Transcript: Michael Wolff on Epstein and Trump and Trump’s First Six Months

So I think for many, it starts to be a picture of a clearer picture of who Donald Trump is and where he came from and what he stands for.

CHARLIE ROSE: Okay, answer those three questions. The clearer picture of what he stands for and where he comes from and who he is.

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think it adds up to a clearer picture of Trump as a moral grifter. And that obviously has been a context in trying to understand Donald Trump for a long time. But I think this makes it, this puts a face on that issue and the face is Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s not a face you want on your issue.

Recording Jeffrey Epstein

CHARLIE ROSE: How long did you know Jeffrey Epstein?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I knew him well after 2014. I knew him somewhat before that. Not least of all because he tried to take over New York magazine, or was one of several very wealthy men who tried to take over New York magazine, where I was one of the central writers in 2004. But it was really after 2014 that I got to know him.

CHARLIE ROSE: And how did you come to record conversations with him?

MICHAEL WOLFF: He said to me, “Would you consider writing about me?” I said, “Probably not.” And he laughed. And he said, “Well, you don’t have to make up your mind.” He said, “If you want to talk to me and see if I’m worth writing about, I’m here. You’ll judge whether I’m a good story and whether I’m telling you the truth.”

And he said, “I have a lot of interesting people who come to my house and why don’t I invite you when I think you might be interested in those people? And you’re free to take notes, you’re free to record, you’re free to do anything. I have nothing to hide,” is what he said.

CHARLIE ROSE: So he was fully into this recording of whatever he said about whoever?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes. He thought that this was, he wanted his story to be told and thought I could tell it.

CHARLIE ROSE: What did he think his story was?

MICHAEL WOLFF: This was about, he saw a path to his rehabilitation. He had gone to jail for quite terrible things, but was out of jail, had done his, he believed he had done his time, and now he was looking to, as so many before him, have to restore at least somewhat of his reputation. And he did not, I should hasten to add, succeed in that.

CHARLIE ROSE: And then he committed suicide.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Or his life ended in some fashion, by some fashion.

CHARLIE ROSE: And you think there should be a question about that?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I think there is a question about that.

CHARLIE ROSE: And do you have an answer?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I do not have an answer to that question, but the question certainly is out there in a substantial way.

The Tapes and Media Interest

CHARLIE ROSE: Did you try to publish these recordings?

MICHAEL WOLFF: These recordings have been in some form offered to virtually every mainstream media outlet and none of whom were interested.

CHARLIE ROSE: Are they interested now?

MICHAEL WOLFF: They are more interested. No one has made me a proposal. But there are lots of conversations going on now.

CHARLIE ROSE: Between you and publishers and broadcasting?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you expect to sell them to someone?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I don’t know. I mean, at this point, having gone through this so many times, I have no expectations. I might be pleasantly surprised, but I have no expectations.

CHARLIE ROSE: But this is across the board in terms of media properties.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes. Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Whether it’s cable, network television?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah, I just got a note today from a particular company that had entertained this and been ultimately pretty resistant, pretty clear in their lack of interest in this or of their wanting to avoid the controversy that would be attendant to these tapes.

So I got a note from this person today with a completely changed demeanor. “That was such an interesting project. I wanted to be involved with it then. Perhaps there’s a way to go forward now.” It’s a sea change in the climate and we’ll see where this ends up.

What’s in the Tapes

CHARLIE ROSE: What’s in the tapes?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Everything is in the tapes. I mean, these are about 100 hours of conversations with Jeffrey Epstein. So it’s a kind of a life in the tapes. I mean, he talks about a full range of his interests, of the details of the people who are around him, of his point of view. And this is a wide open window into who this man was.

CHARLIE ROSE: And he talks about President Trump.

MICHAEL WOLFF: He does at great length.

CHARLIE ROSE: At great length.

MICHAEL WOLFF: At great length, yes. I mean these were, in fact, so I began to talk to him in 2014 and largely about himself and how he had gotten to where he had gotten and the nature of his interests.

But then in 2015, Donald Trump started to run for president and I started to write about Donald Trump and it immediately became clear that Jeffrey Epstein had had a long relationship with Donald Trump. And it turned out he was incredibly insightful about Donald Trump, the man, and knew a great deal about him.

