Title: MAGA Fractures Over Epstein. Plus, What Michael Douglas Movies Tell Us About Masculinity.

Reporter 1: President Trump said his administration would release the Epstein files, but now he says those files are a hoax.

Megyn Kelly: Make some noise if you care about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. [shouting] Everybody cares.

Reporter 1: Trump adding, "I don't want their support anymore."

Brooke Gladstone: MAGA has found its fault line. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Where's the line between healthy skepticism and conspiracism?

Dan Friedman: People who have engaged in conspiracy theories feel like their theories have been vindicated, and thus, they are very excited.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, how the films of Michael Douglas inadvertently trace the origins of today's masculinity crisis.

Jessa Crispin: He became an avatar for these changes that men were going through, and it seems like maybe it was a bit of a burden to act out an entire nation's sickness.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. [music] From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. At one point, we thought we really wouldn't have to go there, or at least all the way there, but at this point, it seems perversely contrarian not to, because in all our years of scrutinizing the MAGA movement, we've never seen such division in its ranks.

Reporter 2: Breaking news overnight about the Jeffrey Epstein files and the conspiracy theories officially being rejected.

Brooke Gladstone: First, the chronology, which began on July 6th in the evening with an Axios story, but took off on the 7th when everyone else jumped in.

Reporter 2: Overnight. The FBI and Justice Department releasing 11 hours of footage they say helps confirm notorious financier, Jeffrey Epstein, died by suicide in his Manhattan jail cell in 2019, awaiting his sex trafficking trial. According to a memo detailing the findings, investigators found the video showed no one entering the area in the overnight hours before Epstein was found unresponsive, but perhaps the biggest bombshell.

Investigators say they found no incriminating client list of Epstein's, no credible evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals, and no evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.

Brooke Gladstone: A bonfire that had blazed steadily for years, fed by the hot breath of Donald J. Trump, his sacred vow to expose the Democrats' yawning depravity was suddenly a conflagration and then an inferno because, as president, he didn't come through. Exhibit A. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Fox back in February.

John Roberts: One of the things that you've alluded to, and this is something Donald Trump has talked about, the DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients? Will that really happen?

Attorney General Pam Bondi: It's sitting on my Desk right now to review. That's been a directive by President Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: But on July 7th, she shut it all down. On the 8th, at a Cabinet meeting with Bondi and the President, this from a reporter who seems to know it won't go well.

Reporter 3: Could you say why there was a minute missing from the jailhouse tape?

Attorney General Pam Bondi: Yes, sure, if I could--

President Trump: Pam, can I just interrupt for a second?

Attorney General Pam Bondi: Sure.

President Trump: Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

Brooke Gladstone: The President was having none of it.

President Trump: I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.

Brooke Gladstone: For him, a desecration; for the opposition, an opportunity. The next day, Democrats and some Republicans vociferously demanded the promised release of the Epstein files and have been doing that pretty much every day ever since. On Tuesday, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, rankled by the conspiracy-fueled investigations into philanthropist George Soros, asked--

Jamie Raskin: Why don't we have a hearing about the continuing suppression and cover-up of the information in the Epstein files? Because President Trump, Attorney General Bondi, and their allies in the DOJ and FBI repeatedly claimed in public that the Epstein files have the names of power elite actors involved in human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and they promised to release all the information in the name of maximal transparency. Remember that? They said this would be the most transparent administration in the history of the United States, but now they're shouting, "Nothing to see here."

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, there are plenty of Democrats, but not just Democrats, lots of prominent Republicans too, among them-

Marjorie Taylor Greene: It's just a red line that it crosses for many people.

Brooke Gladstone: -the redoubtable Georgia Rep, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Jeffrey Epstein is literally the most well-known convicted pedophile in modern-day history, and I really think people deserve transparency on that. It's not wrong to continue to push for it and ask for it.

Brooke Gladstone: And Missouri Senator Josh Hawley in high dudgeon.

Senator Josh Hawley: This is one of the worst human trafficking rings in American history run by this scumbag, and I think the more we know about it, the more we get out there, the better it is.

Brooke Gladstone: And House Speaker Mike Johnson is in mild discomfort.

House Speaker Mike Johnson: We should put everything out there and let the people decide it. The White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don't know. This isn't my link.

Brooke Gladstone: And plenty of those online influencers like Infowars' Alex Jones, the kind of people the President has always relied on, but when it came to calming the restive MAGA minions who lived online, they weren't much help.

Alex Jones: The reason that you are seeing this deep-sixed is because the CIA, with the Mossad and MI6, was running Epstein, and it was an official US government operation.

