I understand what he’s doing,” Jon Stewart said of Trump’s decision to start ranting and raving about what he has deemed the Jeffrey Epstein “hoax.” Stewart shared his theory on a new episode of his Weekly Show podcast that Trump’s trying to cloud to legitimacy of the Epstein files because he knows he would likely be implicated by their release.

“Surprisingly, MAGA world, for the first time in memory, isn’t just slavishly acquiescing to Trump’s reality distortion field,” he said, and played clips of figures on the right trashing the president after the Justice Department said last week that the long-rumored Epstein client list doesn’t exist.