Hey, everybody, it's Alison Gill.

You'll notice I'm not in my regular studio.

I apologize for that.

I'm on vacation.

There wasn't going to be an episode of the breakdown this week because of that vacation,

but this news is too important, so I wanted to jump on and tell you about it.

The anonymous donor who made the $130 million payment to Donald Trump to give to the military is connected to

Jeffrey Epstein. This is The Breakdown.

Hey, everybody, welcome to The Breakdown. I'm Allison Gill. Let me show you how all of this

unfolded for me in the last day.

By Saturday morning, we all knew, because we'd heard from Trump himself, that some anonymous, wonderful, wealthy benefactor had donated $130 million to help pay the military during the government shutdown.

Something, by the way, that Mike Johnson can do and should do, because that's the legal way

to pay the troops during a shutdown, is to have it go through Congress because they control

the purse strings.

But Mike Johnson doesn't want to come back to work right now, so that's interesting, because

then he'd have to swear in Adelaide Grahava, and they'd have

218 signatures on the discharge petition to release the Epstein files. So my first thought was,

maybe this anonymous donor is tied to Epstein somehow, prompting him to help pay the troops

so that Mike Johnson didn't have to come back to work and do it the proper way.

It seemed plausible that rich men associated with Epstein might do anything to help prevent

Mike Johnson from coming back to work. Then I was like, no, no, surely not. No, that's so

transparently stupid, even for this administration. but never underestimate the idiocy of weak and

...