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The Daily Beast Podcast

Trump Knows Epstein Could Be His Mortal Threat

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.67.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2026

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles to trace how a president cornered by Epstein, ICE violence, collapsing polls, and mounting legal exposure responds the only way he knows how: by grabbing territory, media, and attention at scale. From the Foxification of CBS News and the quiet corporate bargain behind it, to Trump’s fixation on Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, and elite cities he loves to demonize, this episode maps a presidency fueled by distraction, intimidation, and an audience of one. Wolff unpacks why Trump’s pressure-point politics now extend from network newsrooms to foreign policy theater, why even loyal institutions are bending under threat, and why the nightmare Trump is trying to outrun—Epstein.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

The Epstein files are still dripping out.

0:03.0

I mean, the Justice Department, again, has announced that they've released, what, 2%,

0:07.0

and 98% continues to be...

0:09.0

There's another 5 million documents to come out, apparently.

0:12.0

And I had spoken to people in the White House about the progression toward Venezuela and Greenland,

0:19.0

but it was the recognition on Trump's part

0:21.9

that he had these significant problems,

0:24.4

including that fact that he has been unable

0:27.1

to stem the Epstein disclosures

0:30.7

and the demands for ever more information

0:34.7

about what happened with, specifically,

0:37.3

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.

0:42.5

Michael.

0:43.5

Joanna.

0:44.4

We have a new limerick from Garfried, although Garfried has yet to identify himself.

0:49.8

We've got a flurry of comments this week, a flurry, not a flurry, a snowstorm of comments.

0:56.1

A lot of people liking our Limerick Laureate.

0:59.1

The once was a ruler name.

1:00.1

And if you don't know, by the way, we have a commenter who regularly sends us limericks.

1:08.0

After each show, we get a limerick about us, about Donald Trump, about

1:14.8

Jeffrey Epstein. It's the world converges on these limericks. The world converges. And we should

1:22.6

remind people just in case Garfred is in New York and wants to come to see us live at the 92nd Street.

...

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