We begin with a clip from a gaggle on Air Force One this week, in which a female reporter asked a follow up question about the Epstein files, and President Donald Trump responded by wagging his finger at her and saying: “Quiet, piggy.”

Image credit: miss.cabul/Shutterstock

This week, we had trouble with our internet connection, which resulted in the loss of much of what Neil’s valuable contributions to the second half of the show.

News Summary:

* A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 38%, the lowest it has been since he began his second term. He is five points underwater from November alone, but here are the numbers broken out: Only 41% of Americans approve of his handling of immigration; only 34% approve of his handling of the economy (Biden’s number at the end of his presidency), but down 39 points from January 2025. Marist shows Democrats with a 14-point lead on a generic ballot going into the 2026 midterms.

* The vote counting in Seattle has ended, and socialist Katie Wilson, cofounder of the Transit Riders Union and a politics newbie, has unseated incumbent Democratic mayor Bruce Harrell. She’s 43, and lives with her husband and toddler daughter in a 600 square foot rental: sadly, Seattle has no official mayor’s residence. Virginia Heffernan has made the argument that millions poured into fighting progressive and socialist candidates motivates young voters to move left.

* “He is a democratic socialist who once called for defunding the police. She is a data-centric billionaire heiress who has sharply criticized laws to relax bail.” That’s a quote from Wednesday’s New York Times about New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s decision to ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on, and her decision to do it.

* David Maltinsky, in training as a special agent at the FBI, was pulled from his class in October, three weeks before graduation. Why? Because he hung a Pride flag when he was a civilian tech employee at the agency’s Los Angeles office after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. Maltinsky, who is gay, is now suing the FBI and its director Kash Patel.

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).

You can get all audio content directly by subscribing for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.

Representative Thomas Massie (R, KY-04) has been crucial to mustering GOP votes for the bipartisan bill to release the Epstein files. Photo credit: Philip Yabut/Shutterstock

News focus: The accelerating Jeffrey Epstein scandal

* On November 12, the House Oversight Committee released a tranche of materials, among which were some 20,000 pages of emails that journalists and lookie-loos have been combing through. Committee Chair James Comer (R, TN-01) has accused Democrats of cherry-picking the documents to smear Donald Trump.

* This week, a bill demanding that the Epstein files be released in full, after languishing for weeks, headed to Donald Trump’s desk. It passed the House with only 1 no vote, Clay Higgins (R, LA-03), and the Senate passed it officially on Wednesday. Trump freed Republicans to vote for it after months of stalling, and said he would sign the bill because he has nothing to hide: he did. But in fact, the bill contains loopholes to protect “ongoing investigations,” which means evidence will continue to be concealed from the public.

* Some observers argue that Trump’s capitulation to the inevitable signals that he is losing his grip on his own party; journalist Michael Cohen believes that the vote to release the files is an inflection point for Trump and MAGA.

* One stress point to watch is Kentucky GOP Congressman Thomas Massie’s 2026 re-election campaign. President Trump is backing a challenger, but Kentucky’s soon-to-be senior Republican Senator, Rand Paul, has vowed to help Massie—who is taking a victory lap today—win re-election.

* Among the emails is a 2019 exchange between Epstein and Lawrence Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, former President of Harvard, and now a distinguished University Professor in Harvard’s Economics Department. In the exchanges, Summers, who had been married since 2004, sought advice about his pursuit of a young female economist, Keyu Jin. Jin took her B.A. and Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, and was teaching at London School of Economics at the time (she is now with the China Finance 40 Forum, a think tank.) Jin is also Chinese, which is neither here nor there, except that Epstein and Summers nicknamed her “Peril.” Summers “stepped back” from a number of his commitments, as well as teaching and administrative roles at Harvard, and says he is “deeply ashamed.”

* Nina Burleigh has identified a close relationship between Epstein and Trump whisperer Steve Bannon in the released documents. The emails also reveal that after their falling out, Epstein displayed open contempt for Trump, and at the same time, used his knowledge of the man to help other friends.

* Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, who pushed Epstein back into the news in 2017, xeeted out a list of documents that have not (and may not) been released, investigative files held by multiple federal agencies, including the CIA, DOJ, FBI and Homeland Security.

* Jennifer Weiner wrote a great column at The New York Times this week in which she argues that the Epstein scandal, in becoming a political wedge issue, has pushed the victims to the margins.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read Ruth Graham’s terrific piece about young, White men flocking to one of the most conservative branches of the Catholic Church, “Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts,” (New York Times, November 19, 2025).

* Claire wants you to pre-order Martha Ackmann’s new biography of an iconic country singer and a great American, Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton (St. Martin’s Press, 2025).

Short takes:

* Who’s got the money, honey? At The Bulwark, Andrew Egger unpacks Donald Trump’s newest phony international investment scheme. Trump’s murderous White House guest, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, supposedly agreed on camera to invest $1 billion in the United States. But guess what? MBS (the “BS” also stands for “bone saw”) made “monopoly-money promises,” Egger explains. “Saudi Arabia is a staggeringly wealthy country, but its entire GDP is something like $1.2 trillion. The country’s sovereign wealth fund contains an estimated $925 billion. The idea that MBS plans to sink the entirety of his nation’s accumulated petro-lucre into building factories in the United States is laughable on its face.” (November 20, 2025)

* AI may be changing the political landscape—not only with deepfakes, but also by the way data farms drive up consumer energy bills. In Georgia, “An AI data center construction boom across the state has caused consumers’ electricity costs to surge, leading voters to elect Democrats to state-level office for the first time in two decades,” Theodore Johnson writes at The Washington Post. “Political research finds that voters generally support their preferred party’s policy choices on issues with little public attention,” Johnson notes, “but their partisan loyalty frays on issues that command lots of public attention when representatives take unpopular positions. In one study, two political scientists studied ratemaking in Arizona, which has elected members to its public utilities commission for more than a century.” (November 19, 2025)

* When alleged sex trafficker and misogynist influencer Andrew Tate was arrested with his brother Tristan in Ft. Lauderdale earlier this year, it should have launched an investigation into the crimes they were accused of. Instead, when “the White House intervened on their behalf,” they were released, Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro report at ProPublica. According to Faturechi and Asher-Schapiro, “a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.” The Tates have also been charged in Romania, and in the U.K, where they are currently residing and hold dual citizenship. (November 18, 2025)

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