The Daily Beast Podcast

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles as Trump aids declare the White House an “Epstein-free zone” where his name cannot be spoken. Wolff reveals how Trump’s go-to tactic of personal attacks and distraction still works just enough to avoid answering the one question he can’t touch, why the Epstein revelations are quietly reshuffling internal crises, and how figures from Deepak Chopra to Peter Mandelson to Silicon Valley’s self-styled gurus keep orbiting the same corrupt universe. Then comes Trump’s most compulsive, self-destructive obsession yet: his push to rebrand the Kennedy Center, justified by his own near-assassination fantasy and driven by a need to overwrite history with his name—even as artists flee, audiences vanish, and the politics make no sense. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joanna Coles speaks with Jason Zengerle, author of "Hated By All the Right People," about how Tucker Carlson went from dodging Donald Trump’s phone calls to becoming one of the most powerful forces shaping Trumpworld. Drawing from Zengerle’s new book, they unpack Tucker’s unusual method of influencing Trump through television, his spectacular fallout with Fox News, and why being fired may have supercharged his relevance. The conversation traces Tucker’s early skepticism of Trump, his carefully managed realignment to Trump, his role in boosting JD Vance, and how he helped mainstream Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian playbook while flirting with Putin apologism. Coles and Zengerle also explore the deeply personal roots of Tucker’s worldview, including his fraught relationship with his mother, who left when he was a child and later cut him out of her fortune—an abandonment that may help explain his hunger for control, audience, and power. Is Tucker a cynical opportunist, a true believer, or something more unsettling—a movement leader with ambitions that stretch well beyond media? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles as Trump predictably lashes out in the fallout from the Epstein files—targeting Wolff as his latest nemesis, threatening lawsuits he can’t afford to file, and insisting the real conspiracy is against him. They unpack Trump’s rambling, defensive response to questions about Epstein flights, island denials, and the newly resurfaced claim—now echoed in official documents—that Epstein introduced Melania to Trump, a detail Trump world once tried to bury with billion-dollar legal threats. From Bill Gates and elite denial to Epstein’s role as an information broker, the conversation widens to Trump’s current obsession: federalizing elections, re-litigating 2020, and quietly laying the groundwork to undermine the 2026 midterms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Rothkopf joins Joanna Coles for a blistering, wide-ranging conversation about a presidency defined by vulgarity, fear, and damage—starting with Rothkopf’s searing argument that Donald Trump is the ugliest expression of American power yet. From the White House’s gilded excesses and the planned hollowing-out of the Kennedy Center, to the Melania “bribe-umentary,” its Epstein-adjacent fallout, and the mounting contradictions exposed in the Epstein files themselves, the episode tracks how taste, corruption, and impunity collide. Rothkopf, The Daily Beast’s unmissable columnist and found of the DSR Network, dig into the murkier questions Trump can’t outrun—from Howard Lutnick’s shifting Epstein story to why so many powerful figures are suddenly caught in bald-faced lies—while also unpacking the strange Tulsi Gabbard whistleblower saga, Trump’s renewed fixation on “stolen” elections, and the quiet groundwork being laid to destabilize 2026. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jennifer Welch of the hit podcast ‘I’ve Had It’ joins Joanna Coles as the news cycle spins completely out of control—from Don Lemon’s arrest and what Welch calls a chilling test case for silencing independent journalists, to the sudden flood of Epstein files, DOJ lawfare, and Trump’s deep, decades-long vendetta against the press. Welch dissects the masculinity myth at the heart of MAGA, the submissive strongman worship that props it up, and the evangelical culture that looks away from abuse while preaching moral authority. Along the way, Welch connects grift, grievance, and repression into a single operating system powering Trumpism—and asks the question hanging over all of it: If this is Trump’s authoritarian testing phase, what comes next when the guardrails finally give? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.