Brooke Gladstone: Here's the nation's most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan: Like, "Look, where's the Epstein files?" "Boo. Can't find them. Don't exist." They can get away with [redacted].

Brooke Gladstone: Here's far-right flamethrower Jack Posobiec.

Jack Posobiec: I will not rest until we go full Jan 6 Committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Brooke Gladstone: And one-time Trump dinner guest, the anti-Semitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Nick Fuentes: [redacted] you. [redacted] you. You suck. You are fat. You are a joke. You are stupid. This entire thing has been a scam. We are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history, and the liberals were right. We will see Trump as a scam artist.

Brooke Gladstone: The President tried to shut it down, of course he did, but he couldn't.

Megyn Kelly: Make some noise if you care about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

[shouting]

Brooke Gladstone: Megyn Kelly and one of Trump's favorite podcasters, Charlie Kirk, at a Turning Point's USA event last Friday.

Charlie Kirk: Raise your hand if it matters a lot to you. Raise your hand. [shouting] Every hand of 7,000 people.

Brooke Gladstone: The next day, the President took to Truth Social.

Reporter 1: Writing in part, "They're all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a fantastic job. We're on one team, MAGA, and I don't like what's happening. We have a perfect administration, the talk of the world, and selfish people are trying to hurt it all over a guy who never dies: Jeffrey Epstein."

Reporter 4: According to one report, get this, Trump personally called Charlie Kirk, and then Kirk and others have certainly softened their tone.

Brooke Gladstone: Charlie Kirk on his show, Monday.

Charlie Kirk: Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being. I'm going to trust my friends, the administration. I'm going to trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done. Solve it. Ball's in their hands.

Brooke Gladstone: Charlie Kirk on his show, Tuesday.

Charlie Kirk: Let me be clear. I'm not trusting the government; I'm trusting individuals that you, too, also trust, but you guys are all fans of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel. We are trusting that they heard you. They heard me, and they are working to fix this.

Brooke Gladstone: The President's knickers are clearly in a twist because polls suggest that the recipients of so much of his beneficence, his respect and adoration, proved so unworthy when he pulled the rug out from under them. I'm talking about the MAGA base, or part of it anyway. He wrote this week in a Truth Social post that "Past supporters have bought into this bull stuff, hook, line, and sinker," adding, "let those weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats' work.

Don't even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don't want their support anymore." There, I added that. As I write this Friday, there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a birthday letter to Epstein with Trump's signature and a doodle of a naked woman surrounding the text that reads in part, "Happy Birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret." Trump's name is scrawled in marker where the pubic hair would be.

"False, malicious, and defamatory," he asserts. "I never wrote a picture in my life. It's not my words." In fact, he's known to doodle. He personally begged Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Journal's parent company, News Corp, not to print the story or risk his wrath. He intends to sue. Funny, the role played by Murdoch here. His own Fox News Channel is barely covering the Epstein story and is silent on the Journal scoop.

Murdoch's fortune was hammered by one defamation case when Fox lied about voting machines, and yet for now, he's standing firm. Not so for some of our legacy media. This week, CBS, whose owner, Paramount Global, needs Trump's okay for a long-sought merger, said it's canceling Stephen Colbert's top Late Show for financial reasons, and it's true, the late shows are no longer big money makers. It's also true that lately Colbert's been joking about CBS paying Trump $16 million to settle what's widely seen as a baseless complaint against 60 Minutes. Colbert on Monday.

Stephen Colbert: My parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his [booing] 60 Minutes lawsuit. As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended, and I don't know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company, but just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16 million would help.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, the president has asked Bondi to secure the release of grand jury transcripts from the Epstein case, which courts are loath to do, and that certainly will be redacted to protect the victims at least, and maybe not just them. So far, I've seen no commentary that predicts any revelations. It seems like a Hail Mary, an attempt to distract from all the irreconcilable narratives he's propagated.

First, that the files would take down the rotten, rapacious deep state, then that the files don't actually exist, then that they were fakes written by Obama or Biden or whoever, and finally, that the whole thing is so boring, why would anybody care? But they do care. The worldview that he crafted, where his followers have a community and a role, is roiling. It'll take a mighty suspension of disbelief, a herculean rewrite, to make sense of this, if they even can.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, what even are the Epstein files?

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. [music] This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. When we talk about the Epstein files, what exactly do we mean?

Julie K. Brown: Well, first of all, there's tons of files that are out there in the FBI's vault.

Micah Loewinger: Julie K. Brown, investigative journalist, speaking here on CNN.

Brooke Gladstone: Hundreds and hundreds of pages, files that you can click on, and you can look at.

