This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

President Trump's propagandists are getting more frantic in their efforts to spin away the scandal around the Jeffrey Epstein files.

White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt, unsurprisingly, offered the most creative spin of all,

basically throwing the FBI under the bus. But House Speaker Mike Johnson followed a close second,

casting Trump's position on the files as the height of transparency. All this comes as Trump's

approval ratings have just hit a new low, and those things are related.

The Epstein scandal, though it might appear disconnected from people's everyday lives, is perfectly

suited to damaging Trump in all kinds of hidden ways.

We're talking about all this today with data analyst G. Eliot Morris, author of The Strength in Numbers Substack, who has a good

new piece probing how the Epstein fiasco is weakening Trump. Elliot, good to see you. Hey, thanks for

having me back. So the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump drew a lewd, doodle,

and Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday album, along with some cryptic prose.

Trump denies it.

As a reminder, MAGA spent years promoting the idea that Epstein's client list would expose a massive pedophile ring among Democrats.

Now, Trump's DOJ suddenly said, oh, there's nothing here.

Yet, in fact, there are actual questions about whether Trump is in there or not.

Elliot, you wrote the other day that the scandal by itself is taking a toll on Trump's approval.

Can you walk us through that argument?

Sure.

So at Strengthen Numbers, My Substack, what we like to do is look at an average of all polls over a certain amount of time. And, you know, while there's some noise in the data, when there's a clear shift in how people feel about the president in a short amount of time, we can, like, be reasonably confident that we can attribute that to certain events. So since July 13th, there's been about a two percentage point increase in

Trump's disapproval rating from 52.5% of the public saying they disapprove of the job he's doing

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