In fact, they basically had been in so many ways joined at the hip for more than a decade. And so that became a constant theme of our discussions. He was an interpreter of Donald Trump for me.

Epstein’s Assessment of Trump

CHARLIE ROSE: And so what does he say about Trump?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, there was a kind of chilling moment when he said to me, “The problem with Donald Trump,” and this is coming from Jeffrey Epstein, which I was fully aware of the source. And he said, “The problem with Donald Trump is that he has no scruples.” And I thought if Jeffrey Epstein could find someone without scruples, that man must certainly have no scruples.

CHARLIE ROSE: But that’s character, isn’t it?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, it is, yes, but that’s…

CHARLIE ROSE: And that is character.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Character is ultimately the issue. I mean, then he went on to demonstrate long discussion about Donald Trump’s obsession with sleeping with other men’s wives, especially the wives of his friends, and how he would go about this.

Long discussion about Donald Trump’s business practices, including his tax situation, of which it was my impression that Jeffrey Epstein was a facilitator in the taxes that Trump avoided, whether rightly or wrongly, and ever more gradations of this Donald Trump.

How Donald Trump lived his life with regard to women, with regard to other men, what Donald Trump’s capabilities in life were that Donald Trump could not read a balance sheet, for instance. Or at one point, Epstein said that the thing about Donald Trump was that he absolutely lacked an executive function, which is partly the chaos that we always see now.

He couldn’t organize anything. He couldn’t make decisions. And when he did, the things he did were all a kind of a performance. He could respond to a script, someone could tell him what he should be or he would describe what he thought he should be and he could project that. But in terms of the details, in terms of carrying out anything, Epstein believed he could not do those things. He couldn’t run a company, which was why actually the Trump Organization was never much of a company.

Credibility and Corroboration

CHARLIE ROSE: This is Jeffrey Epstein’s opinion. Should we believe him?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I think we know what Donald Trump has become. And so I think that Jeffrey Epstein’s opinion certainly backs up and explains much of what we see on a daily basis.

There was also a point at which, and this was interesting and certainly helpful to me when Steve Bannon joined this conversation, that Steve, in the fall of 2017, Bannon and Epstein were introduced, and then they almost immediately became close friends, bonding over the fact that they both detested Donald Trump.

And I was privy to a lot of those conversations. And I would say to me, having spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people about Donald Trump, they are the two people who are most insightful about who Donald Trump is, what his character really adds up to and why he is what he appears to be.

CHARLIE ROSE: Has Steve acknowledged that he said these things?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I have him on tape, so he doesn’t really have to acknowledge this.

CHARLIE ROSE: But he hasn’t confirmed them. I mean, he actually…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Actually he has confirmed them. Because he continues to serve Donald Trump, yes, but I have Steve in several iterations not necessarily related to… I mean obviously in my first book, Steve was a key source of which he vilified Donald Trump every which way. And he was thrown out of the White House for that or thrown out of the Trump circle for what he said to me.

But in terms of what he said to Jeffrey Epstein, part of what he said is that Steve Bannon, in the final months of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, when he was kind of frantically trying to figure out how he might save himself as the legal situation closed in on him, he decided or he was advised by various people that he should go on a national television show and essentially perform a mea culpa.

And Steve Bannon then offered to train him, give him media training to help him go on “60 Minutes” or some equivalent. And Steve did this. And I’ve reported extensively on that and written about it.

Steve has responded by saying, by not denying this but saying actually he was preparing a documentary about Jeffrey Epstein. That’s what he was doing there, which is not true. And I have the audio recordings of this which clearly establish he’s there out of friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and to prep him to go on one of these shows. And in fact Jeffrey Epstein was paying for this media training session or at least paying the production costs.

CHARLIE ROSE: But I’m still amazed that you have not fully made public and published these.

The Epstein Story and Media Interest

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, as I said, Charlie, first thing I have done some of that.

CHARLIE ROSE: Donald Trump has been the dominant political personality since he walked down the escalator for 10 years. I think the better question is our understanding.

MICHAEL WOLFF: No, but the question is why haven’t people been interested in this? I have certainly offered this literally to everyone, so why haven’t they been interested in this story? And this story has been out there very clearly for a very long time.

