The Only Way Out of the Epstein Abyss

Moving forward must mean transparency and accountability.

Photo by 愚木混株 Yumu on Unsplash

If you don’t follow Rotimi Adeoye on social media, I recommend you rectify that mistake. He’s a long-time political staffer-turned-commentator, and he’s good at figuring out what we’re all missing.

But I was disappointed at a bit of pessimism he displayed this week. Commenting on the latest news about the Trump-Epstein connection — the Wall Street Journal published a copy of a risqué birthday greeting sent by Trump to Epstein — he suggested that maybe the former president is guilty of Epstein-like crimes and will just get away with it:

Hate to say it, but much like the conversation on gun control ended once we decided that killing kids was fine and we didn't need gun control, the public fully rejecting Trump probably ended when it became clear he was friends with a pedophile and everyone said it was okay

I understand Adeoye’s fatalism. The Epstein issue at this point seems like Charlie hurling towards Lucy’s football. Every time you think we have an opportunity to see the totality of Epstein’s connections to the world’s VIPs, the football is pulled away and we find ourselves flying through the air.

After a whole host of Trump administration staff promised to do a full disclosure of everything the federal government knows about the disgraced former billionaire, the president is now waging war on his own allies to prevent a congressional vote on disclosure.

It’s entirely possible that we just run out of stories that can be done on this issue based on what’s in the public domain. The thousands of files in possession by the FBI and Department of Justice will never come to light, and much of the population will think that Trump and other Friends of Epstein are simply bad guys that will never be punished; others, mostly people in Trump’s diehard base, will argue that the former president is clean as Boy Scout. That signature on the Epstein card is fake! Trump is an upstanding man, basically the Pope.

At the risk of making a comparison that’s too extreme, it reminds me of an earlier post I penned about how so much of history forgot about what happened to the Armenians during the Ottoman-led genocide. Adolf Hitler was directly inspired by those events, arguing that nobody in history will complain about the bloodshed was about to unleash in Europe because “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

But Hitler was wrong. He ended up losing the war, which meant that the Nazi leadership faced accountability for war crimes. Today, the Nazi atrocities during World War II are perhaps the best-known war crimes in the world. Almost nobody has forgotten Hitler’s crimes. But that’s only because we got accountability.

The way out of the Epstein abyss is to remember that lesson. Congress or the administration could choose to release all of the Epstein files at any time — any Congress or any administration.

While the Democrats are quick to capitalize on the Epstein issue now, it is fair to ask why they didn’t do disclosure when Joe Biden held the presidency and they held the Congress. One obvious reason would be that Epstein was close friends with many elite Democrats, including the Clintons. This creates an awkward incentive for both parties to never disclose everything the government knows about this matter.

But I expect we are starting to see a generational shift in leadership in politics, and there’s a narrow window of opportunity for people running for Congress in 2026 and president in 2028 to say that not living in a world where elites can cover up their complicity in or knowledge of grand crimes is more important than protecting the behinds of their party bosses, whether that be Clinton or Trump. If we don’t want bad behavior in the future, we have to be honest about the bad behavior of the past.