On SiriusXM's Young American with Dylan Douglas, Media Matters' Matt Gertz explains how the Epstein scandal is fracturing MAGA
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On SiriusXM, Media Matters' Matt Gertz explains how the Epstein scandal is fracturing MAGA
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From the July 26, 2025, edition of SiriusXM's Young American with Dylan Douglas
DYLAN DOUGLAS (HOST): Are these right wing influencers, I mean, -- obviously, like Joe Rogan, he was a Bernie Sanders fan back in 2016 and even, I think, maybe in 2020. And he obviously endorsed President Donald Trump, Trump came on the show, but then since then has sort of criticized him on some things.
Is some of the more new wave media that's coming out of TikTok, that's coming out of YouTube, podcast space, some of which bent towards Trump or leaned towards Trump or endorsed Trump in 2024 -- would you call that "conservative media?" I mean, of course, you have someone like Alex Jones or a Ben Shapiro, that's clear cut. But I guess what I'm asking is, is the new wave media, the non legacy media, as embedded with Trump world the same way that say Fox News is?
MATT GERTZ (GUEST): Yeah. It's a great point. I think there's pretty obviously distinctions that can be drawn here, between the sort of less purely ideological voices, in which I'd include Joe Rogan, and the more ideological voices like Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk or Benny Johnson, who are just going to be with Trump, ride or die. I mean, that is -- they have, I think, very different audiences. And, you know, I think the value that the sort of less ideological voices provide to someone like Donald Trump is being able to access an audience that is not already fully committed to him. Whereas, you know, someone like Charlie Kirk or Benny Johnson, their audiences are going to be 100% Trump voters. And so, you know, they're more of a full force multiplier, a get-out-the-vote operation.
And so that, I think, is actually why the Jeffrey Epstein bubble has been so interesting because it's the first case in which we've seen kind of sustained criticism and dissent of Trump's decisions, I think, since he came back into office.
DOUGLAS: And you see that, with your institute. It's real. It's not just hearsay, because obviously the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing, you know, a lot of people are interested because it's, you know, this horrific crime that happened. But it's tied to celebrities and it has that you know -- people want to hear the story, right? But you're seeing that it's truly making inroads in creating division points within what has been almost entirely a very united MAGA base.
GERTZ: Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I mean, so when we talk about Jeffrey Epstein, there's the story and then there's the discourse. The story as you say is this awful, disturbing story about a financier who sexually abused dozens, perhaps hundreds of underage girls over a period of several years, and then was able to basically get off from any real punishment thanks to his connections and his money.
And then you have a sort of layered on top of that a discourse story in which right-wing media figures basically went looking for an extension to QAnon, I would say. They saw that this idea of a Democratic ring of pedophiles, which is what QAnon is basically about, was getting a lot of attention. And they kind of superimposed it -- that, like, idea over the Jeffrey Epstein story, and built out this kind of complicated backstory in which Epstein was procuring girls for lots of other people, and that he perhaps had been murdered in prison, when he was, you know, investigated for a second time. And, so, what we see there is because those right-wing media figures had spent so much time and energy on that story, they -- they helped inculcate in their audience, the Trump base, this idea that there was something very major to be found there.
And then a couple of weeks ago, what happened is the Justice Department and the FBI put out this press release in which they said that they had reviewed all of the Epstein files, which the administration had promised to release, and that they had determined that there was no evidence of blackmail, that there was no client list, and that Epstein killed himself. And so many people within this right-wing commentary sphere looked at that and said, "Well, what's going on here? Because we've been saying for years that all of those things that the Justice Department is now saying didn't happen are true." And then Trump spends a week and a half trying to get everyone to shut up about it, which made them also very curious, like, "Why does Donald Trump not want us to talk about Jeffrey Epstein?"