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As Joe Perticone outlines in The Bulwark today, Republican lawmakers are greeting the release of the lewd letter in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book depicting the outline of a child and apparently signed by Donald Trump either by saying they don’t care or by denying the signature is Trump’s. For this to be true, someone would have had to have slipped the letter into the book when it was bound in leather in 2003, a story that makes no sense at all. But, as J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, Trump and his loyalists, including White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, are insisting the letter is a hoax.
Last speculates this is the route they’re taking because claiming proof that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016 was a “hoax” mostly worked, because claiming the letter is a hoax is a loyalty test, or because Trump knows what else is out there and is setting a marker to declare any more revelations a lie.
Or, perhaps, all three.
As Last writes, the material in the 238-page book reveals that the friends of the convicted sex offender described him as a “super-rich” man who liked “having sex with very young girls.” But rather than recoiling from his predatory habits, they celebrated those crimes. As Last writes: “Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle knew. They knew that Epstein was a predator. They believed that his pathology defined him. And they joked about it, encouraged it, and egged him on.”
An in-depth article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg detailed how top bankers at JPMorgan Chase ignored the many red flags around Epstein’s financial activities to keep the wealthy and well-connected man as a treasured client. It was only after Epstein was arrested the second time, federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, and he died in his jail cell that JPMorgan filed a report retroactively flagging 4,700 transactions totaling more than $1.1 billion as suspicious.
According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), that money included hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions involving women in Belarus, Russia, and Turkmenistan, and two Russian banks.
Epstein’s story personifies a cultural system in which wealthy white men can laugh about the horrific and illegal abuse of children—female children—comfortable in the knowledge the system will never hold them to account.
Retired Navy captain Jon Duffy encapsulated where this kind of thinking leads in an op-ed published today in Defense One, which covers issues of national security. Examining the administration's strike against a small vessel in the Caribbean last week, Duffy warned that “[t]he United States has crossed a dangerous line” into “lawless power,” operating without regard to the law.
Duffy reminded readers of the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling in Donald J. Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed while exercising official duties. At the time, he notes, experts warned that the decision would “give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder,” but a majority of the court waved those concerns away. “Now,” he writes, “the president has ordered killings in international waters. Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.”
“This is no longer abstract,” Duffy writes. “The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.”
Duffy notes that Trump has already used the exact same logic when he sent National Guard troops into U.S. cities: “redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first tool.” He warned that “the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law.”
Duffy urged military leaders to stand firm. “A republic that allows its leaders to kill without law, to wage war without strategy, and to deploy troops without limit is a republic in deep peril. Congress will not stop it. The courts will not stop it. That leaves those sworn not to a man, but to the Constitution. The oath is clear,” he wrote. “[U]nlawful orders—foreign or domestic—must be disobeyed. To stand silent as the military is misused is not restraint. It is betrayal.”
A world in which a few rich men run the federal government for their own benefit and according to their own whims looks much like the late nineteenth century.
Already, the cost of such a system to the American people is ramping up. Yesterday, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Maeve Reston of the Washington Post reported that states are facing cuts because of the Republicans’ sweeping tax and spending plan, which forces many of the responsibilities the federal government used to assume onto the states. The sudden shift of financial weight means states are cancelling infrastructure projects and scaling back benefits, even as new requirements in the law will mean increased staffing to oversee work requirements, for example.
In Maryland, Governor Wes Moore said the legislature has cut its budget by the largest margin in 16 years. He told the Washington Post journalists: “And now the federal government continues to lay off federal workers in historic numbers, slash rural health care, slash food assistance and then say to our states: ‘Now you all have to be the ones to pick up the pieces.’”
In North Carolina, Republican senator Ted Budd says that the policy of Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that she must sign off on all expenditures over $100,000 has badly delayed recovery aid to the state after Hurricane Helene that Congress approved back in December. He says he will place holds on all Department of Homeland Security nominees until the process speeds up.
In Ellabell, Georgia, an immigration raid by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security on an electric vehicle battery plant has destabilized the project altogether. The plant was under construction by the South Korean carmaker Hyundai and the battery supplier LG Energy Solution. Federal agents swept through last week and arrested 475 people, 300 of whom were South Korean nationals. South Korean leaders are angry, and LG Energy has pulled most of its employees out of the United States. The detained workers are supposed to be repatriated tomorrow.
As Farah Stockman and Rebecca Elliott of the New York Times note, the plan was billed as the biggest economic development project in Georgia’s history. Electrive reported today that LG Energy Solution is suspending construction of the factory.
But as the Trump administration’s authoritarianism hurts Americans, state governments led by Democrats are stepping up work for their people. Today is the anniversary of the day in 1850 when California became a state, and this evening, Governor Gavin Newsom noted on social media that “[t]he Trump Administration is once again failing to do its job—and California is cleaning up their mess.”
“We're deploying state resources to protect the 2,000-year old sequoias on FEDERAL LANDS from the wildfires the federal administration are supposed to handle.”
Democratic-led states are also joining forces to address the health issues the federal government is now dropping. In the western U.S., Oregon, California, Washington, and Hawaii are coming together in a new West Coast Health Alliance to coordinate vaccine guidelines; on the East Coast a similar joint effort is underway with representatives from every New England state except New Hampshire, along with New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, declined to participate, saying she doesn't want to politicize health care.
In New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the Union, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will be the first in the nation to offer universal free child care, expanding a program that lifted 120,000 of the state’s residents out of poverty by enabling them to stay in school and to work. The program also raised wages for childcare workers.
“Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”
In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey announced today that she would tackle the high cost of housing in the state by cutting environmental review for certain new housing construction projects down from more than a year to 30 days. Katie Lannan of GBH News notes that this plan is designed to deliver the 222,000 new housing units Massachusetts will need in the next ten years.
Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll said: “The bottom line is we can maintain our strong environmental standards and build housing and also have nature-based solutions to address…rising climate needs and mitigation.”
In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker visited with immigrant community leaders who focus on protecting constitutional rights as Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan warns of more of the ICE raids that have been sweeping in citizens and legal residents. “Many families who have lived in Illinois for years are fearful to pick up their kids from school, go to work, and live their lives freely,” the governor said. “At such an uncertain moment for our immigrant communities, it is more important than ever that people know their rights and have someone looking out for them.”
Tonight, Democrat James Walkinshaw easily won the special election to replace the late Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA). According to Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, the district has swung 16 percentage points toward the Democrats since the 2024 election.
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