I Know Truth About Why Epstein and Trump Fell Out

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles for part two, continuing their forensic account of Donald Trump’s long, combustible friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Drawing on years of interviews and firsthand reporting, Wolff argues that Trump and Epstein were not casual acquaintances but intimate allies, bonded by money, sex, models, and a shared outsider resentment of New York’s elite. The episode traces how that alliance curdled into rivalry and fear—through real estate betrayals, private planes, kompromat, and the moment Epstein believed Trump turned the authorities on him. Wolff details why Epstein obsessed over Trump even after their rupture, why other powerful men fell while Trump survived, and how Epstein’s arrest and death intersected with Trump’s presidency. If Epstein was the man who knew Trump best, what does it mean that this is the one story that still visibly unnerves him?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	He was the best friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and their friendship was clearly over women.
0:07.1	What we can say is that for over 10 years, Donald Trump lived the life of a sleazeball,
0:13.4	lived a life that I think, if people understood, would have disqualified him from the presidency.
0:24.6	Michael.
0:26.3	Joanna.
0:27.3	For new people to inside Trump's head, we are...
0:33.6	We have no idea who we are.
0:35.0	We have no idea who we are.
0:36.0	I was just going to say...
0:36.9	We're just... We've just parachuted in.
0:40.1	We're parachuted into inside Trump's head.
0:42.8	This is, I was going to say volume two.
0:46.0	It's the second episode in a special we are doing on the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and our president, Donald Trump.
0:57.8	And I am Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of The Daily Beast, and why don't you
1:02.4	introduce yourself for anybody living under a rock who doesn't know who you are?
1:07.4	I'm Michael Wolfe, and I have written four books about Donald Trump. So I have spent the last
1:14.1	10 years of my life inside Trump's head, a fearful place. I have also had a long relationship
1:25.2	with Jeffrey Epstein, who I began interviewing in 2014 and continued through
1:31.7	to when he was arrested in 2019. Do I know more about Jeffrey Epstein than anyone else on
1:41.6	earth? I don't know if that's true, but it is possibly true.
1:46.4	And I have been variously pilloried for this and sought after.
1:55.4	So, but we are, I have always thought that one of the, of a fundamental point here is that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, the president of the United States, once, twice, who knows, were the closest of friends.
	...

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