How Donald Trump and his Jeffrey Epstein scandal lay bare our racist roots

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal stripped away the polite fiction that wealthy white men in America are held to the same standards as everyone else.

Epstein wasn’t an exception. He was the rule, laid bare.

From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.

We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.

That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.

The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.

The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.

And then — as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy — that logic didn’t stay confined to the frontier. It seeped into every corner of American life and rose up to try to destroy even the idea of a pluralistic democracy in this country.

Slavery was built on the same logic. It wasn’t an ugly exception to American values; it was a central expression of them. The economy depended on it. Congress bent itself into knots to protect it. The Constitution accommodated it.

When the Civil War ended, our country had a chance to uproot the white male supremacist ideology that had allowed human beings to be treated as property. Instead, we dodged it.

I still remember well, when our son was nine years old and we lived in suburban Atlanta, asking him over dinner, “What did you learn in school today?” and his answer was, “We studied the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’”

We allowed the old Confederates back into the halls of power in the 1870s. We let them write the history books. We abandoned the freedmen who had been promised protection and citizenship.

And the system that emerged was simply white male supremacy, the foundation of slavery, by another name.

Jim Crow wasn’t a detour; it was the natural continuation of the racial hierarchy this country was built on and today’s GOP — and ICE, CPB, and Trump’s toadies in DHS — are trying to re-solidify for the 21st century.

Every tool was used to maintain it. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Lynching. Chain gangs. Sharecropping. Segregated schools. Redlining. Policing practices that looked far more like occupation than law enforcement.

All of it justified by the same foundational lie that today animates the brutality of Trump‘s ICE raids: that white people were meant to rule and everyone else existed by their pleasure. And the Big Lie that brown-skinned immigrants are committing “voter fraud” that justifies purging millions from our voting rolls every year.

That lie still echoes in our institutions. It’s why entire communities — and now polling places — are policed like enemy territory. It’s why Republicans on the courts (particularly SCOTUS) have so often sided with the powerful over the vulnerable. And it’s why we’ve seen, in recent years, an explicitly brutal willingness to use federal force against Americans exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and protest.

When Trump sent federal agents and troops into Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and threatened to deploy them elsewhere, it wasn’t a new idea. It was an old ideology flexing its muscles again. It treats American citizens as though they’re foreign enemies. It uses military-trained forces not for defense but for control.

James Madison warned us precisely about this danger of the military policing civilians:

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

He couldn’t have been clearer. The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.

The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.

It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).

It thrives on fear and resentment, and encourages a view of fellow nonwhite and female Americans as enemies to be controlled rather than citizens to be represented.

Today’s GOP and the rightwing-billionaire-funded, 50-year-long “Conservative Movement” that drives it have embraced every bad instinct of the Confederacy, the frontier, Jim Crow, and the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.

They’re not “conserving” anything. They’re restoring an old order.

This didn’t happen suddenly. It took decades and the investment of billions of dollars.

People of a certain age (like me) well remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1966-1999 show Firing Line, every Sunday on PBS, as he pontificated about the wonders of “conservatism” and promoted Republican politicians. My dad was a religious viewer and we watched it together every weekend; the show was a major force in national politics.

In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of conservatism must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.

“The sobering answer,” Buckley wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Arguably following up, in April 2021, the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.

Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.

By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.

Trump told white male voters they were the only “real Americans” and everyone else was suspect. He told them the military and the police existed to protect them from demographic change. He told them the only valid elections were the ones they won.

The good news is that most Americans reject this.

Most Americans believe in a multiracial democracy. They want equal justice. They want freedom that applies to everyone. They don’t want their own government treating nonwhites or women as enemy combatants. They don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men. They don’t want leaders who behave as if the military is a toy for intimidating political opponents.

But we can’t defeat what we refuse to name. America’s original sin wasn’t just slavery or colonialism: it was the belief that white men are entitled to rule by default and women and nonwhites must be subordinate to them.

That belief still infects our politics and largely controls the GOP. It still shapes our institutions. It still animates Republican justices on the Supreme Court who see equality as a threat and democracy as negotiable.

We can’t move forward until we reckon with that truth about our nation’s history and today’s GOP.

We can’t protect liberty while ignoring the warnings of the people who built this country.

And we can’t defend American democracy — and democracy around the world — while the GOP wages war against the very idea of a nation where everyone counts.

The reckoning is long overdue. This time we have to finish the job.

Double-check your voter registration and pass along the good word to everybody you know.