Micah Loewinger: Her reporting in The Miami Herald, which identified some 80 survivors, helped spur a new investigation into Epstein in 2018. Over the past week or so, she's appeared on several podcasts and TV shows to discuss the Epstein files, what's secret and what's public or partially public, in the case of the FBI vault. That client list, the one that was supposedly on Pam Bondi's desk and then wasn't, Brown doesn't believe the client list exists and that sometimes people confuse it with Epstein's contact list, his black book compiled by his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Julie K. Brown: Trump is in there, a lot of phone numbers, including important people, were on there as well as other celebrities, but Epstein was sort of a social climber, and part of that was him just meeting somebody and saying, "I want to put you on my Rolodex" kind of thing. There's no evidence that the people that were on that phone directory were involved in his sex trafficking. Perhaps some of them were, but we don't know that, but there's tons of other material that we don't know about.

Micah Loewinger: There are the records from the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, which have largely remained sealed. Then there are the flight logs from his private jets. Some logs are public, but others are still held by the Federal Aviation Administration. There are the mostly redacted files from the US Marshals, which inspected his planes when they made international trips.

There's secret evidence reviewed by two grand juries, plus records uncovered by the US Virgin Islands, which filed a civil racketeering case against Epstein, and of course, there are the records related to Epstein's Manhattan prison death, which was ruled a suicide by city and federal officials.

Julie K. Brown: We don't have his autopsy, for example. We know that his brother doesn't believe that he committed suicide. We know that there were cameras that weren't working. I think that it's not a conspiracy to be skeptical when you find that the government really isn't releasing everything, or they're keeping something secret.

Micah Loewinger: All of this might seem like perfect grist for the mill for congressional Democrats, but Dan Friedman, in a piece for Mother Jones, cautions the opposition not to indulge in the conspiracy at the heart of the Epstein story.

Dan Friedman: Senator Ron Wyden tweeted last week after this news broke about Bondi, "Given the evidence my investigators have seen, this reeks of a cover-up." Another example is Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee asked in a letter in which they also asked for former Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation, the results of his investigation to Trump's retention of classified files at Mar-a-Lago.

They also said, "We would like evidence mentioning or referencing Donald Trump in the Epstein files." Those are a couple of examples. They aren't overt, but they do sort of raise the suggestion that Trump is implicated, and that's the reason that he is not releasing the files.

Micah Loewinger: You took note of what that letter from Jamie Raskin cited as evidence that there is Epstein material incriminating Trump.

Dan Friedman: Right. What they cited was Elon Musk tweeting that Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public, and the point that I would make is that Elon Musk has lied about all kinds of stuff. He said lots of crazy things. There's no good reason to think Musk is telling the truth on this issue, and we should be pretty skeptical of things that Musk tweets, especially in this case when he deleted the tweet and apologized for it.

Micah Loewinger: On Monday, House Democrats tried to push an amendment that would force the Justice Department to release the so-called Epstein files. It was subsequently blocked by House Republicans. Here's Ro Khanna, who brought the vote.

Ro Khanna: It's not just about knowing who's being protected, the rich and the powerful, in terms of who had interaction with Jeffrey Epstein. It's the sense that people have that the government is too beholden to certain interests who have their thumb on this scale.

Micah Loewinger: Is there nothing to what Ro Khanna is saying here?

Dan Friedman: I think Democrats are going to point out that Attorney General Bondi and President Trump are hypocrites on this issue, that they're not doing what they said they were going to do. I wouldn't want to be out there saying that they shouldn't be doing this sort of basic politics of trying to force a vote on this thing. The point I would make is, it just seems like there's a low probability that these files are going to turn up evidence of criminality by Trump.

Micah Loewinger: I guess I'm curious to hear how you know that. Julie K. Brown, the reporter who helped reopen the case against Epstein in 2018, has identified the potential existence of many, many records that have not received scrutiny from the public or the press. How are you so certain that you know what is or is not in those records?

Dan Friedman: Well, let me be clear. I don't know. I don't know what are in those records. Julie Brown doesn't know what are in those records. We're looking at, "What are the chances?" I think a big point is that these files were in possession of the Justice Department, not just for the last few months, but during the entire Biden administration under Attorney General Merrick Garland. If there is evidence of Trump committing crimes in there, that means that Garland and the Biden administration also covered up that information. That's conceivable. It's just improbable.

Micah Loewinger: It feels like this is not just the first scandal to really divide his most faithful supporters. It also feels like a topic that has inspired dissatisfaction and suspicion from both parties. Recent polling from CNN shows that a growing share of Americans really are not satisfied with the answers this administration is giving on the Epstein files.

