Why Trump Cannot Make the Epstein Scandal Go Away – MAGA Base Has Class Interest to Expose It
19.07.2025
After promising to publish the Jeffrey Epstein files with a list of high profile possible sex offenders, President Donald Trump and his Attorney General then announced that such files do not exist, and nothing was therefore to be published. The pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base was so furious, went so hysterical, and denounced Trump so loudly, that Trump has had to do a volte-face.
Yesterday 18 July Trump called on the Department of Justice to do the rare thing of releasing sealed evidence from the Grand Jury trial against Epstein. Yesterday Trump also sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over a lewd birthday card the newspaper of the previous day said he had sent to Epstein years ago.
What is the importance of the story behind this political bomb-shell?
Firstly, it exposes the underbelly of a falling empire. The American empire is suddenly exposed as being in a state of rot, to the very core.
Conspiracy theories abound. Ignore them. The question is, is the issue important to politics in other ways as well as exposing the rot of the American nightmare? If so, in what ways?
The story is about powerful, very rich men and political figures in a social ring of friendships and business deals, including arms sales, in mansions in the USA, Britain and on the Virgin Islands. The events, however, include involvement in, at best, salacious sexual escapades and behavior that the powerful men involved in it are, themselves, ashamed of and do everything to hide from their sisters, mothers, daughters and wives, let alone “the public”. But, that is just the surface. There is also, for this to take place, very serious sexual abuse, sexual assault, even rape, of the working class women who are the “minor actors”, or victims, on this ruthless playground. Hundreds of women, and dozens of underage girls, were drawn into this nexus of sexual abuse. So, the Epstein network is important for us to understand as a sign of serious, rampant, violent patriarchy, and of systemic patriarchal abuse of women and girls.
In turn, this kind of racket inevitably opens the way for legitimate speculation about it being a cover for blackmail operations on an industrial scale. Blackmail is one of the principle ways that politicians in the USA are corrupted, and it operates as an adjunct to the bribery of the capitalist lobby system. If bribery (election funding and lobbying) is the carrot, then blackmail is the stick.
So, it is an anti-patriarchy issue, and a blackmail issue.
In addition, it may be a secret services issue. It may even be that, at its source.
There is circumstantial evidence that the whole outfit has links to secret services, including the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and the British MI6, and may have had from the outset. To take one example, according to a World Street Journal report in 2023, a calendar the newspaper got hold of shows, and it is not denied, that former Israeli Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001, Ehud Barak, who was also vice Prime Minister from 2008 to 2009 and importantly Defense Minister from 2007 to 2013, “visited Epstein about 30 times between 2013 and 2017 at his estates in Florida and New York, including a time in 2014 when the former Israeli premier flew with Epstein on his private aircraft from Palm Beach to Tampa, after which Epstein went on to New York.” (quoted from Times of Israel, 4 May 2023). It goes on, “According to the report, Barak also met with Epstein monthly for nearly a year, beginning in December 2015.”
Anyway, the Epstein case refuses to go away for US President Donald Trump. Why? And what is it?
The “Make America Great Again” movement is constituted mainly of the disenchanted working class and small town lower middle class, in areas of massive factory closures and the despair this has brought with it. This social base has been faithful to Donald Trump even to the extent of having to defile its own narrow Protestant “family values” and accept the vulgar, patently disrespectful, openly amoral or immoral President in order to get policy issues they believe in, like banning abortion and same-sex marriages, and so on. But Trump’s recent new cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files is going a step too far for this base.
The issue has hit a class struggle nerve.
It is not just the moral and legal transgressions of Trump and his intimate friends like Epstein that the MAGA base people are asked to swallow. It is not just aval kulev for Donald Trump’s past frasques and various acts of debauchery regularly uncovered. The Jeffrey Epstein outfit concerned the systematic exploitation of hundreds of young women and girls, the daughters and sisters, of the very social class of the MAGA base: the poor and often beautiful, young white girl students going to the city to get a qualification and also look for a job as a model, an artist or an actor, so as to pay the high rents there that being a waitress does not cover.
They were followed, then lured and tricked into the luxurious houses Epstein owned in New York City, in Palm Beach in Florida, and abused in London and on an Island he owns in the Caribbean Virgin Islands, and abused by the richest and most powerful men in the world. Epstein was convicted for this in 2008, and after his death, his partner, a woman called Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted and is serving 20 years in prison in the USA for aiding and abetting him in these ventures.
The scandal became famous because it led to Prince Andrew being cut off from the Crown by British Royalty for his participation. Other men named for links with Epstein, though not incriminated in anything criminal, include top politicians like US Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, who was Epstein’s close friend for 10-15 years. Other well-known people named by the mainstream press include Bill Gates, Michael Jackson, the magician David Copperfield, disgraced actor Kevin Spacey, lawyer Alan Dershowitz (who people may remember is the very lawyer Israel is believed to have named for its defense in the South African case at the ICJ for genocide against the people of Palestine), the late American state Governor Bill Richardson and former Vice President Al Gore, but without these people being suspected of anything criminal. Epstein, remember, posed as a benefactor of science and art. And one of the problems of this kind of ring is that they can invent rumours about totally innocent men, based on an offer of funding for some ordinary research or charitable work. One of the main “zone d’ombre” in the case is how exactly how a penniless Epstein made the immense amount of property and money he ended up having, including owning two Islands in the Virgin Islands and what was the biggest house in Manhattan, a huge ranch in New Mexico as well as residential properties in London and Paris.
To give readers an idea of the scope of the scandal, though it is still mysterious, JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest bank in the USA, and by capitalization in the whole world, has paid out over $350 million to settle for claims against it, as a Bank, for facilitating sex trafficking by Epstein’s ring. That is huge.
