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The New York Times reported that Donald Trump personally called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and then had Attorney General Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel take her into the top-secret, no-recording-devices-allowed Situation Room to urge her to drop her support for releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump apparently also tried to reach Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) for the same reason. This week’s newly surfaced details about Epstein and Trump again reveal something far larger than the tawdry specifics of their relationship, as grotesque as those are. They point to a structural crisis at the heart of American democracy. As Republican President Theodore Roosevelt said:“The exposure and punishment of public corruption is an honor to a nation, not a disgrace. The shame lies in toleration, not in correction.“If we fail to do all that in us lies to stamp out corruption we can not escape our share of responsibility for the guilt. The first requisite of successful self-government is unflinching enforcement of the law and the cutting out of corruption.”These newest documents, including Epstein’s correspondences with the journalist Michael Wolff about how Epstein’s knowledge of Trump’s involvement could be used against him long before Trump was involved in politics (apparently to blackmail him, something Epstein apparently advised Vladimir Putin about how to do) reveal a pattern we’ve seen throughout history. It’s a pattern where men of wealth and power create a zone of impunity that protects them while destroying vulnerable people like Virginia Giuffre. This is where the story moves from sleaze to a massive crisis for American democracy itself. When a president insists that scrutiny of his possible crimes is illegitimate, he’s not defending his innocence: he’s attacking a foundational principle of the American republic. As John Adams proclaimed:“We are a government of laws, not of men.”If only that were true today. If only more than a tiny handful of Republicans believed in that principle. From Socrates’ collapsing Greece and Caligula’s Rome through the dictatorships of the 20th century and today’s Russia and Hungary, history shows that democracies don’t survive when their leaders live above the law and beyond the reach of legitimate inquiry and a free press. This danger to America is magnified by Trump’s pardoning or promising to pardon the very people who’ve already committed crimes on his behalf, acts intended to benefit him politically or personally. And he continues to signal that he’ll pardon even more people who help him out. This isn’t forgiveness: it’s instruction. It’s an explicit message to present and future loyalists that when they commit crimes for him, particularly those involving election or financial fraud, they’ll be rewarded rather than punished. From Blanche’s treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell to Bondi and Patel’s ongoing coverup for Trump, he’s created a private so-called “justice system” where loyalty to Dear Leader outweighs loyalty to the law. As we see with the case of Maxwell and Trump’s pardon of a crypto executive who made his sons billions, our Justice Department has turned into a “Protect and Enrich Trump Department.”Amy Wallace, co-author of Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, says she knows the names of the men who raped and trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein. She says the FBI and the Department of Justice know them too.“Yes, I know who the names are,” Wallace said. “Virginia knows who the names are. So does the FBI and the DOJ.”Was Trump part of it? Was his Miss Teen USA pageant another front in Epstein’s network? Is that why House Speaker Mike Johnson was stonewalling, terrified of the truth? George Washington warned that when politicians became more loyal to their party or its leader than to our nation or our laws:“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.“It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.”The principle of a nation of “laws, not men” that Adams envisioned becomes meaningless when wealthy and powerful men are no longer held responsible for their actions. Thomas Jefferson reminded us that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” a phrase that becomes hollow if the institutions meant to guard liberty are paralyzed by the fear of offending a wannabe dictator like Trump. We see this with billionaires like Elon Musk, whose destruction of USAID has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children with absolutely no accountability. With Trump’s henchman and Republicans in Congress gutting healthcare and food assistance, while threatening war in Venezuela. Thomas Paine cautioned that “when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”Paine never imagined corrupt billionaires building a network of over 1, 500 rightwing radio stations, four rightwing television networks, and hundreds of rightwing-controlled newspapers and websites, all with the singular message of protecting their wealth, privilege, immunity, and tax cuts. Today we’re seeing right before our eyes, in real time, how easily democracy can slip away when a leader trains his followers to believe every investigation is treason and every fact is a lie. The Epstein revelations matter because they’re symptomatic of a larger ecosystem of secrecy and impunity that Trump and many of the rightwing billionaires associated with him have relied on for decades. An ecosystem that destroys democracies. Epstein, Trump, and Maxwell spent years cultivating relationships with extremely rich and politically powerful people. That network helped shield them long after allegations of exploitation became so obvious they would have destroyed a less wealthy or powerful person. The crisis this affair presents to America including the complicity of Republicans in the House and Senate, along with the billionaire owners and executives of rightwing media isn’t simply about “who knew what, when.”The crisis is that such a network exists at all. That Trump has rebuilt government in a way to protect that morbidly rich network. These latest releases remind us that when powerful men including those claiming to be in the press operate in spaces where wealth and social status shield them from scrutiny, abuses become routine and accountability vanishes for decades or evaporates entirely. Thus, the most urgent threat to our republic isn’t the past behavior of Epstein or even Trump’s proximity or alleged participation with it. The real danger is that Trump is now rewriting the rules of political accountability in real time in ways that have already corrupted the Republican Party for a generation, and threatened to corrupt our entire nation in ways we may never recover from. By dismissing legitimate scrutiny as “hoaxes,” by attacking those who want transparency, and by pardoning people who commit crimes for him, our president is teaching his followers that law has no meaning except as a tool to reward friends and punish enemies. That’s precisely the type of explicit corruption that America’s Founders feared and repeatedly warned us about. Like in ancient Rome, or modern-day Russia and Hungary, it’s the corruption of a republic from within. Democracy can’t survive this pattern if it’s allowed to continue. A previous generation of Democratic and Republican legislators understood this, which is why they drove the criminal and corrupt Richard Nixon from office. The Founders also understood this, and their warnings weren’t abstract philosophy. Alexander Hamilton, for example, thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had insulated us from exactly what is happening today. But he and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 40+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery. They never conceived of an Australian billionaire family coming to America and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and adjudicated sexual abuser would become a noble president. They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to put him back into office after presiding over the unnecessary deaths of a half million Americans. And they never imagined that a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a serial bankrupt and professional con man would be able to leverage rightwing billionaire money and captive media to ascend to the Oval Office twice. In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote:“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”He never imagined the American people tolerating such a widespread level of deceit and corruption. Today those founding ideals are being tested in a way so serious, so severe, that it puts the future of our country in question. If we fail to investigate possible crimes and enforce the law, if we continue to allow billionaires and Trump to corrupt our political system, if we continue to tolerate a culture of impunity to harden into a permanent feature of our nation’s political life, America will cease to be America. And that “shame we let in” is something we must purge from our body politic and never again tolerate.