Harry Enten: Look at this. You get 43% of lean GOP, that's Republicans and independents who are dissatisfied. Just 4% satisfied? My goodness gracious.

Micah Loewinger: CNN's polling analyst, Harry Enten.

Harry Enten: When you only have 4%, that is with Donald Trump on a particular issue, that is ridiculously low. I've never seen anything quite like it. How about lean Democrat, 60% dissatisfied. Compare that to 3% who are satisfied. Again, 4%, 3%, Republican, Democrat. You rarely ever see this type of agreement.

Micah Loewinger: Doesn't that mean that there's a solid case for members of Congress to push for more disclosure, especially considering that it really is the secrecy and misinformation around the Jeffrey Epstein case that is likely inspiring so much of the conspiratorial thinking?

Dan Friedman: I think that Republicans have formed a circular firing squad. There is no doubt on this issue, and they do not need Democrats to get them there. They are fighting tooth and nail with each other, and Democrats don't have to egg them on to get them to do it. In fact, Trump, we've seen in the last few days, has made a ridiculous argument, which is that Democrats are the ones who concocted this.

This is A hoax. He said it's like the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, and Democrats are behind it, and Republicans should not fall prey to this because this is an issue that Democrats are pushing. It seems possible that if Democrats lean in too hard to making assertions that aren't going to be borne out about what these files may reveal, they will sort of play into the argument that Trump is making, and that will help, I think, kind of align Trump's MAGA base with him.

We've seen that happen before on other issues, certainly with the Russia scandal. Ultimately, Trump's supporters became very convinced that it was Democrats who had concocted this issue, and not that it was a real issue that needed to be looked at.

Micah Loewinger: Basically, what I hear you saying is that you agree that this story is newsworthy, but you're cautioning lawmakers and pundits to stick with the facts, the evidence that we do have, and there is evidence that I think continues to make this story only stickier. WIRED just reported this week that, according to analysis of the metadata, there are three minutes missing from the video that Trump's Justice Department released, surveillance footage that purported to show that no one entered into his prison cell. Do you really think that he's not covering something up?

Dan Friedman: I think there's no question that he sounds like he's hiding something. We just can't assume it's because he is personally implicated, as tempting as that is, the WIRED report. These are facts reported by WIRED. It's a great piece of reporting, but Hank Johnson, the congressman from Georgia who made a song about releasing the Epstein tapes.

Hank Johnson: Epstein died by suicide.

Believe that and you must be blind.

You've been telling us you'll release the files,

But where are they?

Dan Friedman: Johnson says in that song, everyone knows that it wasn't suicide, and everyone doesn't know that. That's not actually the case. It is, at best, very unclear and fairly persuasive that he did, in fact, end his own life.

Micah Loewinger: I had to look in the comments when that video came across my For You page, and it was like an interesting mixture of cringe and celebration of that song, [laughs] which I think shows a split among Democratic voters about how they feel about this story themselves.

Dan Friedman: There is joy out there. People think it is so great to see Trump get his justice or it's for pushing a conspiracy theory about Epstein and claiming he was going to reveal it when he became president, and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, too, and now being exposed as liars and hypocrites because they can't produce what they said they were going to produce, and I certainly wouldn't suggest the Democrats should not enjoy what they can about that or even point out that they're lying.

If Hank Johnson falls into saying he knows for a fact that Epstein was murdered, that's where you get Democrats sort of diving into these conspiracy theories in a way that I think can come back to bite them when they turn out not to be borne out, at least not to be proven.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. In your piece, you say that this could potentially turn out like the Steele dossier.

Dan Friedman: Yes, I think that's a risk. I think there is a parallel. People had read in the Steele dossier that there was some tape of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow and somebody peed on the bed, and that turned out not to be real, it would seem. I think there was a feeling that the credibility of anyone connected to it, and certainly people have made this attack on Mother Jones and other media publications, as well as on politicians, was diminished because this tape isn't real.

Trump is trying to run the same play that he ran with the Russia scandal. The truth was that Trump was aware that the Russians were helping his campaign in 2016, it seems, and he didn't try to stop them, and then that scandal became defined by, "Was there a pee tape? Was the Steele dossier accurate?" Which was not, and then Trump used that to say the whole thing was a bunch of BS.

Clearly, what he's trying to do here is to say the Democrats are pushing a false statement and to sweep away the entire scandal and to sweep away the fact that he himself said that the Epstein files needed to be released by claiming that Democrats are the ones ginning this up. It's just good practice to stick to the facts, if you're a Democratic lawmaker, if you're a journalist, if you're anybody else.

Micah Loewinger: As I understand it, when you wrote this article calling for some caution from Democratic lawmakers, you got a negative response from some of your readers. What did you hear?

