Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
A detailed new account reveals the full-blown panic in Trump’s White House over the Epstein files. The president also launched into an early-morning meltdown at Joe Scarborough for discussing that bombshell report. Inflation just hit a new three-year high, driven by high gas prices due to the Iran war. And a damning new report shows how paranoia and distrust is rampant inside Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon and crippling military operations.
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New Report Shows Trump Cabinet at Each Other’s Throats Over Epstein Files
The New York Times has a new bombshell Epstein report showing just how much chaos the Epstein files caused in Trump’s White House.
Last July, Trump’s most senior advisers filed into the White House Situation Room. But this time, the crisis on the table wasn’t a foreign threat. It was Jeffrey Epstein: specifically the revolt within MAGA over the files still being under wraps, and the Wall Street Journal’s soon-to-be published blockbuster report about a lewd birthday message to Epstein attributed to Trump.
Trump had called Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s CEO, and its editor in chief. He berated the editor and told her she must “hate America,” before threatening a lawsuit. But none of it worked.
JD Vance called the story “a huge problem.” He appeared to genuinely believe in some of the darker theories about Epstein and a hidden cabal of predators among the ruling class. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles would eventually call Vance a major conspiracy theorist. The vice president even floated the idea of having Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, hoping she’d publicly clear Trump.
His argued that Congress would eventually force the DOJ to release the files, and that it was better to get out ahead of the story and release everything — including anything mentioning Trump — and move on. But his colleagues weren’t buying it.
Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s former personal attorney, proposed petitioning the courts to unseal grand jury testimony, knowing they almost never allow it. If they refused, the president could blame the judges, preferably Democratic appointees. He suggested it was a way to appear transparent while making sure nothing got out. He also suggested having the Justice Department interview Epstein’s chief accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and release the transcript.
When the subject of pardoning Maxwell came up, several people in the room pushed back hard. White House spokesman Steven Cheung said it would be a catastrophic PR disaster. Deputy chief of staff James Blair was blunter, saying giving Maxwell a pardon would “undermine the entire point of her saying good things” and “feed the conspiracy theory.”
But the crisis was far from over.
Things continued to spiral out of control over the following months. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had already told Fox News in February that the fabled Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” and gave out binders to MAGA influencers. The binders turned out to be a PR flop, and Trump’s base felt duped.
Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino, who both promised the MAGA faithful on their podcasts that a second Trump term would expose Epstein’s world, were now left holding the bag. When surveillance footage of Epstein’s cell had a mysterious one-minute gap, the right’s online rage turned on them.
Bongino cursed out at Bondi in a Justice Department meeting. And when Susie Wiles accused him of leaking to ABC News, he offered her a hundred thousand dollars cash to prove it on the spot before storming out and calling the Epstein story “President Trump’s Iran-Contra.”
By November the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed both chambers with bipartisan support, which Trump signed into law. More than 3.5 million documents were eventually released. Trump’s name appeared more than 38,000 times. Flight records showed he’d flown on Epstein’s plane at least eight times between 1993 and 1996. Keep in mind that In January 2024, Trump had said he’d never been on the plane.
Trump’s team had spent a year trying to bury the Epstein story. They couldn’t. And now it could eat his presidency alive. When Richard Nixon’s people huddled to manage a scandal, they at least pretended it was about national security, but here the most secure room in the country, the one built to weigh genuine threats to the republic, got turned into a war room for protecting one man’s reputation. That’s the tell, because it shows you exactly whose interests this White House believes it exists to serve.
Trump Erupts at Joe Scarborough for Covering Epstein Report
Wednesday morning, as news broke about the New York Times report on the Epstein crisis, Joe Scarborough and his panel on Morning Joe promoted it on air. They talked up the authors, the reporting credentials involved, and plugged their upcoming book.
That was enough to send Trump scrambling to social media before 7 AM.
Less than an hour after the segment aired, Trump posted on his Nazi-infested social media site attacking Scarborough’s ratings and mocking his co-hosts, Willie Geist and Mika Brzezinski. The president called it “Low Ratings Disease.”
