Sonali Kolhatkar: The big abusers are Trump and other rich and Powerful Men connected with Epstein, not migrants, etc.

“Best Friends Forever” (also known as “Why Can't We Be Friends?”’) statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, briefly installed at the National Mall in downtown Washington, D.C., last Sept. The Feds took it down.

Via OtherWords.org

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.

Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.

For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”

But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.

Even the Republican rank and file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.

Polls show that in summer 2025, 40 percent of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved — even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.

While some European leaders, such as the former Prince Andrew, are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.

That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the unredacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.

And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.

Epstein was a glorified drug dealer and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.

Georgia Senator John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters — at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult — are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.

“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”

He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.

Sonali Kolhatkar is host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, an independent, subscriber-based syndicated TV and radio show.

Chris Powell: The Epstein scandal: 'No one that couldn't be bought'

Jeffrey Epstein in a 2006 police mug shot

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Vile as financier Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been, many if not most of the girls he targeted were not quite the innocent victims being luridly portrayed by news organizations, not all if any of them really being "sex slaves."

To the contrary, while most of them were minors, under 18, they retained freedom of movement and repeatedly returned to Epstein, traveled with him, or went where he told them to go to be used by his friends. They knew what they were doing was prostitution, even if the law rightly holds that minors are not fully responsible for themselves.

Epstein's character is a settled matter, just as it is settled that money is power and power tends to corrupt. So it may be more illuminating to ask how so many teenage girls could escape the custody of their parents for so long to become the playthings of Epstein and his friends without inciting at least suspicion back home.

There seem to be two explanations. First is that some girls did not have much in the way of parents, so they were more vulnerable. Second is that there was a lot of money in it for them, for Epstein paid them well -- so well that many of his girls recruited others for him, and some even told the police that they loved him.

Having accepted such employment with Epstein, some of his girls now accuse him of ruining their lives and are levying claim to his estate. Others brought suit against him and then settled confidentially, choosing to take his money again without warning the world against him.

Epstein's most publicized accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, now in her 30s, married, a mother, and living in Australia, has figured it out better than most news organizations. "Laughing the whole way through," Giuffre says, "Jeffrey thought it was absolutely brilliant how easily money seduced all walks of life -- nothing or no one that couldn't be bought."

Of course as the prototypical "sadder but wiser girl," Giuffre could apply her insight to herself most of all.

The corruptibility of human nature explains Epstein's success as a predator. Of course it does not excuse him. But it does invite reflection on the failure of society and the law to protect minors, and, really, the lack of interest in protecting them.

That children don't have parents is often the consequence of welfare and divorce policy.

Advertising and television sexualize children and bring the coarsest sex to the youngest audiences, especially those with negligent parents.

Even Epstein's friends and acquaintances who did not exploit his girls surely saw that something wrong was going on but did not report it. Long before he was elected president, one of those friends, Donald J. Trump, was quoted about Epstein's partiality to young women

Epstein was notorious a long time before he was prosecuted, and then his prosecution was so gentle that it has become a scandal in itself, suspected of having been meant to protect the most influential of his accomplices.

But lest people in Connecticut get too disdainful of Epstein and his circle, it should be remembered that had one of his underage playthings been impregnated, she could have been given another few hundred dollars in cash and been driven by limousine to any abortion clinic in the state, where nobody would have contacted her parents for approval or notified the police, state law concurring as much as Epstein in the concealment of statutory rape.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.