Dan Friedman: Many of my readers said, "You must be on the list, too. There's no other explanation for you writing this, or maybe you think Obama is on the list, and you're covering for Obama or Bill Clinton." People called me a pedophile for writing the story. Another thing that I also heard back was the argument that there may not be anything there, but Democrats should make this argument because it drives a wedge between Trump and his supporters, and his supporters seem very mad at him, and nothing else has worked, so they might as well try this.

I think there are a lot of other issues out there where there is a great deal of personal and professional failures by Trump that Democrats, to a certain extent, are putting aside when they're focusing on Epstein. Trump has let down his supporters, who he promised he wouldn't cut Medicaid. The Big, Beautiful Bill cuts a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. The Trump administration has cut funding for FEMA.

They cut funding for the National Weather Service. His corruption, the fact that his family and him are enriching themselves by doing deals in Qatar with the United Arab Emirates, with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, and these are companies that Trump still owns that are benefiting from these deals, which appear intended to gain favor with him. He got $16 million for his library from Paramount because Paramount seemed to believe that was the price they needed to pay to get their merger with Skydance approved, and so they settled a ridiculous lawsuit that Trump never would have succeeded in, which he filed against CBS News, and Trump can benefit from his library.

He can take a salary. He can use the plane that the Qataris gave to the library. Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, this week released a report on the library, and one of the reasons it hasn't gotten much attention is because of the Epstein thing. Those are issues where there is really far more evidence of wrongdoing by Trump that is consequential and had a negative effect on his supporters and other Americans.

Micah Loewinger: Here's where I would usually thank Dan Friedman, and we'd end the segment, but when The Wall Street Journal article about the alleged Trump-Epstein birthday message broke late Thursday night, we decided to call him back the next morning. Dan, thanks for coming back on the show. This is unusual for us.

Dan Friedman: No problem. I'm happy to do it.

Micah Loewinger: When we spoke yesterday, Dan, you said it was highly unlikely that there would be any more information about Trump and Epstein to emerge from the so-called Epstein files. Does this Wall Street Journal story change anything for you?

Dan Friedman: It is certainly an indication of something sketchy going on. What I would say is you could argue this is evidence of criminality, this Wall Street Journal report, but it's still a little short of what we were talking about, which is the speculation that there are pictures of Trump committing sex crimes, basically, or videos or something like that. What it does is it offers a pretty compelling explanation for why Trump has been acting so defensive and making up absurd stories like his assertion that former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wrote the "Epstein files" in some effort to smear him.

Why would he say that other than if there was evidence of him committing a crime in those files? Well, here's an example. Perhaps he was aware of something like what The Wall Street Journal has reported, and was concerned about a very bad-looking note that he sent to Jeffrey Epstein, which does imply something quite untoward. He wouldn't go to jail for this letter, is what I'm trying to say.

Micah Loewinger: I think the thing I'm struggling with here is I agree that caution is the right mode in the middle of a developing story, especially for elected officials and journalists. I'm struggling to find the right way to talk about something that looks so bad but does not meet a very high bar of criminality in court.

Dan Friedman: I know exactly what you mean. I am struggling with how to characterize this, and I have to be honest, I made an argument about Democrats don't take the Epstein bait, and they did take the Epstein bait, and it seems to be working out for them.

Micah Loewinger: You do think it's working out for them?

Dan Friedman: Well, I think the Epstein issue is working out for them so far, and obviously, I don't think a lot of Democrats are taking the advice, "Let's not speculate about what might be in there." I think people, including elected members of Congress, are speculating wildly, and I think it's kind of unavoidable given what has happened in terms of The Wall Street Journal report, in terms of Trump's reaction to it, in terms of Trump's bizarre lies, downplaying the so-called Epstein files.

It's difficult to tell people to be cautious in how they go about talking about this issue, but I still would stand by the argument that elected members of Congress should stop short of opining on what they think is in there in terms of criminality by Trump.

Micah Loewinger: How should news consumers evaluate this news while sticking to the facts and not buying into the variety of conspiracy theories out there?

Dan Friedman: I think that people who have engaged in speculation about Epstein that we could call conspiracy theories feel like their theories have been vindicated, and thus they are very excited, but it is more important than ever when we're talking about an issue where really a lot of the key facts are still shrouded in secrecy. The grand jury transcripts that Trump said he's going to unseal haven't been unsealed yet.

