Mark Simone jumps in for Sean Hannity during Hannity's Christmas break and admits its jarring to stumble back into work mode mid-vacation. With Linda, he kicks off the hour with light, holiday-week banter about studio routines, lunch orders, the clock on the show, and the fact that Christmas Eve is just a night away.
Then Simone pivots to his case that Christmas week hasn't slowed the news cycle or New York City. Pushing back on the familiar NYC is dying narrative, he argues the city feels packed: a booming tourist crush, scarce hotel rooms, strong rental demand, and active apartment closings. In his telling, the streets are crowded and the market signals don't match the doom talk.
From there, the conversation moves to city politics and public safety. Simone warns that a new New York administration could look a lot like the de Blasio era, pointing to staffing he says overlaps with that previous team. But he suggests the equation changes with Donald Trump in the White House, arguing federal enforcement could be used to bypass what he describes as an overly lenient local system. He highlights Southern District U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton as a figure he believes could bring more cases federally reviving, he says, a Giuliani-era idea of a weekly Federal Day, a concept Linda notes she hadn't heard before (and which they connect to *Blue Bloods*).
Simone closes with the Epstein files and the media fight over what they mean. He contends coverage leans heavily on images of Trump at large public events, while he contrasts that with what he describes as a deeper archive involving Bill Clinton. Simone claims Trumps interactions were limited to social encounters after Epstein joined Mar-a-Lago, and says Trump later banned Epstein after learning of alleged misconduct at the club. He also points to the sheer volume of Epstein-related material and notes recent releases that he says include prominent liberal figures, including Larry Summers and Noam Chomsky.
A holiday-week episode that starts in studio small talk and ends in big, hard-edged debates about whether New York is thriving or failing, what tough on crime looks like in practice, and how power, politics, and the Epstein story continue to collide.
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