These critical stories are getting buried by Epsteingate

The public conversation has become so distorted by the moral squalor of Donald Trump and his lackeys that I fear we’re confusing what’s exciting for what’s important.

“Epsteingate” is exciting. The story excites because Trump seems unable to stop it from growing — and it therefore offers a bit of hope that it will undermine his support or even topple him.

Yet I worry that it’s crowding out other stories that Americans need to know and respond to, such as:

1. Hunger in Gaza has reached new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row, according to the World Food Program.

The number of children dying of malnutrition has risen sharply in recent days. Many are literally starving.

According to Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency:

“People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses … One in every five children is malnourished in Gaza City as cases increase every day. When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold. Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need … Parents are too hungry to care for their children. Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.”

America is directly implicated in this humanitarian crisis.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since May while trying to get food in the Gaza Strip, mostly near aid sites run by an American contractor.

The United States must stop all military assistance to Israel unless Netanyahu and the Israeli government allow relief organizations to bring immediate humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

2. Federal judges accuse the Trump regime of deliberately defying court orders by being slow to respond, misrepresenting facts in filings, and refusing to take action as ordered by the courts.

In an analysis of 165 court orders filed against the Trump regime, the Washington Post found that federal judges accused it of resisting court orders in at least 57 of those cases — approximately 34 percent.

This story needs far more attention. It’s the clearest evidence yet of the regime’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution.

It should form the basis for impeachment of Trump and his lackeys, and for criminal action against them once they’re out of office.

3. 56,816 people are now being detained by ICE, both in the United States and in El Salvador and other countries where there’s little or no control over the conditions in which they’re being detained.

Over 70 percent have not been convicted of any crime.

Many were abducted by ICE agents in plain clothes and wearing masks to prevent identification, from their places of work, court houses, or their homes and apartments. Families have been broken up and family members “disappeared.”

We have no way of ensuring that they are being held in humanitarian conditions. Venezuela’s Attorney General has announced that Venezuelan migrants held in El Salvador recently returned to Venezuela suffered torture and abuse while imprisoned in CECOT.

Because there’s been no due process — no independent verification of who these people are or even that they have been in the United States illegally — it is entirely possible that some detainees are American citizens.

This story continues to worsen. And it, too, hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

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The question of whether Trump had sex with one or more of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficked girls is not unimportant, but I worry that its sensationalism is burying some of these other stories that deserve our attention and action.

We have little or no chance of rectifying the most serious wrongs if we’re captivated by the most exciting.

• Robert Reich is a professor emeritus of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com