Why Trump Can't Escape Epstein Forever: Wolff

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles to unpack one of the most confounding political inversions of the Trump era: the moment when lying stopped being a liability and became a source of power. Wolff argues that while past presidents were undone by exposed falsehoods, Trump’s credibility has never been weaker—and yet it has only strengthened him. Together, they examine how shamelessness, repetition, and brute insistence on an alternate reality have replaced truth as a governing tool, leaving institutions, media, and public protest strangely inert. From the collapse of shared reality to the media’s inability to name what’s happening in plain language, this episode digs into why transparent lies no longer undermine authority—and what it means when reality itself stops working as a check on power.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Nothing is going on besides Venezuela at this point.
0:04.0	This is a monster development in the Trump political life.
0:09.0	But Epstein, it never goes away. It always comes back.
0:14.0	I mean, I think the question to ask right now is what's the status of the, what were the remaining, the five million other documents that have not been released.
0:29.5	Michael?
0:30.8	Joanna Coles, could it be?
0:33.1	Oh, God.
0:33.8	Should we remind people who we are?
0:35.5	I'm very conscious that lots of new people join us every
0:39.5	week and we never really tell them what we're doing or who we are. I'm Joanna Coles from The Daily Beast.
0:45.2	We're two old friends who now find ourselves like perhaps all old friends as a podcasting team.
0:53.1	Possibly. And again, this morning I woke up, having had a calmer period, perhaps because
0:58.2	of the holidays and a slight break, waking up thinking, oh, God, are we slipping into an
1:03.9	autocracy? Is this all slipping away from us? Is this the moment when we should all be in the
1:09.8	streets?
1:19.1	And, well, no, and I, curiously, I woke up thinking exactly the same thing.
1:26.5	I woke up thinking, wait a minute, there is not the proper response to this. I mean, this is going off the rails, off the rails on a
1:31.0	daily basis, even more off the rails than we thought it was going. Right. We've now invaded another
1:37.8	country. We're talking about invading other countries. We've had this remarkable statement from
1:43.8	Stephen Miller, arguably the second
1:46.4	most important person in the White House, which is in any language, thinly veiled fascism.
1:55.7	And what are we doing besides doing a podcast?
	...

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