Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue [View all]

It’s about elite impunity, the defining issue in America for more than two decades.

by David Dayen July 15, 2025

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.
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-07-15-jeffrey-epstein-is-policy-issue/

Indeed.