The View cohosts kept talking about the Jeffrey Epstein case on Tuesday’s (July 15) episode, even if certain other talk shows took Donald Trump‘s cues to stop doing so. This time, the cohosts reacted to the about-face certain MAGA-aligned celebrities and Republican officials have had, after Donald Trump issued a lengthy post calling for the subject to be dropped, and they concluded that the story isn’t going away even if he wants it to.
Whoopi Goldberg opened the subject by saying, “It looks like some conservators are getting behind You Know Who’s push to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Yesterday, congressional Republicans blocked the release of documents related to the Epstein case, and some leading conservative pundits the tune on demanding answers from the government.” She then reviewed footage of people like Laura Inagraham and Charlie Kirk issuing contradictory takes on the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein “files,” including the Department of Justice’s report that there is no “list” of high-profile clients for Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring. They also shared footage of leading House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries’ speech on the matter in which he stated, “Democrats didn’t put the Jeffrey Epstein thing into the public domain. This was a conspiracy that Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, and these MAGA extremists have been fanning the flames of for the last several years, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. The American people deserve to know the truth.”
Goldberg then asked her cohosts to weigh in on whether the Epstein reaction will die down, per Trump’s apparent wishes.
Alyssa Farah Griffin was the first to speak on the matter, saying, “I do not think it will go away.” She then pointed that Kirk reportedly got a call from Trump himself and added, “Clearly, the White House is reaching out to him, to Fox News hosts, and saying, ‘Let’s not make this a big story.’” However, she pointed to others who have so far not been dissuaded from talking about the Epstein case and said, “It just comes down to the fact that you cannot radicalize people for the better part of five years and say, ‘There is a grand conspiracy. This is going to take down the worst liberals you know. It is more far-reaching than you can imagine, and it is the worst crimes imaginable.’ And then just be like, ‘Actually, there’s nothing quite to see here.’”
“It turns out that when you spend years building a five-alarm fire, you can’t put it out by pissing on it,” Ana Navarro then agreed. “It’s the equivalent of Frankenstein, right? They built this monster. They so much fan the flames of this conspiracy, and now the monster is coming back for them, so it’s a little scary. And this is really the first time that I can think of where there has been a break with from the MAGA base with Trump that has lasted this long. This has outlasted how mad they were over January 6. This has outlasted the Access Hollywood tapes and the reaction to that, the fact that his FEMA failures have had catastrophic effects in Texas, the fact that his ‘Big Beautiful [Bill]’ now is going to take away their Medicaid. So this conspiracy that he built is the one that has led to this break. I think it’s awfully entertaining.”
For Sara Haines, she was just happy to see some agreement between the usually far apart political party members on this issue, saying, “The one thing that is somewhat good is that the right and the left seem to both agree — some part of the right — that pedophile rings are a bad thing, and they’ve been going on and getting away with things for a long time.”
After pointing to other instances of major pedophilia scandals, like the Franklin case and the case against certain members of the Catholic church, she added, “If you are protecting pedophiles, you are as bad as the pedophiles.”
“I do think that this is not going away because of the severity of what could be in these files and because of the severity of the crimes,” Sunny Hostin agreed. “But I will say what has been surprising to me that Democrats are embracing the politics of the situation, for a change, they’re actually taking it head on.” After pointing to Jeffries’ statement, she added, “I don’t think Democrats do often enough. They just sort of sit back and let it unfold and let Trump kind of control the narrative and change things around — not doing that this time. They even pushed a vote… There’s only one Republican that didn’t vote against forcing the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, and that is now part of the Congressional Record.”
Goldberg closed out the segment by saying, “I am gratified that people want this information. I’m gratified that they want this information. I wish they cared as much about the children who are being snatched off the streets…. I wish the passion that people are showing [applied to] the rest of the children who are not going to get their SNAP benefits, who are not going to get fed at school…”
The View, weekdays, 11 a.m. ET, ABC