An Inside Look: How the Law-and-Order Party became the Party of Jeffery Epstein

What Republicans called 'bedrock principles' turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.

Let me begin with a question that a lot of us are asking ourselves. How did we get here? How is it that right now, as we speak, there are American citizens that haven't been charged with a crime, much less convicted, sitting in a concentration camp in Florida while one of the most notorious, evil, child sex traffickers of our time has cut some sweetheart deal so that she has been transferred from a prison in Florida to a Club Fed in Texas?

This sweetheart deal violates the Prison Bureau guidelines that prohibit sex offenders from minimum security prisons. But now Ghislaine Maxwell is sitting in that Club Fed after two days of talking to the president's personal criminal defense attorney, who is currently masquerading as an Assistant Attorney General. How did we get to a place where innocent American citizens are held in a Florida concentration camp while this monster named Maxwell is now serving her sentence, taking yoga classes? How did it happen? Well, the easy answer is that we elected Donald Trump. But that's really a cop-out because it's not just Donald Trump.

When Trump first started to dominate the Republican Party, many of my Bush-era Republican friends talked about how Donald Trump had hijacked our party. This never made sense to me. The hijacker on the plane is not popular with the passengers. No one is thanking the hijacker for the chance to go to Cuba instead of grandma’s house. But Donald Trump quickly became the most popular figure in the Republican Party by a wide margin.

In my view, the only intellectually honest conclusion was that Trump didn’t hijack the Party, he revealed it. People don’t abandon deeply held beliefs in a matter of months. When you go from the “Character Counts” party to fervent support for a guy who talks in public about dating his daughter, it doesn’t mean that you have changed a deeply held principle. It proves that you never had deeply held beliefs. What the party called “bedrock principles” turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.

Something happened in the Republican Party. We evolved a system that rewarded lack of character and elevated weak men and women. I'm not sure how this happened, but it probably has something to do with the homogeneity of the Republican Party. In a country that is 57% white, Trump’s coalition in 2020 was 85% white. In 2024, he improved among non-white voters so that his winning coalition was … 84% white.

Race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. This isn’t new to the Trump era. In 1956, Eisenhower got 39% of the Black vote. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and received 7% of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 12% of the Black vote, a number he improved to 13% in 2024. That’s a six-point increase in 60 years.

In the Bush 43 years, in what seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, the party admitted it had failed to attract Black voters and took responsibility for the failure. In 2005, the Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Melman, gave a speech at the NAACP convention apologizing for the Southern Strategy, which leveraged white racist anger to maximize Republican votes. Does it mean anything that you apologized? I think it does. It’s an acknowledgement that what had happened is wrong and that the party had to endeavor to earn more Black support.

That all ended in 2016 with Donald Trump’s openly racist campaign.