Some friendships last forever, others are phases in life. When it comes to his hangout days with Jeffrey Epstein, US president Donald Trump was, on Tuesday afternoon, more than ready to consign it all to the dustbin.
“I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else really,” he said when asked about the deluge of documents that entered the public domain last Friday.
“Now that nothing has come out about me – other than that it was a conspiracy against me,” he said, doubling down on his weekend assertion that the gargantuan content of the files absolves him.
“So much for the Radical Left’s hope against hope, some of whom I’ll be suing,” he wrote on Truth Social.
READ MORE
“Additionally, unlike so many people that like to ‘talk’ trash, I never went to the infested Epstein island but, almost all of these Crooked Democrats, and their Donors, did.”
If the Trump administration has its way, the matter ends here. Ghislaine Maxwell remains the sole person to undergo a trial and conviction and resides in a minimum-security prison in Texas. The reasons for her transfer to that comparative luxury have never been made clear.
In Britain, Peter Mandelson’s fall from grace is complete. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor will live out the remainder of his life in privileged disgrace and may yet endure the discomfiture of testifying before the US Congress in Washington.
On Monday, it was confirmed former US president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, will do just that, after being served subpoenas to answer questions about their relationships with Epstein. Those appearances, in late February, will be a publicity circus and will afford Trump a further I-told-you-so lap of triumph.
The release by the department of justice of some three million files has served as an avalanche on the claims that everything Trump has been up to this past while, including his renewed claims on Greenland, has been a grand distraction from fears about what those files contain.
The department didn’t so much “release” the files as dump them into the public sphere in a way that has caused further trauma for some of the survivors, whose names and even faces the department of justice in some cases failed to redact.
So three million files are in the public domain. Another three million files have yet to be released. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat, has formed with Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie an alliance that has quietly become one of the most effective forces in the trenchantly divided Capitol Hill. On Sunday, he was asked if he felt the department of justice has now fully complied with the law.
“No, they haven’t. They’ve released at best half the documents. But even those shocked the conscience of the country. I mean you have some of the wealthiest individuals – tech leaders, finance leaders, politicians – all implicated in some way, wanting to go to Epstein’s island knowing that Epstein was a paedophile. It is frankly one of the largest scandals in my view in our country’s history and there’s a demand for lead accountability.”
Khanna is half right. It unquestionably should be one of the biggest scandals in US political and civic history. But the “conscience of the country” is far too battered and careworn to fully absorb what the Epstein files have to say about the most powerful and elite tiers of society.
The various images and videos of Epstein himself deepen the sense of a man who was, clearly, a grotesque: a satyr in slovenly leisure wear, manipulating young women whose identities and faces have been redacted, leaving their ages an open question. If someone is clearly repugnant on grainy photographs and videos, then what must an encounter with the real living thing have felt like? Irrespective of guilt or innocence, what does it say about the judgment of those who elected to be around Epstein?
The list of familiar names in the files range from current commerce secretary Howard Lutnick to Microsoft owner Bill Gates to the Clintons to Elon Musk to Steve Bannon to Woody Allen. All have explained away their appearance on the files through terse statements leaning on their lack of knowledge of Epstein’s behaviour.
The Trump name is mentioned some 38,000 times in the files but there are no direct communiques in those files released. So in the weekend headlines, the president and first lady are merely bit players in the bipartisan cast of the richest and most influential leaders in their fields, people who have, for decades, cast themselves in the guise of moral and civic exemplars.
The United States is experiencing a kind of collective exhaustion syndrome right now. The relentlessness of this administration, with its breakneck switch of focus from Davos to Minneapolis, has drawn on emotions and loyalties and asks broader questions of where the country is headed.
It’s asking a lot of the people to have the bandwidth to parse through a blitzkrieg of federal documents from a murky past that were, immediately after release, prone to AI-generated distortions and manipulations so that it soon became impossible to authenticate much of what was circulating.
Todd Blanche, Trump’s assistant attorney general, suggested that the department of justice has found nothing so far to bring about prosecutions and argued that Epstein-related crimes aside, the administration has successfully chased down more sex traffickers and paedophiles than any in history.
He is also adamant that Friday’s release marks “the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people”.
Massie and Khanna have written to the department of justice, requesting to come and view unredacted files. Blanche says they are welcome. “We have nothing to hide. We never did. And our doors are open if they want to come and review any of the materials we have produced.”
It all leaves the Epstein saga at a strange and murky impasse, where nobody, it seems, is guilty, but a host of reputations have been smeared by association.
The release of the files has done nothing for the many hundreds of women whose lives were terribly damaged by the abuses perpetrated by Epstein and those unprosecutable others. The exhaustion and dismay they must feel this week is inestimable. The entire Epstein saga occupies that queasy middle ground between historic scandal, as framed by Khanna, and black-comic material for the late-night talkshow hosts.
Beyond that, the overall content of the files serves to illuminate the craven and contemptible shamelessness among too many of the most prominent elites to have emerged in western society over the past 30 years.
Epstein’s slimy talent was to insert himself as a fixer and connector within a malleable system of favour and influence. The jet, the island, the house in Manhattan, the disguised references to “parties” that run through the files: all were shiny adornments to attract the attentions of those who already had – and still have – everything for now.
The Trump administration believes it has washed its hands of Epstein with the release of these files. But getting rid of the stench may be more difficult.
