00:00How you view those comments, I mean, do you think that the president has allowed the optics of this to get away with him?
00:10I mean, you were sort of espousing some of the success stories.
00:13But as both of our other guests have said, this is what people are talking about.
00:18Look, Melinda, as far as the politics, Donald Trump is trying really, really, really hard to move on.
00:23OK, he's trying really hard. Again, this has not been handled well.
00:26Now, he did direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to try to unseal grand jury testimony.
00:30They tried. That came back completely unsurprisingly.
00:33And the court, Judge Rosenberg, earlier this week in Florida said that the grand jury testimony is sealed.
00:38Again, as a lawyer myself, totally unsurprising. That's typically how grand jury testimony goes.
00:43Now, we'll see how it plays out. I mean, there's there's going to be a little more runway to this story.
00:48I, for one, am personally disappointed that this is the way that it's been handled.
00:52To give Kurt at least a modicum of credit, it is definitely right that there have been some people that have been deeply animated in part of Trump's base about the Epstein story for a very long time.
01:02Folks like Cash Patel, back when he was on the outside, did talk a lot about this story.
01:06However, I think it is completely ludicrous, is ludicrous, I think, to suggest that this is one of the leading factors that Donald Trump's voters care about.
01:13Donald Trump's voters, you know, especially those those middle class, working class, blue collar voters in the proverbial or literal American heartland, care about the bread and butter issues.
01:22They care about the economy, jobs, inflation, immigration, crime.
01:26I mean, these are the issues that people voted on.
01:27And these are the issues that, frankly, the administration is delivering massive results in there.
01:32So, again, with a base as loyal, not just substantively, but personally to Donald Trump as this base says, by the way, the approval ratings are not nearly as catastrophic as Joel is making them out to be.
01:40There has been something of a drop in some polls, at least for Gen Z MAGA supporters, Gen Z Republicans.
01:46But overall, Trump's approval ratings with Republicans, according to at least some of the data, has actually increased since the Epstein saga started.
01:53So the polling is deeply mixed there.
01:55I think Trump is weathering this storm ultimately, effectively.
01:58It is definitely a storm, but he's weathering it.
02:00I think it's going to be smoother sailing in the fairly near future, if I have to guess.
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