[Caption – Epstein survivors confront Pam Bondi]
JONATHAN NEALE writes
One way or another, Trump is going down. This article explains why. And at the end, I look briefly at the consequences, mainly for the United States and Israel.
Here’s one straw in the wind:
On July 18 Vice-President J. D. Vance said on Joe Rogan’s show that Jeffrey Epstein’s operation may well have been a honey trap organized for Mossad. Here’s the way the New York Times reported it:
“Most people think he was Mossad,” Mr. Rogan, a frequent promoter of conspiracy theories, said of Mr. Epstein in an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” released on Wednesday.
“Yeah, Mossad or C.I.A., or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country,” Mr. Vance replied.
“He clearly had connections to the upper — the highest — levels of American intelligence,” the vice president added. “He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.”
Vance has also been publicly reproving Netanyahu recently. In June he said that Netanyahu better shut up and stop criticising America, because Israel was a pariah state with no friends in the world but the United States. Last week he said that Israel was still an American ally, but it was time for Israel to stop controlling American policy.
Vance wants to be President. He can see Trump is going down. So he is separating himself from Trump over both Israel and Epstein.
THE REASONS WHY
Trump’s popular support is evaporating. On top of that, he is obviously sick. For both those reasons, he now looks like a loser.
The fading popular support is the driving force. Some Americans and many foreigners find this difficult to understand because they regard Trump’s supporters as irrational, immoral, stupid bigots. They believe his base will just follow him anywhere, no matter what.
It’s turns out they won’t. They think raping children is wrong. They can no longer bear the Middle Eastern wars. And their economic lives are getting worse. We’ll explore all three issues, the Epstein files first.
THE EPSTEIN FILES
To understand the politics around Epstein, it’s important to remember that until 2025 the Democrats were suppressing the Epstein files and the Republicans were trying to expose them.
Men from the Democratic Party and the wider centre left are all over the Epstein files that have been released so far. They include former president Bill Clinton; Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser; Larry Summers, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary; and George Mitchell, a Democrat, former Senate Majority Leader and architect of the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland. In Britain there was Peter Mandelson, a British government minister and founder of New Labour.
There is no conclusive evidence for any sexual abuse by those men. We do know that they were heavily involved with Epstein, and must have known what he was doing in broad terms.
In the case of Bill Gates, the leading liberal tech lord, we also know that his wife divorced him because he refused to break off with Epstein.
In the case of Ehud Barak we have the testimony of Virginia Giufree. Barak was the leader of the Israeli Labour Party for many years, briefly Prime Minister of Israel, and a business partner of Epstein’s. Giuffre said in her memoirs that after sex with “a former prime minister” she left the building bleeding from her mouth, vagina and anus, and fearing for her life. [In the British edition of her memoir she says “former minister”.]
Critically, the Biden administration tried hard to suppress the evidence of Epstein’s ring. Ghislaine Maxwell was the only person convicted of anything. After her sentencing in 2022, the Democratic prosecutor for the Southern District of New York state announced that all investigations had now ended. More than 500 FBI agents had been investigating for two years, taking thousands of witness statements. They were all stood down. There would be no further charges and no release of evidence.
The suppression was egregious, brass-necked, brazen. Far right Republican influencers thought it was obvious that the Biden administration was protecting prominent Democrats. So they began demanding the release of the Epstein files.
The Democrats, the New York Times, most of the mainstream media and Biden supporters all said it was a crazy conspiracy theory, don’t ask, don’t look.
In the 2024 election campaign Republicans candidates promised to release the Epstein files. So did Trump. But when he got into the White House, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, read some of the files. She told Trump he was in those documents. So Trump reversed field and said nothing could be released. Many Democrats started calling for the release of the files.
Representatives Ro Khanna (Democrat) and Thomas Massie (Republican) introduced a bill in the House to compel the Department of Justice to release the six million files.
The House was almost evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Massie spoke to his fellow Republican representatives.
Massie said, in effect: Think about the year 2030. You will be up for re-election. Trump will be gone. Your opponent will run endless attack ads on TV showing you voting to suppress the Epstein files. So don’t do it.
Sixty republican representatives told Massie they would vote for him or abstain. At that point Trump was forced to say he supported the bill too, and it passed with one vote against.
The administration stalled for three months, and then released three million of the six million files, heavily redacted. The three million files not released are the bad ones. We don’t know what’s in them. Yet. But it’s worse.
In particular, Epstein recorded his clients having sex in his mansions on video. When he was arrested the FBI went to his New York mansion and confiscated all the tapes. We don’t know where they are now.
