'd say the same thing about the Hunter, the Joe Biden acuity thing and the doctor taking the fifth.
00:33:43.000If I were running a news organization like the New York Times or NBC News, with the exception of continuing to cover the tragedy in Texas, I would have led with those two stories.
00:33:52.000Those are massive stories, and yet they're barely covered today.
00:33:56.000And I normally can explain the press's behavior.
00:34:13.000Jamie Raskin, your favorite House Democrat, I believe.
00:34:16.000I know you like Nadler too, but Jamie wrote, Jamie wrote a letter with five or six other House Democrats sounding like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon saying, you know, everything should be released.
00:34:32.000And again, I would think the press would write about that.
00:34:34.000And there was a little bit of coverage of it.
00:34:35.000But here you have a rare moment of bipartisan moral clarity saying this needs to be done for the sake of trust in government and the sake of transparency and sake of the victims and a shared populist line that elites should not be protecting elites.
00:35:00.000That's what I think this Epstein thing is a unique example where there's like five or six elements that kind of combine because it does have this.
00:35:08.000Not only was he a creep and a pedophile, which has there has been a yearning in the right-wing base that there has been some pedophilic activity that has not been held accountable.
00:35:21.000As you know, that has been a legitimate concern for over a decade.
00:35:25.000And then number two, that he probably was an intelligence asset, either for the American government or for MI6 or for the Saudis or for Mossad or whatever, right?
00:35:38.000Number three, of course, the way he died, which was not exactly transparent.
00:35:43.000And then, of course, like what you, he's a billionaire or allegedly.
00:35:48.000So there's this populist thing, which is like, oh, if you have money, you can buy your way out of no matter what evil actions that you are in.
00:35:56.000And that the elites will protect each other.
00:36:18.000And, you know, one of the things that I work as hard on as anything as a journalist is I've lived in Boston, Washington, and New York my whole life, okay?
00:36:27.000But my obligation is to not reflect the point of view of those three elite places.
00:36:31.000And yet, when I say the obligation to the victims and when I say the responsibility to not have elites protect elites, I feel it in my core.
00:36:44.000Like, that is a human resonant thing for me, in part because I feel both things myself, but in part because I know tens of millions of people around the country feel it passionately.
00:36:55.000And to have this administration, which promised otherwise to not do it, just is going to incite the worst speculation about what the motive is.
00:37:06.000And elites protecting elites is not great.
00:37:08.000Transparency is the answer here, and it's not too late to fix it.