This is a pattern that’s worth naming. When embarrassing but accurate reporting surfaces, Trump doesn’t refute the substance of the report, but rather attacks the messenger. He can’t rebut the Situation Room meetings, the Bongino blowup, the missing surveillance footage, or the 38,000 references to his name in the Epstein files. So he talks about ratings instead. And that should tell you everything.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787 that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he wouldn’t hesitate to pick the newspapers. A president who responds to reporting he can’t disprove by mocking somebody’s ratings has that whole bargain exactly backwards, and somewhere down deep he knows it.
Inflation Hits New Three-Year High in Response to Iran War
Consumer prices rose 4.2 percent in May compared to a year earlier, up from 3.8 percent in April, according to the Labor Department. That’s the third consecutive monthly increase and the highest inflation reading in three years.
The main driver is gas prices. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply, pushed gas prices from about $4.04 per gallon in mid-April to $4.49 in mid-May. Prices have come down a bit since then, but the damage to May’s numbers is already done.
Higher diesel prices have also raised shipping costs. UPS and FedEx added fuel surcharges to deliveries. That’s affecting grocery prices, which jumped nearly a full percentage point in April alone and are nearly three percent higher than a year ago.
The political situation here is uncomfortable for Trump. He specifically appointed Kevin Warsh as Fed chair specifically because he wanted lower interest rates faster than Jerome Powell was willing to go. Now Wall Street is betting the Fed’s next move will be a rate hike, not a cut. Higher rates mean more expensive mortgages, car loans, and business loans.
Trump’s tariffs were already pushing prices up before the Iran war made energy more expensive. Now, these crises are stacking on top of each other.
Back in the early 1970s Richard Nixon leaned hard on Fed chair Arthur Burns to keep money cheap heading into his reelection, and the country paid for that favor with a decade of stagflation. Trump handpicked Warsh for the very same reason Nixon wanted Burns, and the lesson history keeps trying to teach us is that when a president bends the Fed to his own calendar, it’s ordinary people who end up holding the bill.
Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Consumed by Paranoia
A new report based on interviews with over a dozen current and former Pentagon officials describes a Defense department paralyzed by secrecy, paranoia, and distrust.
Hegseth has fired more than two dozen senior officers, pushed out the Navy secretary, and personally intervened in promotions across all four branches of the U.S. military. Troops have to sign nondisclosure agreements and submit to polygraph tests just to learn about ongoing operations.
One senior official bluntly said every decision was guided by: “’Is this going to keep the boss employed, or is this going to get him fired?’”
That’s not a culture of military precision, but of political survival.
Hegseth’s firing of Army Chief of Staff General Randy George laid it bare. He requested a meeting with Hegseth on April 1st. He was fired the next day over a phone call. Before he could even tell his own staff, CBS News had already posted the news on X. His staff found out from a tweet before they heard it from their general.
One official told CNN the mood was “somber,” and like “if someone had died.”
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll praised George publicly after the firing, calling him someone he deeply admired with 42 years of service and a Purple Heart. Hegseth wouldn’t explain the decision to lawmakers, saying only that it was hard to change a culture “with the same officers that were there.”
The officials who spoke to CNN say Hegseth kept military planners at arm’s length during the lead-up to the Iran war. His abrupt decision-making repeatedly caused problems for commanders in the field. One official said there is a “clear lack of process,” and that “everything is a case-by-case basis” because “there’s no trust.” Trump’s response at a recent Cabinet meeting? “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He loves war.”
That’s the whole problem summarized in two sentences. George Washington astonished the world in 1783 when he handed his commission back to Congress, establishing right at the founding that in this country the military answers to the Constitution and never to any single man. A Pentagon where careers rise and fall on whether you’ve kept the boss happy isn’t just dysfunctional, it’s a quiet betrayal of the bargain Washington made on all our behalf.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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