The American People Voted for Jeffrey Epstein
“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick bragged to CNBC in April. Americans, he argued, are now destined for a form of industrial serfdom. “This is the new model, where you work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here,” he later rejoiced in an interview in May. Lutnick, coincidentally enough, was Epstein’s former next-door neighbor in New York City. His own children are reportedly set to make millions at a major investment firm thanks to their father’s tariff policies.
In Trump’s America, all of us are not created equal. There is a hierarchy atop which the Lutnicks and Kennedys and Thiels and Musks of the world can prosper, free from government regulation or union negotiations or press scrutiny or law enforcement investigations. Everyone else is part of a underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity—at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain—and where amorality is required to participate.
The Founders were not without their own sins, of course, but at least they had higher aspirations for their new nation. “Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net,” Adams once wrote to another friend. “Our Constitution was made only for a [moral] people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” So far, Americans are failing that test—and the republic itself.