There's all kinds of files. We don't know what's in them. We don't know exactly what went on between Trump and Epstein. I think it's more important than ever to stick to the facts and to be cautious and humble in what we think we know to be true about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

Micah Loewinger: Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Friedman: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Dan Friedman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. This is On the Media. [music] This is On the Media. I'm Michael Lowinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that men over 75 are at higher risk for suicide than any other group. Young boys are also more likely to experience mental, emotional, behavioral, or developmental problems than girls their age. They're less likely to graduate high school or pursue higher education, and men's participation in the workforce is declining, too. Experts describe the phenomenon as a crisis of masculinity. MAGA calls it something else.

Charlie Kirk: There's an outright war on men in this country.

Brooke Gladstone: Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA.

Charlie Kirk: Men are aimless, and they are treated as second-class citizens.

Dan Bongino: Do you think the war on masculinity and the war on boys is a freaking accident?

Brooke Gladstone: Dan Bongino, the FBI's embattled deputy director.

Dan Bongino: There is nothing the socialist loves more than a population obsessed with weak, non-masculine men not willing to defend their country, their families, and their kids.

Brooke Gladstone: The critic Jessa Crispin was mulling that rhetoric and the mounting data when she embarked on a binge of Michael Douglas movies in the '80s and '90s, and she realized that the actors' roles actually trace to the origins of today's masculinity crisis. Crispin is the author of What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything.

Jessa Crispin: I was reading a lot of press from the mid-'80s to sort of late '90s, and I often saw him being referred to as a sort of symbol of a new masculinity.

Brooke Gladstone: Huh?

Jessa Crispin: I thought that was very funny because when I watched his movies, he was always wide-eyed and waving his arms around and yelling about something or other, and so I just thought, "What if I take the idea that Michael Douglas is a representative of a new masculinity very seriously in order to look at what masculinity that was emerging in this time was really all about?"

Brooke Gladstone: In the '80s, we're seeing the rise of, well, frankly, fiercely right-wing media that condemned feminism. People like the AM radio host, Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh: Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream society.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Douglas' characters didn't hate feminism. He saw himself as a good guy, but we saw, in his condescension and in his fragility, that wasn't quite true.

Jessa Crispin: A lot of the vitriolic right-wing rhetoric around feminism really gave cover to a large segment of men who just didn't want to get involved, who just didn't think that this had anything to do with them. The Michael Douglas figure conceptualizes himself as the center. He doesn't have to adapt to a changing world; the world should adapt to him.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's get to some specifics, starting with his two biggest hits of the era, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, and a warning, countless spoilers ahead, but come on, these movies are 40 years old. Fatal Attraction features Douglas as an attorney who has a steamy affair with an editor played by Glenn Close, but Close then simply will not go away.

Alex Forrest: I just want to be a part of your life.

Dan Gallagher: Oh, this is the way you do it, huh? Showing up at my apartment?

Alex Forrest: What am I supposed to do? You won't answer my calls. You change your number. I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.

Brooke Gladstone: Her character stalks him, threatens his family, boils that rabbit.

Jessa Crispin: It's a very sort of vile little film if you really get into the sexual politics, because there's always been the disposable woman for the man who is successful. There's the mistress, the sex worker, there's the courtesan. The reason why women who were mistresses were disposable is because they didn't have the right to own property, right? They didn't have access to education or to their own income streams.

Brooke Gladstone: Women couldn't have their own credit cards until the '70s.

Jessa Crispin: If somebody who has a lot of resources or the ability to threaten you, you have to do what they say, which is to shut your mouth, and if you don't, there's a threat of not just scandal, but also death.

Brooke Gladstone: In this case, the marauding mistress isn't taken out by the man. She's murdered by his wife. That's a kind of tension we often see set up, the raging feminist versus the trad wife. These wives, and the wife certainly in this movie, isn't just protecting her home; she's also striking back at the feminist, seeming contempt.

Jessa Crispin: There was definitely a backlash to the development of the no-fault divorce. Women were afraid that this would make women like them, upper-middle class, vulnerable because then their husbands could leave them without warning. This is a legitimate fear, but no-fault divorce dropped women's suicide rates. It helped lower the rates of domestic violence that ended in homicide.

Brooke Gladstone: One point which really surprised me is that the notion of midlife crisis, the man buying the motorcycle and looking for a younger woman to have an affair with, was rewritten. The midlife crisis was experienced by the woman, who was much more likely to leave the marriage than the man.

Jessa Crispin: Yes. Beginning in 1980, no-fault divorce was being rolled out state by state. Approximately two-thirds of these divorces were instigated by women. They faced really serious consequences, right? Their income dropped. They had mostly the custody responsibilities at the time. They would still rather suffer all of these things than to stay married to their husbands. I think the midlife crisis fantasy was a cover for men to protect their egos.

