As the 2020 campaign revved up, MAGA conspiracy theorists once again attempted to portray the Democratic Party as covering up elite crimes: note the triple parentheses around “Epstein” in this 2019 photo, symbols that identify Jeffrey Epstein as Jewish. Photo credit: Marc Nozell/Wikimedia Commons
We begin with a clip of Fox News host Laura Ingraham demanding answers from the Trump administration about the Epstein case at last weekend’s Turning Point USA summit.
In the News:
* Polling shows President Donald J. Trump underwater in every category, including immigration, and the stink has spread to the rest of the GOP. Fabrizio Ward, a Trump-leaning polling firm, warns that the generic Republican in a swing district is down 7 points among motivated voters. A central issue is the threats to Obamacare in the recent budget bill. Nearly 2/3 of Trump voters and ¾ of swing voters favor health care tax credits set to expire at the end of this year: extending the tax credit would give Republicans a 6-point edge in the 2026 midterms.
* On Tuesday, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he will run for Mayor of New York City as an independent following a stunning primary loss to State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Along with incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, that makes four major candidates on the ballot. Cuomo has promised a more energetic campaign than he delivered the first time around: we’ll see.
* Congress passed a budget rescission request from the President yesterday that, in addition to further foreign aid cuts, defunds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a non-profit media institution Republican presidents have long tried to kill. On Wednesday, Ann Philbin, former Director of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, was awarded the prestigious Getty Prize: she has given the entire $500,000 award to NPR and Los Angeles Public Media.
Today’s focus: former financier and accused predator Jeffrey Epstein lives on in the conspiracy theories that flourish among GOP extremists
* In 1964, Richard Hofstadter argued that conservatives are more prone to believe conspiracy theories. But research suggests that the partisan embrace of such beliefs depends on the conspiracy. A 2020 Pew Research study about election fraud conspiracies showed that while Republicans were more likely to believe in election fraud, the subset of Republicans that did not watch Fox or listen to talk radio were dramatically less likely to believe in those false narratives.
* Following her Turning Point USA, Laura Ingraham then went on air to parrot the Fox News line that there was no there-there.
* On Monday, House Democrats introduced legislation that would force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files; only one Republican voted for it. Republicans are now toying with a similar, but non-binding, resolution.
* Following last night’s Wall Street Journal scoop about the Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book,” Trump put out an order on Truth Social to release the Grand Jury testimony in the case.
* Steve Bannon warned that Trump could lose 10% of his base if he does not release the Epstein files, and translated that to 40 midterm House seats.
* Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, also a podcaster, threatened to resign, saying that he could no longer work with Attorney General Pam Bondi. He didn’t.
* Trump has made a public statement supporting Bondi, but insiders say she is on the hot seat.
* Former Fox star Megyn Kelly admitted the possibility of a Trump coverup on her streaming show.
* Trump has a talent for altering his base’s reality: why is it not working this time? Is the Epstein case different from other things he has lied to them about?
What We Want to Go Viral:
* Neil’s fave rave speaks to a number of issues we have discussed here, and whether all unjust laws ought to be decided by a Supreme Court that will always deliver a conservative opinion; see Duncan Hosie, “Liberals Are Going to Keep Losing at the Supreme Court,” The Atlantic (June 30, 2025)
* Claire is excited about ”My Mom Jayne” (HBO, 2025), a documentary by actress and filmmaker Mariska Hargitay about her mother, actress Jayne Mansfield.
Outro photograph of Donald Trump is by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Short takes:
* One demographic especially hard hit by the ICE raids in Los Angeles, according the Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark, are street vendors, who are now scrambling to support each other. The effects of these attacks are reverberating outward. An “attack on working immigrants is also an attack on the local economy,” Carrasquillo writes, “and while the economic effects of such actions might be less photo-ready than the scenes of violence, ICE’s abduction of street vendors (and intimidation of others) threatened their livelihoods. The consequences are now cascading outward into a community scrambling to help them.” (July 18, 2025)
* “What’s striking about Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson’s turns of phrase is that they employ what we typically regard as oral language—spontaneous, spoken words—in an extremely serious written text,” New York Times house linguist John McWhorter writes in an excellent essay about how the newest Associate Justice is dragging the law into the 21st century. “That choice and the blowback it encountered are a chance to consider the arbitrariness and narrowness of the conventions dictating how legal opinions should be written. The expectation that their language be timeless, faceless and Latinate is a matter of custom, not necessity.” (July 17, 2025)
* At Vanity Fair, a Tufts doctoral student, abducted by ICE and sent to a for-profit women’s detention center in Louisiana earlier this year, offers a first-hand view of her journey through Trump’s deportation machine. “All we wanted was to be seen as human again,” Rümeysa Öztürk writes. “We felt invisible, stripped of our identity as breathing and living human beings. One morning, we were head-counted seven times in the span of a few hours and woken up from our sleep to be lined up. Another time, we were forced to wait for nearly three hours in bed to be counted. During head counts, we communicated with our eyes, rejecting the dehumanization and silently agreeing that this is brutal. We longed to be recognized as more than just numbers, no longer reduced to figures in orange uniforms.” (July 17, 2025)
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