No major US figures other than Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell have been held legally accountable for the child sex trafficking scandal — and conservatives are blaming President Donald Trump.
“Trump is saddened by any embarrassment to the royal family,” wrote William Kristol of the conservative publication The Bulwark, referring to the president’s response to the recent arrest of the former UK prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. “And there is no evidence the Trump administration has any interest in seeing justice done, or any intention of having the truth come out. We have an executive branch that is on the side of the Epstein class, not the Epstein survivors.”
When asked by Fox News’ Peter Doocy on Thursday if people in America will wind up in handcuffs too, Trump replied instead that the whole situation was a “shame.”
“I think it’s a shame,” Trump told Doocy. “I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. . . . So I think it’s a very sad thing.”
Holly Baxter of the UK Independent was as scathing as Kristol about Trump’s response to Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest.
“By God, doesn’t Britain’s willingness to go after him make America look absolutely pathetic in comparison?” Baxter wrote. Calling out Trump for saying it is “really time” for people to move past the Epstein scandal, Baxter pointed out that “there are a lot of emails, a lot of photographs,” with “a whole load of redactions” and “some truly shocking claims.”
“There may have been children as young as nine years old, perhaps even younger, who were trafficked by Epstein and his associates,” Baxter wrote, adding “that there was a ‘torture video’ shared among them; that Epstein and Maxwell paid their victims to recruit their friends into the trafficking network.” Despite that, Trump’s Justice Department has barely moved.
“Where are the arrests?” Baxter wrote. “Where is the crack team poring over every single date and word in order to hold as many people as possible to account? Where are the back-to-back, day-and-night meetings with the victims to gather every single possible morsel of data, to piece together a constellation of crimes so that the perpetrators may be held to account? Where is the DOJ? And why, oh why does justice in America these days look like a bunch of millionaires stepping down from their very prestigious jobs?”
Indeed, along with Epstein (who died in jail due to a mysterious suicide), the only person to be held accountable is Maxwell, who is in “a ‘Club Fed’-style prison she was moved to by Trump’s DOJ after being interviewed by the president’ former personal lawyer Todd Blanche. The ongoing injustice is damaging Trump’s own movement.
“This very much is about a schism that is happening in MAGA,” historian Nicole Hemmer told Greg Sargent for The New Republic. “And some of the schism predates Epstein, and we’re just seeing it play out. Like, the people who are willing to attack Trump over Epstein already had problems with Trump.”
Many suspect that Trump, who was friends with Epstein since the 1980s and frequently socialized with him during the 1990s, was in some way involved with Epstein’s scandals. This suspicion was recently reinforced when a key piece of material from the Epstein finals was suddenly taken away from the public. The file contained notes from a 2019 multi-part interview between the FBI and a woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was a minor.
