Patrick suggested I write something about this development in the Trump Regime in the country formerly known as the Land of the Free. He felt I had noticed something worth sharing. There is a sense of fairness at the core of our tolerance of wealth. Break our sense that fairness is part of the inequality and outrage results.
The development is that the Trump Department of Justice and the Trump Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared that there is nothing to see in the Jeffery Epstein youth sex trafficking investigation.1 The MAGA faithful are enraged.2
To recap, back in the 1990-2010 decades, Epstein was a wealthy investor and playboy who was a center point for other wealthy people such as Donald J. Trump and Prince Andrew Windsor. It seems that he purchased an island, and like Tiberius at Capri,3 invited his friends to enjoy parties and indulge their sexual tastes, including adolescent women who were groomed for the abuse.
The MAGA faithful had seized on this as a proof for the wild conspiracy theory that was nurtured during the campaign for president in 2016. At that time, there was a pizzeria in the DC area that was presumed to have a basement from which the wealthy, elite democrats were operating a cannabalistic pedophile ring.4
Seriously.5
As a side note, I particularly enjoy the conspiracist tendency for layering. Pedophile ring needed even more, so they are eating the babies. Or was it cats?
The problem that Trump now faces is not that he is an abuser of women. It is not that he is a moral degenerate. It is not even that he is a leering old man who likes young, nubile women. Most of his supporters are already fine with that. They voted for it. The problem is that he has managed to hoodwink his supporters into believing that he is not one of the elite. Even Trump, with his formidable and only competence being a public spectacle star, will find it hard to avoid being seen as an elite when he is proven to be part of the Epstein sex party ring. In the MAGA world, the problem is less about moral perfidy and more about elite privilege. In my thinking, this is the difficulty at the heart of the Epstein case.
It seems to me the difficulty is a web of desire and envy that masks itself as moral outrage. The difficulty is that most people cannot believe that there is any chance they could enjoy the parties on private islands or private yachts where nubile young women are enslaved as the playthings of wealthy white men. It is a fantasy that many have, but the idea that it is only permitted to the elite few is a powerful trigger of the human sense of fair play.
Brosnan and de Waal propose that inequity aversion can be broken down into two levels. At the most basic level, individuals react to immediate unequal distribution of a reward for equal effort expended, whereas at the second, they show the ability to accept a current unequal distribution with the expectation that over time distribution will equalize.6
The problem here is that the expectation of equalisation has never existed for elite, wealthy parties. The perhaps foolish presumption was that Trump was not party to the party. The current MAGA meltdown about the Epstein files seems to me related to a shift from the second level of fairness to the first level, which level is much more visceral.
More than most things I have seen, this has potential to pivot on Trump. Then we will see how effective and committed is the core group around him. Will they retire him? How will they defend and continue their oligarchic efforts? Vance has not proven a charismatic evangelist for the oligarchic takeover for which Peter Thiel paid.7 On the other hand, perhaps charisma is fading in significance with an army of well funded ICE agents.8
Citations
- Department of Justice. Letter posted to DOJ website and link provided by Heather Cox Richardson. Interestingly, I could not find this document by navigating from the main page of the DOJ. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline. ↩︎
- Richardson, Heather Cox. 2025-07-14. “July 13, 2025”. Letters from an American. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-13-2025. ↩︎
- “While Tiberius was in Capri, rumours abounded as to what exactly he was doing there. Suetonius records the rumours of lurid tales of sexual perversity, including graphic depictions of child molestation, cruelty, and most of all his paranoia. While heavily sensationalised, Suetonius’s stories at least paint a picture of how Tiberius was perceived by the Roman senatorial class, and what his impact on the Principate was during his 23 years of rule.”
Wikipedia contributors. 2001-09-06. Tiberius. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tiberius&oldid=1300105939. ↩︎ - Wikipedia contributors. 2016-11-25. “Pizzagate conspiracy theory”. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopaedia. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory&oldid=1297122032 ↩︎
- Wikipedia contributors. 2005-12-06. “QAnon”. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopaedia. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=QAnon&oldid=1299476059. ↩︎
- Brosnan, Sarah F. and Frans B.M. de Waal. 2014-09-18. “Evolution of responses to (un)fairness”. Science. 346,1251776(2014). DOI:10.1126/science.1251776 Accessed 2025-07-14 at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1251776. ↩︎
- Pequeño, Antonio IV. 2024-07-16. “What We Know About J.D. Vance’s Relationship With Billionaire GOP Donor Peter Thiel”. Forbes. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/07/16/jd-vance-and-peter-thiel-what-to-know-about-the-relationship-between-trumps-vp-pick-and-the-billionaire/. ↩︎
- “But the most important political story may be the $160 billion which has been allocated to immigration and border control. This is not just because of what that money will do to immigrants and their communities, but because the expansion of ICE will change the balance of power between American states and the federal government. We have never before had a federal police force built on that scale…”
Applebaum, Anne. 2025-07-11. The Authoritarian Slide. Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum. Accessed 2025-07-14 https://anneapplebaum.substack.com/p/the-authoritarian-slide. ↩︎
The Epstein outrage by the MAGA folks has legs because it is believable. It touches on what Trump has told us about himself. And the jealousy spillover from the Bezos Venice party (a bubble party on his super yacht! Really?) may be in play in the MAGA outrage. Meanwhile hundreds if not thousands of citizens and legal US residents are being abducted. It’s a grand country
So, the MAGATs aren’t bothered by the misogyny , pedophilia, sexual assault and all the rest of the debauchery that the nazi-in-chief is defined by. They’re mainly triggered that they didn’t get an invite to the party. Is there a bottom to MAGA hypocrisy?
“Promises, promises, But Daddy, you promised we could all know the truth. We could spit on the nasty criminals, watch them squirm as they were tried and led away, you promised! ”
Of course they are upset, and of course they will forget it as soon as he throws another hunk of junk food and distracts them. We know he is on the plane logs and that at some point he broke it off, probably owed Epstein money. Now, they need to keep a close watch on the girlfriend because she is next for defenestration. And she wants to talk because he now can’t pardon her without more uproar. And she expected to be pardoned for not implicating DJT.
Cleverness seen on the interwebs…
“Prison cameras went down while Ghislaine Maxwell committed suicide next week”