The pressure for release of the tapes was increasing all the time. If they are ever released, it will finish Trump. But the political impact will go much deeper, because so many Democrats, bankers, lawyers and billionaires will be implicated too. It will shame and shake the system, not just politicians or one party.
The bottom line for the moment, though, is that Trump betrayed his promise about the Epstein files, his voters know it, and whatever they say, everyone knows he’s in those files.
THE FOREVER WARS
Then Trump betrayed his followers over the wars. This was because it was only a matter of time before more and more information about Epstein would leak. So Trump started one amazing distraction after another, a Killer Klown Circus of epic proportions.
First, he invaded Venezuela. That worked for a few weeks until people started talking about Epstein again. Then he threatened to invade Greenland. That worked until it didn’t. Then he went to war alongside Israel against Iran.
Mainstream experts in international relations produced all sorts of reasons why Trump did these things. So did experts in imperialism.
There were certainly real social forces that welcomed Trump’s new wars. Marco Rubio at the State Department had been wanting to dominate Venezuela and Cuba for years. Netanyahu wanted to bomb Iran.
But that was not why Trump invaded. Almost everyone in the world, except for the experts, knew that the main reason Trump was creating a glorious mess was to distract attention from the Epstein files.
Of course the results of Trump’s mess are a great deal of death and suffering. To say he was doing all that in order to distract attention from sexual abuse is not to belittle the importance of that suffering. Rather, it is to be clear about just how monstrous the attack on Iran is.
Here we need some background on why so many Trump voters are against the war with Iran.
Some people inside America, and many foreigners, assume that Trump voters would naturally support American wars. The opposite is now true. Working class Trump voters, like most other working class Americans, are now bitterly opposed to what they call the “Forever Wars”. The main reason is that working class people have fought those wars.
They were wars of roadside bombs. Not that many soldiers were killed, because the surgery was very fast and good, but many survived with serious lifetime wounds. Many were hit by roadside bombs, which created brain injury and missing limbs.
This was a professional army, who served for many years and did four, five or more tours of duty. These soldiers had spouses and children, and their families lived for years with the fear of them coming home with terrible injuries.
Also, the soldiers served overseas long enough to understand that those people did not want them there, that they were fighting for the oil companies, and that they would lose in the end.
Working class Americans have come to hate the wars because soldiers and their families have come to hate the wars, from experience. And those families are particularly concentrated in the places where Trump voters are concentrated, above all in the South, small towns and poor rural areas.
In this process, many working class Americans have turned against the informal American empire. They have also turned against it for economic reasons. They believe that free trade, globalization and the WTO have devastated American industry and lost them good jobs, especially factory jobs.
Not all working class Americans think this way. But many, perhaps the majority now do. It’s often difficult for people in Europe or Asia to understand this, because so many of them believe that American imperialism benefits American workers. I don’t think it does.
I probably need to say that again, because it’s a hard point for many people to understand. Most American workers now think that American military and economic involvement abroad harm American workers.
I agree with them. I say, “American imperialism”, not “American involvement abroad”, but they mean the same thing.
American imperialism does benefit American business and American corporations. It benefits wealthy Americans too.
Educated Americans, people with college degrees, and particularly people with professional jobs, also tend to feel a bit differently, because their experience has been different. They are mostly not the people who fight the wars or lose the factory jobs.
This popular bitterness toward the forever wars is the reason why Trump promised in 2016 to end the wars. He didn’t completely meet that promise. But he did get American troops out of Syria, and he negotiated an end to the war in Afghanistan.
In the election campaign in 2024 Trump promised again to end the wars. And he said he would settle Gaza and the Ukraine War in a day. He did not. Then he went to war with Iran. He’s now losing that war, but can’t bring himself to make peace, because that would expose the extent of his loss. And it would bring all the attention back to the Epstein files.
THE COST OF LIVING
Trump betrayed his voters over the Epstein files. To distract them from the Epstein files, he betrayed them over the forever wars. And as a result of the Iran war, he betrayed them further over the cost of living.
To understand why people felt so bitter about inflation, we need to understand a stark fact about the median male worker in America. He’s the guy in the middle, who makes less than 50% of men, but more than the poorer 50%. His real wages in 2025, in terms of what money can buy, were the same as the median male worker in 1975.
Men in the middle were making the same as their grandfathers did 50 years ago.
The United States is the only industrialized, wealthy country where this was true. In Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand and the median men and women were making more than their grandfathers and grandmothers. This was also true in almost all the middling and poor countries too.
This happened at the same time as inequality increased massively. Singapore and the US are now the most unequal of all the wealthy OECD countries. The incomes of the top 20 percent of men and the top 20 percent of women – the educated professionals – have increased massively.