I think once Jeffrey Epstein had become so demonized in every possible way, the representative of the worst person on earth, then it became very hard to turn him around and use him as a witness against the President of the United States who, by the way, has always successfully until now denied that they had anything more than the most superficial relationship. So I mean, I think that’s the media ecosystem in which this story has lived or had a half life.

Epstein’s Mysterious Fortune

CHARLIE ROSE: A couple of questions have arisen about Jeffrey Epstein recently and people saying, “Gee, I never knew how he made his fortune.”

MICHAEL WOLFF: No, I think it’s a good question. I don’t think anyone really knows and I may know more than most people, but still not that much. Epstein would speak in a kind of cryptic, almost epigrammatic fashion about this.

I mean, he once said to me, “I run a reverse Ponzi scheme. In a real Ponzi scheme, you make money appear to exist that doesn’t. In my Ponzi scheme, I make money that exists appear not to exist.” And the example was if you can, if a wealthy man gets a divorce and you can hide $100 million, he saves $50 million. I don’t know. I mean, that’s what he said.

I know that he had relationships with many dubious regimes around the world. And he once said to me that “the virtue of disgrace is that people with regard to money knew that they could trust you because your disgrace meant that you would not have any relationships with governments or major financial institutions or anything else that might mean you had an intrinsic bias, that your advice then would be pure.”

What epigrammatic. Is it true? Is it meaningful? I don’t know.

The Ghislaine Maxwell Interview

CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think may come out of the fact that the Deputy Attorney General went down to Florida and interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I know somewhat of the background here that in the White House they believe that the story in the Wall Street Journal about the salacious birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 on the occasion of his 50th birthday was a leak from the Maxwell family. And in the White House they regarded this as, quote, “a shot across the bow.” So a threat that Ghislaine had damaging material on Donald Trump.

So Donald Trump’s lawyer, who as it happens is also the number two in the Deputy Justice Department, but principally is Donald Trump’s own lawyer went down. And I expect to try to figure out exactly what Ghislaine Maxwell has and then they would figure out how they might have to handle that.

CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think it might be?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think in order for her to have leverage, I don’t know what she has actually. Ghislaine was sort of out of the Jeffrey Epstein picture by 2004, 2005, when his first legal problems began. But I think it’s very possible that she has substantial amount of information on the nature of the relationship between Epstein and Trump.

Trump’s First Six Months: A Consequential Period

CHARLIE ROSE: Talk a little bit or a lot about the Trump administration. We just saw the first six months of it on July 20th. The first six months. How do you think he’s done?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think it’s the most consequential six months in the history of the United States presidency.

CHARLIE ROSE: Better or for worse?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, for worse. I mean, I think every institution, every process, every check and balance that we have come to depend upon and to assume were inviolable have been undermined.

CHARLIE ROSE: You mean law firms, you mean the courts, you mean…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes, I mean every branch of government, aspect of government, agency in the United States government. Any assumption of how the United States could be expected to do things, has always been expected to do things. All undermined.

Economic Performance vs. Institutional Damage

CHARLIE ROSE: The Trump administration will point out at every turn that the stock market is doing quite well.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I mean, there would be two points there. The stock market does not run the United States government, nor should it run the…

CHARLIE ROSE: They would suggest it’s somehow an indication of feeling positive about doing…

MICHAEL WOLFF: I mean, but we don’t have to take that suggestion seriously. And number two, I would just say for now, how about foreign policy?

CHARLIE ROSE: How about Ukraine? How about…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah, I mean, what we know about foreign policy and what the world knows about foreign policy, the United States foreign policy at this point in time is, you can’t count on it. So the pillar of American foreign policy that you could count on it has been undermined. Has actually likely been destroyed.

America’s Diminished Global Standing

CHARLIE ROSE: You’re saying, I guess, that countries around the world no longer believe they can depend on the United States.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, for good reason. They cannot depend upon the United States. They cannot depend upon it on a day to day basis.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yet at the same time they’re willing to, and perhaps it follows suit, they’re willing to spend record numbers of their GDP on NATO defense.

MICHAEL WOLFF: That’s because they can no longer depend on the United States anymore. Europe will have to defend itself. If you’re Europe, I mean, Europe as virtually as a concept has depended upon the United States to be its partner in protecting itself, particularly from first the Soviet Union and now Russia. And they could no longer count on the United States for that. So better well do it itself.