Like, "You can't fire me. I quit." [laughter] Because so much of media was run by men, they reinforced it with these movies about the midlife crisis guy running off into the sunset with a 21-year-old secretary in a sports car.

Brooke Gladstone: Who coined the term?

Jessa Crispin: A woman journalist, Gail Sheehy, actually.

Brooke Gladstone: Ah, Passages.

Jessa Crispin: Yes. In the book Passages, she was describing a change that women were going through once their children became less dependent on them. It would set off this kind of searching moment of "Is this all that there is?"

Brooke Gladstone: Where does that leave Michael Douglas, though, in Fatal Attraction?

Jessa Crispin: He's trying to recreate a kind of masculinity that no longer exists that says, "I can cheat on my wife, and when I'm done with this woman, then she'll just disappear."

Alex Forrest: Why don't you just hit me?

Dan Gallagher: You're so sad. You know that, Alex? Lonely and very sad.

Alex Forrest: Don't you ever pity me, you smug bastard.

Dan Gallagher: I'll pity you. I'll pity you. I'll pity you because you're sick.

Alex Forrest: Why? Because I won't allow you to treat me like some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage?

Brooke Gladstone: Let's move on to Basic Instinct. Here he plays a detective charged with bringing a crime novelist, played by Sharon Stone, to justice, since she appears to be offing her lovers one by one. Basic Instinct, you've said, basically comes down to a sweater, in a way.

Jessa Crispin: Yes. [laughs] Yes, the sweater that started this whole book, honestly, it was a pandemic, and so I was watching Basic Instinct a lot. [laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

[laughter]

Jessa Crispin: It's such a good movie, and this sweater that Michael Douglas wears may be the most upsetting sweater in cinematic history. He's going to the club to meet Sharon Stone and all of her friends. He's investigating her, but they do weird flirtation in the interrogation scene right before the club.

Nick Curran: You never tied him up?

Catherine Tramell: No. Johnny liked to use his hands too much. I like hands and fingers.

Nick Curran: You describe a white silk scarf in your book.

Catherine Tramell: I've always had a fondness for white silk scarves. They're good for all occasions.

Nick Curran: But you said you like men to use their hands, didn't you?

Catherine Tramell: No, I said I like Johnny to use his hands. I don't make any rules, Nick. I go with the flow.

Jessa Crispin: He's going to seal the deal with Sharon Stone by wearing a sweater to the dance club? It's not just any sweater. It is a V-neck, olive green. The V is just too deep, clearly made with synthetic fabric, and so you can just tell what it's going to smell like the next day: sweat, cigarette smoke, and spilled beer, and he's like, "This woman's going to go home with me," despite the zero effort that he's put into his looks, the way that he talks to her, the way that he dances. He doesn't have to think about any of it.

Brooke Gladstone: Sharon Stone, the character she plays, is very successful. She lives in a house that is sleek and beautiful. She wears beautiful clothes.

Jessa Crispin: It's not just that she looks amazing. She's always on the shoreline with the waves crashing against the cliffs, and every time you see Michael Douglas at home, he's falling asleep in a recliner with the TV still on, right? He goes to work, and it's fluorescent lighting. They're drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

Brooke Gladstone: You sound a little bit like a snob. Why do you focus on this cheap garbage that he lives in?

Jessa Crispin: There's such a suspicion within Basic Instinct that the men have toward anything that is beautiful, soft, pleasurable, and I think that it's a kind of paranoia built into this moment where women had the power to create things on their own. It used to be we had dandies in masculine culture, artists and poets, but now, as women take space in the public realm, there's this paranoia about, "Am I going to be mistaken for being a sissy, for being gay?"

Brooke Gladstone: Now's a good time to move to the category of Michael Douglas films, the economic actor. Starting with the movie Wall Street, where he plays the hugely successful, unabashedly amoral banker, Gordon Gekko.

Gordon Gekko: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Brooke Gladstone: The admirable qualities that once defined American manhood, you wrote, hard work, loyalty, ethics, they no longer have value. Only money matters. Like when Trump said during his first campaign, when challenged on paying hardly any taxes, "That's because I'm smart."

Jessa Crispin: Wall Street was released in 1987. In 1980, you have the first real financial reform in the banking industry in decades with the Monetary Control Act. What it does is incentivize speculation over long-term investment.

Brooke Gladstone: Taking things apart.

Jessa Crispin: Yes, by basically stripping businesses of assets and selling it off for parts. This is why we don't have local newspapers anymore. No one faces any consequences for the bad decisions at the time, and they continue the process of deregulation without creating any systems of oversight. This creates the foundation for the 2008 economic crash that affected the whole world.

