Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melba. I also want to say, good to be back with everyone. I want to give a special thanks to Melissa Murray and Antonia Hilton, who sat in. If you happened to catch any MSNBC in the last week or week and a half, they held down the fort on this program to great effect, working with our team and our guests and experts and journalists. So thanks to them. I'm back with you.

And as I was saying, Nicole, happy to be back. Plenty going on. We begin with Trump slipping into

what has become the unlikely political quicksand. As you know, you follow the news. There have been

many controversies and policy problems and failures in these first 150 plus days of the Trump administration. But the political

problem that clearly is the largest for him on the center right, the right, and now engulfing

really his entire DOJ is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Today there are new reports. Trump is, quote,

fuming at the uproar taking down him, his agenda, his presidency at this point. And while there are new reports. Trump is, quote, fuming at the uproar, taking down him, his agenda,

his presidency at this point. And while there are many different ways to cut up this scandal,

what you can see very clearly is that this one has virtually no typical defenders of the president.

One podcaster says it is Trump's biggest bipartisan scandal this year, meaning that the outrage

runs from the MAGA right to the center right where there are sometimes critiques of Trump,

to Republicans who are never with Trump to begin with, to the center left, to the far left,

to legal experts, the press has been all over the story from the Wall Street Journal,

the Washington Post, New York Times, all across TV.

Demands for information coming from elected Democrats and Republicans and MAGA leaders.

And now the disturbing comments from Trump today, while he's in Scotland, he was faced with these Epstein questions.

When you were the president, the job goes with you. And even a master of PR distraction like Donald Trump has found he cannot get away from this story, even if there are credible accusations that he and people in his administration are abusing power, cooking up fake stories and fake investigations just to try to get anyone talking about something else. It's clearly not working. It's not working

tonight on this broadcast, for example, because we always try to just follow the big stories and facts,

not the bouncing ball distractions, but quite frankly, it's not working in general. And when you deal

with someone tied to this sex trafficking scandal, the person who has faced the largest legal

accountability, Jiselae Maxwell, Epstein's co-conspirator,

it would be baseline obvious for any responsible leader in any party to say that justice is served

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