Harry Enten: American people not buying Trump’s handling of Epstein files

Harry Enten: American people not buying Trump’s handling of Epstein files

This morning. The pressure is mounting on President Trump and the Justice Department to release all of the files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, after a House committee made public 20,000 more pages of documents. The House is now set to vote on the matter next week. And among those demanding full transparency survivors. Here is one of those survivors who talked to Erin Burnett. We need the government to release everything that’s in these files. Of course, with the appropriate redactions to protect the privacy of the survivors. But we really need this information to be out there so these crimes can be investigated. I think it’s really upsetting to us that this is so politicized when it’s not a political issue. This is a crime, and it’s a crime of sex trafficking. And, we really just want to see justice for the crime that happened to us. Survivor Liz Stein, they’re just asking for justice. CNN’s Harry Enten is here with us. Now, look, when you talk to that, you hear from the victims, and it’s very clear what they want. They’ve made that clear again and again. What does the American public think about how Donald Trump has been handling the Epstein files compared to all the other, issues that he brought up during the campaign? Yeah. You know, Donald Trump is underwater on basically every single issue he ran on in 2024. But the Epstein files, the Epstein case are especially dreadful for him. What are we talking about here? Let’s take a look at Trump’s an approval rating on the issue. Look, they’re all in red. They’re all in the negative territory. But on immigration, you know he’s five points underwater foreign policy eight points. Trade in tariffs. He 17 points. The economy 18 points. But look at the Epstein case. He is 39 points below water on the Epstein case. His net approval is 39 points in the negative. My goodness gracious. What Donald Trump has been selling on the Epstein files, the Epstein case, the American people simply have not been buying at all. Sara Sidner all right. So is there any sign that things have gotten better since there have been some things that have been released? Yeah, they’re released by Democrats. There have been some things that have been released. Donald Trump has been trying to make some sort of case saying that, you know, the folks don’t necessarily care about it, but take a look here. A proof of the Trump men on the Epstein case in early July, right. When you had the DOJ DOJ droppings, right. It was 17%. Look at we we were by late September, the latest poll. I can find it 20%. You know, we often talk about Donald Trump having this floor right about about 40% on this particular issue. He is less than half the level of the supposed floor he is. There’s just nobody. There is just nobody in the electorate who is buying this. They do not like the way that the Trump administration has been handling this case. One I Odah, Republicans have generally said they like what Donald Trump is doing. Generally speaking, how do they feel about the Epstein case? Okay. See, you see, you know, a proof of Trump on the Epstein case. This is overall right. You see 17%, you say 20%. That is way below the 40% flow that Donald Trump supposedly has. How does that possibly happen? It’s because of Republicans. Because look at this number, okay. Republicans who have Trump approve of Trump’s job as president, 87%. That is basically in line with the long term average, 85, 90, 95%. But look at the Trump admins job on the Epstein case. Just 45% of Republicans less than half of Republicans are even buying what the administration is telling. Look, it’s we’re not necessarily sure whether or not this case has moved the ball. On Trump’s overall approval rating. Yet, but I can tell you that the more that this case is in the news, the worse it is for Donald Trump, because, simply put, it is his worst issue by far. We could be seeing a vote on this next week. This case is not going away. And it is. It is not going away anytime soon. And that is bad news politically for Donald John Trump. All right. Thank you so much air Harry Enten. And now joining us is John Berman hopefully. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. He’s over there. I am so pleased to be with you today, Sarah. Thank you very much. With us now also is senior politics reporter for Axios, Marc Caputo. Marc, I’ve been really well, I’ve been reading for years. But overnight, your story on what’s been happening in the white House really over the last 24 hours. Plus, not every story is a process story. But boy, the process here is fascinating because of how the white House is handling this. Why are they doing what they’re doing? We can only speculate. And the speculation that circulates in Trump’s orbit, whether it’s some people around the white House, longtime advisers, confidants, is that Trump’s name in some way, form or fashion is in the Epstein files and that really bothers him, because he knows that if you have Trump and Epstein in a file, it’s going to be a headline and it’s going to dominate news coverage, social media discussion, be all over television. Just consider what’s happened here. There wasn’t a smoking gun in this tranche of emails that was released, yet. It’s just totally dominated everything. So imagine if there is an investigative file, a criminal investigative file or files where Trump’s name is mentioned in some form or fashion. Again, I don’t know what that former fashion is. It would be what we’re seeing now just on steroids. And what exactly have they been doing? There’s the stuff that CNN is reporting. We know about a Situation Room