Fool Me, Once

The trail of the Epstein files is leading to a bigger picture of corruption, but there are reasons to be cautious in following them.

April 1, 2026

The contours of a story is emerging that would make it all make sense, and that if true could prompt the kind of national reckoning that might put our democracy safely back on track. It may or may not be true.

A cadre of dedicated and courageous independent journalists like Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and Ellie Leonard have been sorting through the millions of files so far made public about Jeffrey Epstein, and following the clues and leads these emails and transcripts and images provide. Reporting suggests that Epstein was involved in other illegal activities, including drug trafficking. Figures associated with the convicted pedophile, including Donald Barr who gave him his first job and the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, have long associations with the espionage community. And according to Valdes-Rodriguez’ research, among the many strange things about Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico is a curious high-tech communication device of a type typically belonging only to intelligence agencies, possibly connected to the high-level research facilities at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to behave with bizarre deference to Vladimir Putin. Though he threatened punitive tariffs on a Mexican humanitarian convoy offering relief to a U.S.-starved Cuba, Trump let a Russian oil tanker through, delivering energy to a nation deprived of electricity by an American blockade, and providing needed currency for Putin to prop up his economy and fund his disastrous war. Ever since Trump attacked his own intelligence agencies and sided with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, indeed, ever since the probably-discredited “Steele Dossier” of supposed Russian kompromat, many have questioned whether Donald Trump is somehow working at the behest of Vladimir Putin. That would explain many of the terrible choices the President has made, the obstinate insistence of belittling and short-changing Ukraine, and the fact that he often changes his position on matters in ways that benefit the Kremlin.

The emerging picture suggests that Epstein was at the center of a massive, multi-country blackmail operation, one that may have had the involvement of Russian or other intelligence agencies,¹ that created a vast network of powerful people with terrible secrets to hide. This network enabled whoever runs it to control compromised individuals, to access valuable secret information, to move money, drugs, and people around the world unchecked, and to buy influence with governments across the free world. Epstein was not merely a pedophile and a pimp, on this theory, but also a blackmailer, a spy, and a person with powerful connections to governments friendly and hostile around the entire globe.

Whether the emerging connections will hold water remains to be seen. One reason I am reluctant to believe is that a vast conspiracy would help assuage the deep bewilderment and anxiety around how how so many powerful men could be connected to crimes and to one another through the shared predation of one depraved, now dead, man.

A vast blackmail operation targeting elites makes it make sense. But there is another way to understand why this lurid story seems to capture so many in its net, a grubbier, more mundane, even more depressing reason. It may be not that the world’s elite have come together to form a secret cabal of pedophiles, but rather that what it is to be a “john” is essentially to engage in the same behavior. As I wrote once before, to understand the sex industry fully is to know that prostitution as it exists is inextricable from the exploitation of children. Sexual cruelty and murder are endemic risks for those who are paid for sex; for some, the act of payment is a form of domination that makes it more appealing. Not all johns, fine. Not everybody who has entered into a contract for sexual services is a sadist or a pedophile (though all at a minimum are participating in a system that sexually exploits children). Not all get a thrill from the power differences, from the quasi-rape involved in sex without desire, from being violent towards women, girls and boys for the sexual thrill of it. But some do. Many do. And everything we know about what happened on Epstein Island happens all over the country, every day.

For this reason, I think it is wise to be careful in reading too much into the lurid and despicable tales, to assume that there must be something extraordinary afoot. The connections may hold up, but one reason we want to believe them is that it puts at arms length and in a sense makes explicable the despicable behavior of more people than we would like to imagine are possibly involved in the violent sexual exploitation of children.

Another reason I am wary of my own proclivity to believe is that blowing the lid off a vast international conspiracy is exactly the kind of thing that might spur Americans to take the difficult and unlikely steps we must if we are to restore our democracy.

When all this ends, we will need to take real steps to patch up the weaknesses that have been revealed in our democratic system, and build a society more resilient to both autocracy and to the systematic abuse of the vulnerable (a need that did not emerge with Trump). I am pessimistic about our collective will to sustain hard reflection and demand accountability instead of simply moving on. Resistance to looking at why we got here will be strong. There will long be MAGA dead-enders, just as Stalin still has his fans in Russia today. The right-wing news will continue to spew outrage; even if traditional conservatives return again to the fore, they will want to stave off too much criticism of Trump, lest the tar spill onto them from that brush. The Democrats, likely, will prefer comity to accountability, and will urge us to move on. And as a people, Americans’ ability to sustain attention to our crimes and failures has never been a cultural touchstone.

But if it were to turn out that the President of the United States was indeed a Russian agent, that there was a massive, global network of blackmail victims sharing information and standing out of the way of hacking for espionage and cyberwarfare, if multiple governments were implicated in the shadowy and sordid dealings of Epstein and Maxwell, and if Trump’s fanboy treatment of Putin were revealed to be a fear of being exposed, that would create the kind of constant, breathless news stories and the shock of a duped nation that would make action inevitable. Congressional hearings would be held. Special prosecutors would be deputized. Indictments would fly. And over it all would loom the question: how did something so outlandish, so improbably, end up being true? “The Manchurian Candidate” was kind of fanciful in its day; how did we end up being in a system even more convoluted and vividly improbable than that?

In short, if in the end what happens is that intrepid journalists and others do uncover a wild conspiracy that overtook our government, leading us to the very brink of abandoning democracy, or possibly to World War III, that would be enough to galvanize Americans to pull back, take stock, hold people accountable and demand reform.

A more mundane explanation might bring Trump down, and collapse his movement, but it won’t really help us move on. Even if every man in the Epstein files ends up in the slammer, similar perpetrators will continue to worm their way through the country. And if it turns out that Trump’s rise is less the stuff of movie thrillers and more the stuff of true crime podcasts, similarly, the problems of our democracy will probably remain widespread and deeply entrenched.

I want to believe because we need a moment of high drama to bring us back to our senses. I want to believe because it would be comforting to think that Epstein’s clients don’t represent a grubby, abhorrent element of human nature that goes far beyond the small band of elites he partied with. I do find the evidence persuasive. But I cannot disregard the fact that my appraisal of that evidence is colored by the psychological work it does for me, by the uncomfortable sense of hope that it gives.

1. Valdes-Rodriguez presents a compelling and more complex picture of where the trail leads, not to a government per se but perhaps a global cabal of elites, “the 0.00000031 percent.”