Gordon Gekko: You're not inside; you are outside, okay? I'm not talking about some $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff, flying first class, and being comfortable; I'm talking about rich enough to have your own jet, $50, $100 million buddy, a player.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about how Wall Street commented on the impact of this change across generations.

Jessa Crispin: Yes. You have a couple of different father figures in Wall Street, and then you have this young man, who's basically trying to figure out which father he's going to become like. The young man's played by Charlie Sheen. The father who raised him is working class, but he's built a stable existence for himself and his family. He's a union man. The rug is being pulled out from under his feet by men like Gordon Gekko. He's a representative of this sort of new financial system, and so he does insider trading, and he does all of these unethical, illegal acts in order to attain wealth, but it works.

Brooke Gladstone: In 1996 comes the movie Disclosure, which I think can be distinguished as the one you find most reprehensible. Here we watch a man getting passed over for a promotion for a stereotypically undeserving woman. She is using her looks to get the job that he deserves.

Investigator: She said you sexually harassed her.

Tom Sanders: She harassed me.

Meredith Johnson: Get back here. Can you finish what you started, or you're dead? Do you hear me? You are dead.

Investigator: We just have to hope he's smart enough to see he doesn't have any options. I want to know.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote, "It's a film not meant to entertain or to enlighten, but to rant loudly at you up close, the spittle misting your face as you try to turn away."

Jessa Crispin: It is the 1990s, and out of every story that they could possibly tell, they are making a movie where Michael Douglas is victimized by his female boss, and ultimately, he has to punish these women in order to put the world right, and the world is only right when Michael Douglas is in charge.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, that's your least favorite film in the Michael Douglas catalog, but your favorite character that he plays is in The Game. You say it's the only time that you felt real tenderness towards a Michael Douglas character is the only time that he plays vulnerability in a real way.

Jessa Crispin: In The Game, Michael Douglas plays a finance guy again, but this time he is playing essentially the son of the last patriarch. His father dies by suicide, and he, as the eldest son, is tasked with replacing his father within the family. He takes over his father's business, takes over his father's home, takes on his father's social responsibilities. He doesn't have a sense of self outside of his father's identity, and so his brother buys him this game that is an all-immersive experience to force Nicholas to figure out who he is by stripping his father out of his identity.

Conrad Van Orton: What do you get for the man who has everything?

Nicholas Van Orton: Consumer Recreation Services.

Conrad Van Orton: Call that number.

Nicholas Van Orton: Why?

Conrad Van Orton: They make your life fun.

Jessa Crispin: It leaves him in a state of having to admit that he doesn't know who he is, what he wants, what he has to contribute, and he's left in a really vulnerable place as a result. There are definitely times where Michael Douglas is put into a position of vulnerability in these films, where he's being stalked, chased by the police, persecuted in some way, but The Game is the only movie that pushes him past hysteria or self-defensiveness.

Brooke Gladstone: How does this speak to the current moment?

Jessa Crispin: Patriarchy used to tell men what the world wanted from them. It wants you to make money. It wants you to have a family. It wants you to get an education. It wants you to be respectable. This is how you're supposed to dress. This is how you're supposed to behave. This is where you're supposed to go to work, and all of these other things. Now that's no longer really true.

Just because you fulfill old expectations for what a man's life is supposed to look like, that doesn't mean you're automatically rewarded. What you see are men struggling to figure out "What other roles can they play?" There's a nostalgia for the patriarchy because at least then they were told what to do.

Brooke Gladstone: It's kind of like the nostalgia for the Cold War, right? Things made sense.

Jessa Crispin: Yes, things made sense. "This was the bad guy. We were the good guys," right? And our flourishing was America's flourishing. Now you can be other things, but men see that as threatening. The uncertainty creates anxiety rather than excitement. Look at Jordan Peterson, for example, right? He's a man who has been telling men that their problems are essentially rooted in contemporary madness, feminism or Marxism, or trans rights, right?

That they don't have to adapt their understanding of themselves. It's everybody else who is wrong, and so you don't have to think about what masculinity is supposed to be for. We just have to keep being who we are, and it's everybody else who has to change.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Douglas, we shouldn't confuse, here, the roles he played with the man himself, right?

Jessa Crispin: I'm not really interested in who Michael Douglas is as a person. If he's a bad person, a good person, it doesn't matter, because what matters is the work that he was doing, and I think that he became, probably unintentionally, a kind of vessel for these very specific changes that Americans and men specifically were going through, and it seems like maybe it was a bit of a burden to kind of act out an entire nation's sickness, but I appreciate his contribution.

Brooke Gladstone: Jessa, thank you so much.

Jessa Crispin: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jessa Crispin is a cultural critic and author of the new book What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering help from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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