Donald Trump always demands public adulation, and he probably feels that it should be peaking now. He’s realized such longtime conservative dreams as damaging America’s social safety net and cementing a grossly unequal tax code. He’s bombed Iran with no immediate repercussions, even if it was more of a glancing blow to that country’s nuclear ambitions. He’s dropped border crossings significantly. He’s benefiting from a Supreme Court catering to his every wish. He’s even announced an investment in, and advance market commitment for, a rare earth minerals mining company that the Biden administration’s industrial-policy leaders would have gladly implemented.
And yet he’s losing his MAGA base over Attorney General Pam Bondi’s abrupt closure of the Jeffrey Epstein case. After leading his followers along that his administration would investigate and release information about the man who purportedly committed suicide in prison while awaiting prosecution for sex trafficking, Trump has tried to shut it all down and yelled at anyone focusing on what he termed old news. His base feels angry and betrayed, condemning Trump on his own social media site. Even inside the administration, figures from the podcast world like Dan Bongino are furious.
Democrats, who have mostly ignored Epstein for the past several years, are finally starting to raise the litany of Epstein-Trump connections in speeches. But it feels like their now-standard second-term tactic of using whatever’s available to get under Trump’s skin, without really grappling with the underlying policy issue.
Yes, I said policy issue.
There’s an incorrect belief that the Epstein case is somehow separate from the real concerns facing America, a conspiracist concoction untethered to reality. But it’s actually about the policy issue I’ve probably spent more time writing on than any other in my career in journalism: the two-tiered system of justice and accountability in America, and the impunity we afford the nation’s elites.
For a scandal that’s supposed to be shrouded in mystery, the details of the Epstein case are pretty well known. With the help of associate Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein procured young girls as high-class prostitutes for a fairly broad cross section of U.S. and global elites. We have Epstein’s black book, which includes nearly 2,000 names of associates and clients. We have the flight logs of his private jet and its passengers. We have searing documentary testimony from the girls who were pushed into servitude at his pleasure. We know that Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Larry Summers, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, former Disney CEO Mike Ovitz, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and many, many more had either meetings with Epstein, visits to Epstein’s private island, or have been subpoenaed for information about either or both.
It’s a failure of both parties to hold anyone responsible who has a certain degree of power and authority.
And we know that among Epstein’s associates was his neighbor Donald Trump. There are pictures and videos from parties, seven trips on Epstein’s private jet, numerous comments by Trump on how fun it was to hang out with Epstein and his coterie of young girls, connections between girls allegedly put into service by Epstein and their employment at Mar-a-Lago, and even direct testimony from Epstein himself. Audiotape released last year reveals Epstein saying that he was Donald’s “closest friend for 10 years.”
Even things we supposedly don’t know, like the source of Epstein’s wealth, are also pretty clear: He obtained power of attorney over the estate of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner in the late 1980s, from which he appropriated bunches of money for himself. He was paid hundreds of millions more by Apollo’s Leon Black.
In other words, a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy reached into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went largely unpunished for decades. Yet another Trump connection, his original labor secretary in the first term, Alex Acosta, issued a secret non-prosecution agreement to Epstein in 2008 when he was a U.S. attorney, which allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas for state charges and avoid federal charges or jail time.
Epstein was thereby able to continue his activities for another decade. But the year 2008 featured unpunished crimes of a different kind. It was the year of financial crisis, after banks committed industrial-scale fraud to collapse the world economy. Once the fallout hit and defaults of mortgages spiked, the banks covered up their crimes with millions of fraudulent documents to cure fatal defects in foreclosure cases. Nobody went to jail.
That same year, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president and adopted a policy of looking forward, not backward, at the numerous instances of illegal torture committed by the Bush administration. Nobody went to jail.
As Chris Hayes recounted in his first book, Twilight of the Elites, this was just part of an emerging loss of faith in institutions, whether byproducts of the failure to stop 9/11, the bogus rationales for war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, or the overwhelming evidence of pedophilia in the Catholic Church. And this “rot at the heart of our democracy,” as I put it in my 2016 book Chain of Title, was the thoroughgoing lack of accountability for any of these failures. Powerful people simply were held to a different standard than someone stealing ten bucks’ worth of candy at a convenience store or selling dime bags of pot in the streets. Who you were mattered more than what you did.
Everything about the Epstein case mirrors this. Everything about the failure to sanction Donald Trump for violations of law and the attempted overthrow of a free and fair election in 2020 also mirrors this. It’s a failure of both parties to hold anyone responsible who has a certain degree of power and authority. That goes for Epstein and even more so for Epstein’s clients.
Trump’s true believers thought for some reason he would be different, that he would blow up the system and leave no sacred cows. Entire industries like QAnon were created to enable this categorical error of faith. But it was pitifully easy to see in advance that Trump was never going to release information about Epstein. When asked directly before the 2024 election if he would, Trump hesitated, and even when he said he would, he was clearly choosing his words carefully. When Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking, Trump’s biographer said he considered a pardon out of fear for what she would reveal, potentially about him.
Everything that happened next flowed from this. When the raw tape showing Epstein’s prison cell the night before his death was finally released, metadata of the video file showed it was not raw but modified in some undefined way. Bondi claimed there was no client list, after earlier saying the client list was sitting on her desk.
You don’t even have to believe that Trump is hiding some sort of self-incrimination, though it certainly feels that way, to understand MAGA’s disappointment. They wrongly built up Trump as someone other than just another politician. They failed to understand that there’s a big difference between accountability and revenge, and that Trump is only interested in the latter. Accountability suggests a punishment that fits the crime, and in 21st-century America we have never seen such a thing.
Elite impunity is actually one of the biggest problems facing society. It turns people away from a system that fails them, sends them into the arms of demagogues who promise to make it all right. That the demagogue also was a charter member of the elite, who demanded impunity for himself and his comrades, may swing the pendulum temporarily back to the opposite party. And Democrats are right politically and substantively to call for the release of more information on Epstein, even to set up potential votes on it. But only when someone is actually held accountable for their actions will this sorry cycle be broken.
Certainly, MAGA overhype built the Epstein scandal into a key unlocking an understanding of the entire world, which it probably isn’t. A lot of liars and conspiracists used Epstein to channel rage about globalists and liberals, when in reality he was a scummy guy who didn’t serve any political party. That’s why it’s a harder fall now; it tears apart the entire moral system these people built for themselves. (That Trump is betraying MAGA on other issues, like Ukraine, becomes more noticeable and damaging amid the Epstein disappointment.)
But the larger policy issue tarnishes both parties, rooted in their protecting the powerful from having to answer for themselves. So much of the past 50 years, from the Nixon pardon to Chappaquiddick, from the Lewinsky scandal to Bandar Bush, is explained by this simple truth, that power sees itself as above the law. The public is sick and tired of this disparity, which rings as deep and loud as economic inequality and oligarchy. In fact, it signals the true flourishing of inequality and oligarchy: that the wealthy and powerful are out of the reach of the legal system.
David Dayen
David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’
July 15, 2025
5:15 AM