I’m going to sit down right here and I want you to explain this to me real slow. Like I’m an idiot, OK?
Please tell me how fanning the flames of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy is, as some vocal opponents of Donald Trump seem to believe, in any way going to help us weaken or politically hurt the president.
Then, while you’re at it, explain to me how it is anything other than a distraction from the real catastrophic mayhem that is going on all around us.
Go on. I’ll wait.
It’s not that I haven’t given this some thought. I wish I hadn’t, believe me. Because it is a repugnant story.
Epstein was a criminal pig. He abused many women and girls. Those women and girls certainly deserve justice. But they never got it because the rich and the powerful around Epstein—pigs themselves—helped him dodge accountability for years. Once he could no longer be fully protected, they worked hard to cover up the details.
One of those rich and powerful people, a friend and a champion of Epstein, is President Trump. There is a ton of evidence supporting this. Trump has also been accused by dozens of women of sex abuse; a jury in 2023 found him liable for having committed such an act—and then having lied about it and defamed his victim.
As it happens, Trump is also a convicted fraudster, was impeached twice, has sold out the country to our enemies, has screwed his base with policies that will cause deep pain to tens of millions of them, has stolen and mishandled national secrets, has gone bankrupt half a dozen times, has been involved in literally thousands of law suits and is currently publicly engaging in the most egregious corruption and abuse of power in American history.
He is perhaps the best known of all the piggish pigs who ever snorted their slop from this country’s political or celebrity troughs.
But he’s impossible to taint. Accusations and proven crimes bounce off him like bullets off the chest of America’s most famous comic book immigrant, Superman.
So, let’s just imagine the worst case for Trump. The Epstein files are discovered in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. They include photos of Trump with Epstein and underage girls; tapes of Trump praising Epstein and making light of his predilection for pederasty. They detail ties linking Epstein to former members of the Trump cabinet. They even show Trump offering a cabinet job in his last administration to one of the prosecutors who helped bury the Epstein case.
Yes, and…?
We already know all that stuff. It’s all in the record. What else could be there?
Maybe the files show that powerful men tried to use their influence to help cover up the Epstein case. Maybe they show Trump doing just that. Maybe this whole current controversy proves it. (Which, let’s face it, it probably does.) But is it any more serious than any of Trump’s other giant lies?
What if there was some doubt surrounding Epstein’s suicide—and powerful people were implicated. Who was president when Epstein died? Yes. It was Trump.
Do you think for a minute that if it came out Trump had personally ordered someone to sneak into Epstein’s cell and strangled him with his bare hands, that it would actually damage him in some real way? The Supreme Court has already opined that, if he did so while president, he probably has immunity. His supporters have already shown that they will stick with him after crimes, after convictions. He was re-elected president after leading a coup!
But sure, Epstein. Yeah, that’s what’ll get him.
So then, how? He’s not running for office again? He’s shown he can rule by executive order and ignore laws he doesn’t like and no one will challenge him.
They can’t touch him.
Just maybe, maybe you think this will make him less popular. Well, he’s already incredibly unpopular. His signature initiatives are so far underwater that it’ll take some combination of Jacques Cousteau and the Little Mermaid to report on future developments concerning them.
Would it be good to blow the whistle on our corrupt system of justice—one that has let people like Epstein and Trump get away with horrible stuff for decades? Yes. Would it be good for the girls who suffered to get their day in court? Yes. Will it happen as a result of revealing whatever it is might be in the “Epstein files?” No.
That’s not going to happen.
The only way to achieve that would be to actually elect political leaders who are not tools of the rich and powerful in this country. To elect leaders, rather, who would stand up to them. And that’s a tall order in a country where capitalism is, as we have discovered, so much more important than democracy.
In fact, the reality is, it was protecting the rich and powerful that was the main reason Trump was supported and funded to win election again. Any way you look at it, the Epstein problem and the Trump problem are the same problem. And by that I am not referring to their vile track record with women. Rather, I mean the issue at the core of this case is the impunity of the rich.
This is an issue that sets off MAGA faithful, but in order to fix it, they would have admit they were duped by America’s oligarchs, toss their God-king into a cell, and—let’s face it, they’d probably have to elect Democrats. Which is a sweet lovely fairy tale but it ain’t going to happen. (What’re they going to do, turn to the other MAGA leader? Wait. What? There isn’t one. Well, that is a problem, isn’t it?)
Meanwhile, while we’re spinning our wheels, we’re ignoring that the president has lost his marbles, is destroying the world economy with tariff “policies” that are literally insane, is kicking Americans off healthcare, shutting down or gutting every part of the U.S. government designed to protect us, sending innocent people to rot in foreign jails without due process, attacking our education system, sapping away our national power and systematically destroying our democracy in ways that are putting us all, daily, at great and ever greater risk.
In other words, we’re already in a world of hurt. Spending even one additional second thinking about Epstein is not going to help us solve any of the gigantic problems with which we are confronted in this moment.
But, please, do go on. What have I missed?
The post Opinion: Who Really Thinks the ‘Epstein Files’ Will Harm Trump? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
