Trump, the Press and Defining Deviancy Down

What if the Epstein story is just beginning?

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (especially its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an article in a scholarly journal decrying the country’s tendency to what he called “defining deviancy down,” accepting as commonplace what we had once recognized as deeply wrong. Whether or not people agreed with Moynihan’s specifics (highway deaths or those from handguns) or didn’t (deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill), or with the word he chose, it was clear he had an overall point. This week I want to talk about what we in journalism lose when we define deviancy down with respect to the character of the President of the United States.

This is thus about Jeffrey Epstein, but also not only that. Just to remind us all, Donald Trump was convicted by a jury of his peers in his longtime home town of having run his business in a corrupt manner in paying hush money to a porn star during his third marriage, and in an unrelated case found by another (this time civil) jury, also in his home city, to have sexually assaulted a woman during his second marriage.

It is true that the American people, after both of those jury verdicts, and knowing about them, chose to again elect him as president. So I do not want to suggest that either judgment should disqualify him from the presidency—under our laws, that was a question for voters, and they made it.

Not a clean slate

But neither do I think we can accept that the voters’ decision in 2024 marks some sort of commandment to journalists to behave as if Trump has been absolved of responsibility for all prior acts.

Part of the point here is that the American people can change their minds about things. No one proves that better than Donald Trump. After four years of his first term, they rejected him even more decisively than, four years later, they recalled him to office. Presented with new facts, they could yet change their minds again, not at the presidential ballot box, but surely in ways that can shape our politics profoundly.

Which brings us to Epstein. Here is what we know: Jeffrey Epstein, in addition to being a sexual predator himself, was a pimp, who facilitated sexual encounters between young women, some under the age of consent, some not, and friends and associates of his. We already have some indication that Epstein may have had this sort of relationship with Trump, although we have no direct evidence that, if so, any of the women in Trump’s case were underage.

the skies are darkening

Epstein and Trump: The Facts

We do know so far that:

• Epstein’s best known underage victim came to his attention when she was working at Mar-a-Lago, and thus for Trump.

• Trump once flew a group of 28 young women from New York to Florida for a party at which he and Epstein were the only male guests.

• Trump has been accused by a former Epstein associate of groping her in Epstein’s presence in Trump’s office.

• A former Epstein employee seems to have talked at least once and perhaps twice to the FBI about Trump in the context of Epstein and the victimization of young women. That would have generated what the FBI calls a “302” report of each such conversation, and those reports would remain in the files of the Department of Justice. With Epstein dead and the woman having come forward publicly, there is no reason such a report couldn’t be released publicly.

• The book of leering birthday greetings for Epstein revealed recently by the Wall Street Journal was also reportedly reviewed by DOJ, and any records of that could also be released publicly if Trump or Attorney General Pam Bondi so wished. None of this is limited by grand jury secrecy, as these documents were likely not presented to or considered by a grand jury.

• Trump and Epstein were once sufficiently friendly that Epstein attended Trump’s second wedding and also socialized with Trump and his current wife. Meanwhile, Trump knew of and repeatedly spoke in public, lightheartedly, of Epstein’s proclivities for much younger women.

• Trump, notwithstanding having his own aircraft, flew at least seven times on Epstein’s plane. Those flight logs could also be disclosed.

• Only yesterday did we learn, again from the courageous work of the Journal, that Trump’s name appears multiple times in DOJ’s unreleased Epstein files, that he was told this two months ago by Bondi, and that he then ostensibly deferred to Bondi’s decision to release no further information from those files. Trump lied when asked directly about such a possibility last week. We learned also that the Director of the FBI knew about Trump’s name being in the files and had told people so.

The decision to release none of what DOJ has retained, on Trump and otherwise, flies in the face of repeated promises Trump, Bondi and the new FBI leadership made during and since his campaign. It’s very difficult to believe that this abrupt about-face wasn’t motivated by a desire to keep the documents mentioning Trump from surfacing. In other words, a cover-up.

Why the cynics are wrong

My subject, of course, is journalism, so let’s come back to that. There are those in our business who profess a cynical world weariness about all of this. Epstein won’t result in Trump’s downfall, they say, so why the fuss? Talk about defining deviancy down: nothing short of a cause for presidential resignation is now news?

The facts above have mostly been reported over the last decade, some note, so why rehearse them now? Of course, many making that point are the same reporters and editors who occasionally seek to remind the naïve rest of us that voters don’t pay as close attention to reported detail as we do, so we shouldn’t find their reactions to events as surprising as we often seem to. Sometimes it takes awhile for a story to reach critical mass.

Watergate, after all, did not resonate with the American people in 1972, notwithstanding coverage that won the Washington Post a Pulitzer. And the information about a possible Trump-Bondi cover-up is new. Perhaps the Epstein-Trump story is just beginning.

Most importantly, the fact that Trump returned to office a convicted criminal and adjudged sexual offender does not somehow perversely entitle him to lessened scrutiny from journalists. Nor should it deter the press from holding him or those who join his regime to account for seeking to cover up the darkest aspects of his sordid past. The case of Jeffrey Epstein has already been the subject of some great journalism by the Miami Herald. My sense—and not just mine-- is that more, perhaps much more, remains to be learned and published. If that is so, decency requires no less.