This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Right now in Washington, both parties are experiencing a crisis of leadership.

Last week, when Donald Trump threw up his hands and told Republicans to vote on releasing

the Epstein files, it was a humbling defeat for him, an admission that at least on this

one issue, he had lost control of MAGA.

He tried to sideline Marjorie Taylor Green, and so far, that hasn't worked either.

The movement is just deeply conflicted over everything from the Epstein affair to whether or not

it's okay to be allies with the likes of Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite.

At the same time, if the Democrats are going to mount any resistance at all to the Trump administration,

they need unity, and that continues to escape them.

Whatever you may have thought of the government shutdown as a political strategy, the end of that shutdown,

the defection of eight Democrats who voted with Republicans, really deepened a sense that the

leadership is flailing. Calls for Chuck Schumer to step down as minority leader are now a commonplace.

I sat down recently to talk about all of that with Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.

Then Holland began serving in the House in 2003, and he went to the Senate in 2017.

He's trying to steer a path between the left of the party and the party's establishment,

and he's used the word spineless to describe some of what he sees from his Democratic colleagues.

Senator Van Hollen, we have to begin at the beginning here.

The Epstein case keeps charging along, and now both houses of Congress have nearly unanimously

passed legislation ordering the release of those files, the Epstein files.

How can we trust that the Trump White House and the DOJ

will in the end provide all the information? Well, I'm not sure we can trust them. In fact, I don't

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