Can America Avoid Moral Collapse?

Even as Trump reverses himself and calls for the release of the Epstein files, he and his enablers may have already damaged our nation beyond repair

(Photo by SnowInSummer via Getty Images)

Late last night, Donald Trump unexpectedly posted that he supports the House vote this week to release the Epstein files “because we have nothing to hide.” This comes as more than 100 House Republicans are expected to vote in favor of the discharge petition to release the files. This is according to Rep. Thomas Massie, who co-sponsored the effort with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna to force the House vote.

This also follows the House Oversight Committee’s release of over 20,000 pages of documents this week. The Wall Street Journal’s review of 2,234 email threads in that collection found that Trump is mentioned in more than 1,600 of them—more often than anyone else.

Make no mistake: Trump’s reversal is not a sign that he intends to come clean about his involvement with sex traffickers and child molesters Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell—not after he’s worked so aggressively to deny any role. On Friday, intensifying his effort to avoid accountability, Trump demanded Justice Department investigations of high-profile Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. This was an obvious attempt to deflect attention from himself—look over there!—but also to serve up the classic schoolyard argument: They did it, too.

Of course, Trump was quick last night to further politicize and lie about what’s at issue. “It’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown,’” he posted.

The reversal makes clear that the feral Trump grasped that he’s in trouble and feared humiliation. But we can assume that Trump is counting on enough uncertainties and confusion in a subsequent flood of files to enable him to spin his way out—as well as enough sycophants to support his interpretation of what the documents really mean. He also clearly figured out that he couldn’t hold together a GOP coalition of coverup supporters, not as many have now calculated that the growing firestorm would eventually burn them if they didn’t vote for the release. So, too, Trump may be counting on a failure of the needed 60 votes in the Senate, providing him continuing cover.

But let’s not lose sight of what’s really happening here. This is a corrosive, criminal story involving profound immorality that will only deepen this week when the House votes.

The stench will linger: The man who holds the highest office in the land maintained a long-time relationship with convicted pedophiles and may well have committed pedophilia himself. The blight on our identity and our future as Americans is at stake.

We can say this is about Trump, not us. We can insist this is about Trump’s America, not our America. But there comes a point where any nation’s identity is defined by the values and behavior of its leaders, even leaders that are only supported by a minority of the population.

You and I and the majority of Americans can reasonably insist that he doesn’t represent us, but at what point does that become insufficient? In other words, is there a point when we cannot overcome the accelerating moral collapse resulting from his repugnant actions?

How much longer can we the people sit back and watch the body of evidence grow—the emails and text messages that make clear Trump “knew about the girls” and likely much more than that—before we become complicit by doing nothing to remove him from office?

Yes, a weakened Trump decided to reverse himself as he grasped a major vote against him was coming. But it’s hard to see how this can stem the moral rot in the GOP and among key sycophants like Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and House Speaker Mike Johnson who have worked aggressively to protect Trump for months.

This is a case in which the underlying crime is so monstrous that the ongoing effort to cover it up is nearly as evil. We are talking about more than a thousand female victims, many hundreds of whom were children, who Jeffrey Epstein and his criminal ring raped or or otherwise sexually abused. And we are talking about a corrupt and despicable regime that has actively worked to make us believe that we should not be concerned with the role of the man who occupies our White House.

I won’t reiterate all the ways that, in my view, Donald Trump crossed a moral line from early on. That list would surely include his hateful demonizing of migrants, his taped confession of his pattern of sexual assault, his support for Nazis, his incitement of violence against innocent people, his conscious lies about the deadly danger of COVID, his poisonous spread of bigotry and hatred toward vulnerable populations in order to sow division. And at this very moment, masked federal agents are carrying out lawless and inhumane attacks on our neighbors while the so-called “Department of War” continues to murder alleged drug traffickers sailing in the Caribbean Sea.

In all these cases, Trump’s cultists could cynically dismiss the moral issues by claiming this is all about politics—getting, consolidating and expanding power. Indeed, too many members of the legacy media have treated the story of Trump as fundamentally a political story rather than a criminal or moral story.

But as I wrote on Saturday, this is different. Most Americans, including two-thirds of Republicans, say the files should be released. The Trump cultists may assume their dear leader is innocent of any crime, but it’s clear that the public really doesn’t like the idea that rich and powerful men have exploited their money and power to rape young girls. (That’s true despite grotesque efforts taken by degraded people such as Megyn Kelly who claims that it’s not really pedophilia if it involves 15-year-olds.)

We can assume Trump will do everything he can to muddy the waters and save his own skin—all while pretending he cares about exposing the truth. But the longer the country is dragged through the mud of the Epstein story, the more dangerous for our society and nation. In short: Trump must go.

I have long believed in the generosity of the American people. I have long been nourished by the idea of American freedom and democracy providing a beacon to people around the world. I have assumed that this hateful chapter will be overcome and good and decent Americans will soon begin the arduous but hopeful task of repairing the terrible damage inflicted by Trump and his sycophants and enablers. I have remained hopeful that we will eventually, albeit slowly, be able to rebuild trust within our body politic and with democratic allies around the world.

But I worry that many of those who voted overwhelmingly for Democrats earlier this month have now turned their sights to the midterms and the assumption that we’ll sort this all out at the ballot box. After 10 months of the second Trump term, it should be painfully clear how much more damage and destruction can happen in the 12 months between now and next November’s elections.

And that includes the consequences of not grasping that the Epstein “scandal”—a word that fails to grasp the scale of the horror—is eating away at the moral core of our nation and the idea of civilized society. If the majority of Americans fail to demand that that these predators be held accountable—that America won’t protect the safety of young girls—then we may never recover from the abuse what we have permitted.

As English philosopher John Stuart Mill asserted in 1867, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” As author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said in 1986, “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

I have wondered what event or set of events would finally be the catalyst to mobilize tens of millions of Americans to demand that, finally, enough is enough and Trump must go. If the emerging Epstein facts fail to provide that catalyst, we may long look back at this time and ask ourselves why we chose to remain silent when there was still time to avoid calamity.

Programming Note: I will be talking with on Substack Live at 2PM ET today with Mary Trump, who is a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, vocal critic of her uncle and publishes The Good in Us here. I hope you’ll join us.

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