Senator Chris Van Hollen on the Epstein Files, and the Leadership Crisis in Washington
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I'm David Remnick. Right now in Washington, both parties are experiencing a crisis of leadership. Last week, when Donald Trump threw up his hands and told Republicans to vote on releasing the Epstein files, it was a humbling defeat for him, an admission that at least on this one issue he had lost control of MAGA. He tried to sideline Marjorie Taylor Greene, and so far that hasn't worked either.
The movement is just deeply conflicted over everything from the Epstein affair to whether or not it's okay to be allies with the likes of Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and an anti Semite. At the same time, if the Democrats are going to mount any resistance at all to the Trump administration, they need unity, and that continues to escape them. Whatever you may have thought of the government shutdown as a political strategy, the end of that shutdown the defection of eight Democrats who voted with Republicans really deepened a sense that the leadership is flailing. Calls for Chuck Schumer to step down as minority leader are now a commonplace.
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