Trump’s Political Dominance

CHARLIE ROSE: But if you look at Donald Trump politically and his hold on the Republican Party, it has not diminished.

MICHAEL WOLFF: No, no. As a matter of fact, the opposite. And in a negative way, it has only increased and hardened.

CHARLIE ROSE: And so what happens when Trump is no longer on the scene? Does it revert to the Republican Party of the past, or has Donald Trump changed it?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Donald Trump has changed it clearly. Has changed not only the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party. He has changed everything. But having said that, when Donald Trump leaves the stage and preferably departs this veil of tears, there will be no one. It will be a vacuum because there will be no one to take his place. He is a wholly anomalous and unique kind of creature. So we will all be standing there when he departs saying, “What now?”

The Reality TV President

CHARLIE ROSE: Peter Baker wrote a piece I’m sure you saw in the New York Times talking about the last 10 years, when the country marked 10 years of Donald Trump coming down the escalator saying that he was the dominant force in American politics. Tell me what, because you know Donald Trump and because we’re now seeing it even more so I assume in the first six months of this second term, what is it that makes him an effective politician?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I mean, I can conjecture that he was the star of a reality television show, a top rated reality television show for 14 years, and that he learned gifts that no other politician has had cause to learn.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what were those gifts?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, how to hold the attention of the public. And one of the things reality television does in a very clear and formulaic way, which is to say conflict, conflict, conflict, conflict. You hold the attention of the public, of the audience only one way with conflict and with new conflict and conflict. Always it has to be unrelenting conflict, which basically describes the 10 years of Donald Trump as a political personality.

CHARLIE ROSE: So if you’re unhappy, so the theory would go, I assume if you’re unhappy with a drama that affects you just create another drama.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Absolutely. So any crisis, the interesting thing about the Epstein crisis so far is that he has not been able to find another crisis to trump that crisis.

The Strength of the Epstein Crisis

CHARLIE ROSE: But that says something, I assume, about the strength of the Epstein crisis. And what is that so far?

MICHAEL WOLFF: There have been other major crises in the Trump presidency which we did not think he would get out from under. The Russia investigation. Virtually everyone thought that would be the end of Donald Trump. January 6th, the end of Donald Trump. “Grab them by the pussy,” the end of Donald Trump. And somehow he managed to survive those crises.

So I expect that he will also manage to survive the Epstein crisis. Although acknowledging that this is a very big crisis. It is really up there with his other challenges.

CHARLIE ROSE: You talk to his aides, they have private conversations with you. What are they saying about this crisis and their leader?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think that probably the most telling conversation I had, which was the other day is, “Listen, we’ve always known there was the bad boy stuff out there,” but this person said, “Now suddenly everybody is worried that it might be much worse than we thought.”

Assessing Trump’s Accomplishments

CHARLIE ROSE: Has he accomplished anything in the six months?

MICHAEL WOLFF: No, I think he’s… Well, I mean, has he accomplished anything positive? From my point of view? No. From my point of view, it’s all catastrophically negative. From Donald Trump’s point of view, it is all big and beautiful and amazing and from many, from the MAGA point of view, it’s been, I think, an extraordinary time. They could never have dreamed that so much would be accomplished as to their really fringe agenda.

The Lasting Impact of Trump’s Changes

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think that the changes that Donald Trump has brought to America will last?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I don’t think that they will. I mean, I think he will leave us with a lot of damage, a lot of broken things all over the place. Which one morning when he departs, we will see and we will have to put many things back together again. But I think that we will.

CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think has been the most significant change that he has brought?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I’m not sure I can limit us to one, but let me… I think I can go at some point in the White House, in the first number of months in the White House, I was sitting there with Steve Bannon and Bannon said, “The tragedy of Donald Trump,” and Steve was still in the White House then. He said, “The tragedy of Donald Trump is that this is a country and a government of institutions, and in these institutions, you just can’t understand how strong these institutions are and how much they are invested in protecting themselves. And Donald Trump is just one man, and he is battling these institutions, and that’s not a fight that he can win.”

Well, it turns out that Steve was wrong about that. And I think that is the…

CHARLIE ROSE: Not totally. I mean, the courts have battled, have restrained, have resisted, and…

MICHAEL WOLFF: I’m not sure I would go to bed at night…

CHARLIE ROSE: The law firms have resisted.