meeting with Lauren Boebert, but but what else is happening behind the scenes? Well, from what we understand, they’ve made a number of calls, including the president had played phone tag at one point with Nancy Mace, the South Carolina representative, and he doesn’t want this to, I’m sorry to use the phrase discharge petition. Most people don’t know what it is, but he doesn’t want this measure backed by Republicans, to go to the floor. But increasingly, it looks like that’s going to fail and there is going to be a full vote on it. Ultimately, Trump had decided in July that despite his campaign trail promise, despite the comments of his advisers, that now JD Vance or better said now Vice President JD Vance, Pam Bondi, now the attorney general, Kash Patel, now the FBI director on the campaign trail, they’re saying, oh, the Epstein files are going to be released. July rolls around in 2025. Trump says nope. And once that decision was made, it just sort of created the snowball effect. And Trump is living with it. Or I guess maybe a better phrase is karma. This is political karma, the law of action reaction. You promise you’re gonna do something, then you reverse yourself, and then it already becomes this massive political issue that just becomes very difficult to escape. And what’s the mood inside the white House over this? And how do you and you’ve done reporting on this? How do insiders feel about what would happen if they approached the president on different ways of managing this? Oh, the people I’ve spoken to who talk to the president say, look, we don’t talk about this with him because he’s just going to get angry and lose his temper. And as a result, that’s how you’re seeing or that’s why you’re seeing him act in this way. The white House is bothered by this release of emails from the Democrats because it was released in a strategic way, a political way to coincide with the ending of the shutdown. Also, the sort of most of, I don’t know, eyebrow raising email, the one from Epstein to Glenn Maxwell that the Democrats released. They purposely redacted the name of the victim. And from what we understand, that victim, Virginia Giuffre, was a person who was not a victim of Donald Trump and addition to that, had testified, had written, had spoken, had publicly said that Donald Trump didn’t sexually assault her. She didn’t know of Donald Trump sexually assaulting anyone and that she had good relations with Donald Trump. Friendly. And you know what? Legal, warm relations with him and the fact that the Democrats had redacted that really, really bothers the white House because the Democrats essentially sort of got one over on them and they spent an entire day on defense. And this is a white House that likes to drive the narrative, not have the narrative driven against them. But obviously they were in a situation where they were just on that defensive crash and on a back foot. You know what is interesting with the discharge petition, which does seem like it will go in, I use the words to. But this vote on the House floor, where the full House will vote on calling for the full release from the Justice Department of the so-called Epstein files. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be released, because then the Senate has to vote on it, and the president would have to sign it into law there so the president can stop this. The question is, why is he fighting so hard? Is it clear to you why he’s fighting so hard, therefore, and why he’s used so much capital and had speaker Mike Johnson use so much capital to keep this vote from happening, was that Donald Trump is if he doesn’t want something, he fights tooth and nail to make it not happen. And if he wants something, he does that as well to make it happen here. He doesn’t want it to happen, and he’s just going to fight tooth and nail. And it doesn’t matter how many sort of rakes he’s going to step on in the process and doing it, he fights. Sometimes the way he fights hurts him. You saw, for instance, and I referenced in the piece in Axios today in 2017 and the Russia investigation, if Donald Trump had sort of let FBI director James Comey go and just, you know, do some typical law enforcement work, it probably would have just blown over. But instead, Donald Trump fired James Comey, and that triggered the Russia investigation. Then there was Covid and the way he handled Covid. He got a lot of criticism, criticism for it. And so called that a hoax. And people don’t understand well, what’s he actually calling a hoax? The other day on Sunday, Donald Trump was asked about the affordability crisis on Fox News in a friendly interview, and he called the affordability crisis a con job. So Donald Trump reacts very negatively to criticisms and issues that reflect badly on him, or that his critics say reflect badly on him. And he doesn’t always react in a way that helps him. Sometimes he doubles down, or he gets so heavy handed that it winds up making the story bigger and making the story more negative for him. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here. Had he gone along with his campaign trail promise and released the Epstein files, or come up with a process to release them slowly and some sort of deliberative process, we probably wouldn’t be talking about this right now, but that’s not the situation that Donald Trump finds himself in, because this is sort of a debacle of his own making. As I said, every story is not a process story, but this one does include some of that, to be sure. Marc Caputo from Axios. Always a pleasure to read your work and have you on. Thank you.

CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten breaks down public support for President Donald Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. #CNN #News