So, to summarize, Epstein was convicted, after a plea bargain, of soliciting for prostitution, including for minors, in 2008 under state law, and served 13 months in jail. The US attorney Alex Acosta, who negotiated the plea bargain to stop federal charges at that time, later resigned from his post in the Trump Cabinet in 2019 over this issue. He claimed, according to Britannica on-line, to have been “lenient because intelligence officials had told him to ‘back off’ Epstein at the time.” Anyway, Epstein was later charged with serious federal offences.
While in awaiting bail in 2019, he was found dead in his cell. Though he is dead, his past life is not yet dead.
He supposedly hanged himself in his cell while waiting for a decision on a bail application. Much like the hangings by suicide in Mauritian cells, this one is not convincing. The camera doing the filming was shut down for one minute at the relevant time, by coincidence. The prisoners in nearby cells were not named nor even apparently interviewed, according to the family of Epstein. The scene of the death was not isolated. Famous pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical officer of New York, said the fact that there were three fractures of his hyoid bone as well as a break in the thyroid cartilage in his neck, were consistent with homicide, and not with suicide. And so on.
More recently, the young woman who had accused Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre also committed suicide in Australia, another suicide in slightly unbelievable circumstances.
And of course, the father-in-law of Epstein, i.e. the father of his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell, the disgraced media tycoon and former British MP, died in strange circumstances in 1991 and found floating in the sea after having “fallen off his boat”. He, as an Israeli inside-man was always known to be an Israeli “asset” and seems to have known Epstein before his daughter did. He was given a state funeral in Israel, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, President Chaim Herzog, six or seven serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence, as well as other “notab” and politicians in government and opposition parties.
So, all the above is very dramatic, and very politically important – only nobody knows exactly how, or why. Or, we do not know yet.
The staid source NPR (National Public Radio of the USA), on 4 January 2024, summarized some of the events as follows, excuse some repetition:
* In 2019, then-U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, appointed by Trump, abruptly resigned. According to the Justice Department, Acosta played a “pivotal” role while working as a U.S. attorney in 2008, negotiating a deal for Epstein that helped him avoid federal sex-trafficking charges. Acosta denied any wrongdoing. A DOJ probe later concluded that Acosta used "poor judgment" in the case.
* In November 2021, Jes Staley, then head of U.K.-based Barclays Bank, resigned after it was revealed that he maintained close ties to Epstein after Epstein's 2008 conviction for sex crimes. In a May 2023 report, British officials concluded Staley acted “recklessly and with a lack of integrity” while misleading regulators about his friendship with Epstein. Staley has denied any wrongdoing.
* In February 2022, Prince Andrew reached a settlement with [Virginia] Giuffre, saying in court documents that he “regrets his association with Epstein” and agreeing to make a “substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre's charity in support of victims’ rights,” according to a document filed by David Boies, an attorney for Giuffre. [She committed suicide three months ago.]
* In May 2023, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $75 million to settle claims by Epstein's victims that the bank was liable for "supporting, facilitating, and otherwise providing the most critical service for the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking organization." The settlement included no admission of wrongdoing by Deutsche Bank.
* In May 2023, attorneys for JPMorgan claimed in legal filings that government officials in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein maintained a home, "knew of and facilitated Epstein's crimes." However, the bank later agreed to pay $75 million to the Virgin Islands government to settle claims linked to Epstein's activity.
* In June 2023, JPMorgan agreed to pay roughly $290 million into a settlement fund for victims, after serving for more than 15 years as Epstein's go-to bank. JPMorgan has denied any wrongdoing. "We all now understand that Epstein's behavior was monstrous," bank officials said in a statement sent to NPR.
Conclusion
The importance of addressing this painful story is four-fold:
1. It illustrates the rot in the heart of the American class of billionaires. This is important for everyone in the world because it can impinge on decisions that lead to nuclear war and the annihilation of humanity. At a national level, it stands as a warning of what the new Ramgoolam Government in Mauritius lets itself in for by its continued facilitation of the selling-off of land and villas to the filthy rich, as the Government is again threatening to do with so-called “grandfathering” tax deduction schemes for the very rich, now expected to make an appearance in the Finance Bill. These schemes are being smuggled in, just like doing away with the newly announced income tax of 20% and 10% on the very rich is being smuggled in, after the budget has passed through Parliament. The Government hoped to hide the measures in the Finance Bill. But the right-wing Conservatives in the UK announced loud and clear in the UK Parliament the Ramgoolam-planned income tax deductions – before Ramgoolam even did! Beat that! Ramgoolam has only made an enigmatic reference in last Friday’s Cabinet Meeting to this concession. Is Ramgoolam, with his whole Cabinet, already held hostage by the very rich, and even by the very rich from an imperialist country? The Conservative MP’s made this announcement as part of their campaign against the Chagos-and-Diego deal, saying Ramgoolam would use the British “blood money”, as we call it, to lower income taxes in Mauritius. In LALIT, we thought they were talking rubbish like they do about Mauritius being under the influence of China (or Russia) as a pretext for their pro-empire talk, but it turned out they were correct about the looming tax deductions. We will soon see, when the Finance Bill is tabled.
2. It illustrates the large-scale, highly organized, abuses of poor working class women by the super-rich class of predatory males for their sexual debauchery.
3. It illustrates a bed-rock on which, by constant filming and taping, there was and still is material for huge blackmail schemes to be set up. This is the way secret services get obedience from politicians, and the way they extort immense amounts of money from the very rich for their shady work.
4. It illustrates the way in which the American CIA and Israeli Mossad and the British MI6 or SIS may be interwoven with the blackmail schemes based on large-scale sex abuse against women and young girls of the working classes.
It is the sordid side of the fall of the American empire. We live in dangerous times.