Institutional Damage and Resistance

MICHAEL WOLFF: Harvard resisted, hardly. And they’re all battling down. Harvard is up against the ropes. Columbia has capitulated. ABC has capitulated when he sued them. CBS has capitulated when he sued CBS.

The courts are very precarious. Just as a point, the Supreme Court made it the law of the land that a president cannot be held legally responsible for anything, any criminal act. It doesn’t make any difference.

So I would say that he’s been almost in every institution that we have counted on. He has damaged it. And because his time is not done, may yet flatten them all.

CHARLIE ROSE: And is it your belief and argument and reporting that it is not coming from a plan, whether it’s 2025 or whatever that was, but it, in fact, is simply a desire to have power and fame?

MICHAEL WOLFF: It’s the design. I would even say it in a more horrifying fashion. It is just the desire to dominate. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

CHARLIE ROSE: And if you said that to Steve Bannon, would he agree with you?

MICHAEL WOLFF: He would laugh, and he would certainly agree.

Future Outlook and Leadership

CHARLIE ROSE: So are you pessimistic about the future of the country?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I am not by nature a pessimist. I do believe that Donald Trump will depart and we will be left with a mess, but we will have the good sense and fortitude to get to work and fix it as best we can.

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you see leaders on the horizon and both in institution and in politics that can make a difference?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Not really. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They are not there. They just haven’t had the moment to prove themselves.

CHARLIE ROSE: It would seem, with these kinds of consequences, that Michael Wolff would be fast at work writing a new book.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Are you? Well, Michael Wolff is always fast at work.

The Untold Story

CHARLIE ROSE: Okay. Of all the things we’ve talked about this interests me most, which is the condition of the country and how you see it because of the sources that you have across the political spectrum, and what is the story that you think you ought to tell or someone ought to tell? Because it’s consequential.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Charlie, I think the ultimate story, the story that has yet to be effectively told is how this happened, how this man came about, how this man came to win over half or more of the country. How someone so clearly unfit, not to mention unstable, has succeeded as well as he has succeeded. All imagination.

And someone will answer that. There will be someone who will tell the story and it will say, and you’ll say, “Yes, okay, that makes sense.”

CHARLIE ROSE: And give me the broad outlines of what you think that is.

The Secret of Trump’s Appeal

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think the answer that I gave before is that I think he came to understand better than most that politics is no longer the issue. Politics, policy, politicians, the institutional behavior and superstructure. These are not what people are interested in anymore, that they are interested in that kind of charismatic presence.

If you will, “He speaks to me and he speaks only to me, and there’s nothing. There’s no mediation between us.” And Donald Trump somehow has understood that and somehow has embodied that and somehow goes out there on that stage and if you read his remarks, you would say, as I have many times, “That’s completely incoherent.”

And yet in person, in real life, people stand there and they bathe in this. These are not a political following. This is a following of fans. This is fandom.

And somehow where everybody else was conducting politics as usual, that if you went out to speak to people, if you got 500 people, you were really lucky. And mostly it would be 100 people and 400 would be people that they’ve papered the hall with. But Donald Trump went out there and easily within hours notice can command an audience of 40,000. That’s the thing to look at and to understand and to realize is where the secret lies.

CHARLIE ROSE: And if you do that, you can…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Be elected president, as it turns out. And it’s curious because I remember in 2016, that was looked at certainly by the Democrats as a weakness. “Always just goes out to a stadium and…”

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, but I remember also Steve Bannon saying that he’d never seen someone that good at a rally.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE: At that moment, he realized that Donald Trump could be elected president.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah, Steve realized that, but the New York Times never did. So this is part of the divide about not only politics, but how to write about politics.

The Future of MAGA

CHARLIE ROSE: And when he finishes his term, there is no MAGA movement I’m asking to offer up another candidate has the same possibility of election.

MICHAEL WOLFF: No, really.

CHARLIE ROSE: Not the vice president. Not…

MICHAEL WOLFF: No. Really sui generis. There will be candidates and they will run and they will battle each other, whether it’s Vance and Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, who has always really wanted to be the president, or other figures that will certainly emerge. And some will be more successful than others, but none will be Donald Trump.

CHARLIE ROSE: Michael, thank you. It’s a pleasure.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Anytime.

CHARLIE ROSE: Michael Wolff, thank you for joining us.

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