Is it too facetious to suggest, 250 years after the American Revolution, that the United States might be more democratic if it were still a monarchy?
The idea that President Trump behaves like a king is well founded. The truth might be worse. The stark contrast between the devastating effects of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal on the British royal family and the apparent impunity of the Trump administration might — only half in jest — imply that “No kings” is not the best slogan for those who insist that power be held to account.
No one is likely to mistake contemporary Britain for a model democracy. Five prime ministers in the 10 years since the Brexit referendum can hardly be taken as evidence of a well-functioning polity, and much of Britain’s system of governance seems archaic and sclerotic.
And yet it is in Britain that some semblance of justice for the women and girls so ruthlessly exploited by Mr. Epstein’s network of well-connected men may be finally beginning to emerge. The sensational arrest of the former Prince Andrew, a brother of King Charles III (now pointedly referred to by the king in a statement as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as though he were a distant relation rather than his mother’s much-indulged favorite son), is an event that seems, at last, appropriately scaled to the magnitude of the scandal.
It is true, of course, that the current investigation is not focused on the accusations of sexual assault against Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, including those made by Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide last year. She said that she was trafficked to England by the sex offender Mr. Epstein in 2001, when she was 17, and effectively coerced into having sex with the then-prince, who has denied those allegations and any wrongdoing related to Mr. Epstein. In 2016, British police officials formally declined to open a criminal investigation into her allegations and defended that decision in a 2019 statement that read, “It was clear that any investigation into human trafficking would be largely focused on activities and relationships outside the U.K.”; therefore, the issue was not really a matter for them.
Whether this hand washing amounted, as Ms. Giuffre posted on Twitter, to corruption at the highest levels of government, it certainly smacked of a culture of deference in which treating a prince of the realm as a criminal suspect was simply unimaginable. Even after Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor had paid out an undisclosed sum to settle a civil case that Ms. Giuffre had taken against him, he retained his privileges and the sheen of invulnerability that radiated from a man who, for the first 22 years of his life, was second in the line of succession to the throne.
If, like me, you harbor an innate dislike of the whole idea of hereditary power, this was Exhibit A in your case against monarchy. Here was an elite that could get away with anything, an upper caste that had embedded itself so deeply in the institutions of a state and in a society’s habits of obsequiousness that nothing would ever knock it off its high horse.
Now, however, the jewel-encrusted shell of privilege has been breached. Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal and aristocratic titles and evicted from his royal residence last year. Once the glow of unassailable superiority had faded, it became clear that being the brother of a king in Britain in 2026 is not a shield from scrutiny. Whatever the outcome of the police investigation into Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor’s possible misconduct when he was Britain’s trade envoy, amid reports that information was shared with Mr. Epstein, the indelible images of the police arriving to search his former home and of the startled erstwhile prince slumped in the back seat of a car driving him away from a police station have upended centuries of submissiveness.
The common law offense of misconduct in public office is described by the British Law Commission as “notoriously difficult” to define. But what is hard to define is also hard to limit. If a member of the royal family could be prosecuted for passing confidential financial information to Mr. Epstein, so could Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former British ambassador to the United States who is being investigated over claims that he leaked confidential government policy to Mr. Epstein when he was a senior minister.
And Mr. Mandelson’s association with Mr. Epstein has further undermined the already shaky authority of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who appointed Mr. Mandelson in 2024, despite knowing of his long-established ties to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Mandelson has been sacked from his ambassadorship and has resigned from the House of Lords and the Labour Party. Mr. Starmer has rejected calls that he step down, but he has accepted the resignations of two senior government aides. The Epstein scandal is one of the most potently seismic reverberations from America to be felt in British politics since 1776, and it’s not done yet.
This is not only a British crisis. In Norway, another European monarchy, Crown Princess Mette-Marit, a former foreign minister and two very prominent diplomats have been caught in the Epstein net. A former prime minister, Thorbjorn Jagland, has been charged with gross corruption over his ties to Mr. Epstein. In France a longtime political and cultural grandee and former culture minister, Jack Lang, is under investigation, and Miroslav Lajcak, a national security adviser to the prime minister of Slovakia, has resigned. (All have denied wrongdoing.)
All of this raises the obvious question: If the stench of gross corruption can drift all the way into European royal courts and taint so much of the political establishment in faraway countries (Mr. Starmer is not mentioned anywhere in the Epstein files, yet his connection to a connection of Mr. Epstein’s has been sufficient to badly tarnish him), why does it not cling to the administration of a man who is mentioned more than 5,000 times in the files? If the force of this American outrage can penetrate even the carapace of self-protection created over many centuries by the British royal family, why — to take an obvious example — is Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who maintained ties with the financier even after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to sexual offenses against minors, still in office?
The answer is that even constitutional monarchies developed limits on arbitrary power, chief among them an independent criminal justice system and some kind of parliamentary accountability. The United States, on the other hand, has allowed the application of its laws to be bent to the will of an autocratic president, and the checks its legislature should impose on executive authority have been vitiated by the sycophancy and cowardice of so many legislators.
It is notable that an actual monarch, Charles, felt it necessary to signal this month that he was “ready to support” a police investigation into his brother and then stated on Thursday that “the law must take its course.” For all of his prestige and prerogatives, he had to acknowledge higher powers: public revulsion and the imperative of justice.
Perhaps if Mr. Trump were declared king, America would be forced to find more effective ways to hold him and his courtiers to account.
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times, an advising editor for The New York Review of Books and an author, most recently, of “For and Against a United Ireland.”
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