Because of Epstein, Americans are Finally Seeing Donald Trump

His team says he can do anything he wants; that he embodies America. They are wrong. We are better than that.

The Epstein firestorm is an aha moment. Americans are seeing Donald Trump with new eyes, and they don’t like what they see.

For all his talk about making American great again, people are noticing that he has instead pulled us all down into his sewer of lust, power, ego, betrayal, greed, pettiness, and cruelty. Looking with new eyes, Americans are telling pollsters they don’t like what they see.

This buyer’s remorse has been building for a while, but the Epstein misery has ripped the gold curtain away — and Americans now see the little man hiding behind it. When questioned about his policies — whether that’s immigration or economic leadership Americans now see a president making decisions we do not like. His approval rating is now just 37 percent.

His team says he can do anything he wants; that he embodies America. They are wrong. We are better than that. We will crawl out of his sewer and rebuild our democracy.

But first … What is he hiding?

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has done a lot to find out. For Epstein, sex trafficking was a beginning, not an end. Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, used trafficking to buy or maybe to blackmail wealthy men. Here’s what Wyden says we know about Epstein’s wire transfers:

• There were 4,725 transfers of $1.1 billion to and from his JPM account and hundreds of millions through other accounts

• There was widespread use of Russian banks to process payments for sex trafficking

• JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, BNY Mellon, and Deutsche Bank flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions. These include transactions where Epstein supposedly bought and sold artwork for rich friends, collected fees, and paid women. These transactions were flagged via suspicious activity reports. Banks are required to file SARs when they see suspicious transactions. In fact, they did not file them until after Epstein was convicted in 2019.

• Included in these transactions is $158 million paid to Epstein by Leon Black, the cofounder of Apollo Global Management. According to Black’s legal team, the payments were for estate planning services and save Black $2 billion in taxes.

What’s wrong with all of this? The list is long. It begins and ends with the cruel trafficking of young girls. Epstein and Maxwell bought young girls in Russia and elsewhere and used them as sex slaves to earn the trust or the subsequent fear of wealthy men in America. Those men then paid Epstein huge sums to supposedly buy art or help them dodge taxes. This is pure evil.

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The banking system, ever eager to protect their rich clients, reported none of these transactions until after Epstein was arrested. Their delay undermined the purpose of reporting on suspicious transactions, possibly contributing to the ongoing criminal enterprise. It is pure self-interest.

And Epstein’s rich clients? They paid to abuse young women and girls, then they paid to buy art and to avoid paying the taxes that the rest of us now pay more to cover. It is uncontrollable lust and greed.

The public should see these SARs. They are in the Treasury Department. The Trump administration does not need a court order to release them. They can be released today. Trump says he told Attorney General Pam Bondi to release what they have. Bondi says that’s what she is doing. It’s a lie.

All of this going to court, losing, appealing, blaming judges … it’s just cover for Trump while he buys time and changes the subject. He can release these files and many more right now. Instead, he sent his personal lawyer, now-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison to discuss, well, who knows what? A pardon? A new deal if she helps Trump change the subject?

Is Trump in those SARs? We don’t know for sure. We do know that he is all over the files held in various federal departments and agencies. Pam Bondi told him so. We do know he has a history as a sexual predator, a collector of bad art, and serial avoider of paying the taxes he owes. We know he was often in Epstein’s company. We know he contributed lurid material for Epstein’s birthday book.

Trump doesn’t want us to know whether a bunch of those Deutsche bank SARs are Trump transactions. He will never release them, and the files themselves are likely to disappear. (I wonder whether any were once housed in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.) It would certainly not be out of character for Trump to pardon a monstrous sexual predator like Maxwell if that will change the subject.

Meanwhile, Americans are paying more because of his tariffs. Many are losing health insurance because of his big ugly bill. Hospitals are closing. His tax giveaways to the rich (including many former Epstein “clients,” combined with his reckless spending on an internal security force and concentration camp system, have exploded America’s deficit. (And I’m not even touching on the evil of his racist thugs pulling people off our streets.)

Americans voted for a government that would work for us. What we got is an evil little man whose worn and tattered curtain of bluster, blame, distraction, and disdain no longer hides the truth.

Edwin Eisendrath hosts "The Big Picture" on WCPT820 AM/ Heartland Signal. He's the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. You can follow him on BlueSky at eisendrath.net and Substack at “It’s the Democracy, Stupid.” Read the original column here.