The median woman is catching up with the median man, but she hasn’t got there.
So it’s not just that the majority of Americans have been stuck with stagnant incomes. They have been left behind at the same time. This is in a society that has grown more and more unequal, where money is increasingly worshipped and “losers” are treated with contempt.
Men and women in the middle have coped with this by working more hours. Men work an average of about a month more in overtime. The number of women working has increased enormously. Those two things mean people’s incomes have increased, but life is harder. Working people didn’t just feel stuck, they felt left behind.
Flat median wages and rising inequality are the background to what happened under Trump and Biden. Under Trump, from 2017 to 2020, unemployment went down and the real wage of the median man went up. One reason was because Trump cut taxes, but he didn’t cut government spending. That stimulated the economy.
Biden won the next election in 2020, because of Black Lives Matter more than anything else. Then after COVID inflation hit. That meant that real wages went down, back to where they had been before Trump. The big rises were in food, heating oil for houses and gas for cars, things poorer people spent a bigger proportion of their paycheque on.
Then Biden’s administration, the Democrats and the economists told everyone they had got the cost of living down. Only they hadn’t, and everyone knew it every time they went shopping or filled up the car. So people knew the Democrats were lying to them. That showed they didn’t care about ordinary people, and they thought working people were stupid.
It wasn’t just that the cost of living rose. It was that insult happened on top of 50 years of inequality.
Trump won in 2024. One reason was that Biden had been such a fanatic for the genocide in Gaza. An even bigger reason was the economy. That’s why many Democrats stayed home.
Mamdani’s first video in his campaign for Mayor showed him asking Black and brown New Yorkers in the street if they had just voted for Trump, and if so why. The video showed the people who said yes, and they said it was because of Biden’s cost of living.
But when Trump got in this time the cost of living stayed high. Musk and DOGE cut jobs. Tariffs cut jobs.
LAME DUCK
The more Trump tried to avoid the Epstein files, the deeper the hole he dug for himself. And the war he started to avoid opening the files made prices go up more on food, gas and diesel.
On top of that’s he’s clearly getting sicker and sicker. His cognition is slipping, he’s tired and ill. He may be dying. And he’s getting more emotionally disturbed, which no wonder, he’s trapped in a difficult place.
His power depended on fear. Now powerful people are starting to fear they could go down with him.
All the major far-right podcasters and influencers have broken with Trump, including Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Rogan. They have to, because their livelihood depends on the millions of followers they have. So they have gone with the political feelings of their base.
Crucially, that means Carlson and the others calling for the Epstein files to be released, opposing the war on Iran, and breaking with Israel.
For much of 2025 the Supreme Court enabled almost everything Trump wanted to do. Recently the majority have begun to break with him – crucially in their recent ruling against his attempts to control postal voting.
Trump appointed a new head of the Federal Reserve Bank, but the Fed has just ruled to increase the basic interest rate to the highest level in years. They have done this despite vociferous opposition from Trump, who wants to keep interest rates down, because high rates will be bad for working people and hurt his support.
The alienation of the generals and security apparatus is also crucial. This is long standing. Way back on January 6, 2021, Trump gave a speech urging his supporters to march on Congress to stop the “stolen election” of Biden. Trump then went to his car and ordered the driver to take to join his followers at Congress. Trump and his chief Secret Service bodyguard, Bobby Engel, then wrestled for control of the wheel. According to PBS:
Trump said something to the effect of, “I’m the f***ing president, take me up to the Capitol now.” After Engel relayed they had to return to the White House, Trump reached up to the front of the vehicle to grab the steering wheel. Engel grabbed the president’s arm and said “Sir, you need to let go,” Hutchinson recalled. Trump then used his free hand to lunge toward Engel’s neck.”
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-lunged-at-agent-who-said-he-couldnt-go-to-capitol-amid-jan-6-violence-aide-says]
Engels won.
At one point last year, early in the war with Iran, Trump demanded that his aides bring him the nuclear codes. The military refused. They then threw him out of the Situation Room in the White House because he was too disruptive.
Last year Secretary of War Hegseth summoned the senior flag officers, generals and admirals, from American bases all over the world to Washington. Hegseth told them they were useless, woke, soft and fat. He said they would have to take regular physical exams and would be fired if they were overweight.
Trump followed Hegseth to the podium. Trump waited for the customary applause. No one clapped. Trump demanded applause. None of the more than 800 admirals and generals applauded. They were all silently demonstrating their contempt for Trump. And they all saw that all the other generals and admirals agreed with them.
Since then Hegseth has fired dozens of generals. It does not work, because their replacements are hostile too. Trump could attempt a coup, but if he does, he’ll fail. No one in any country ever succeeds in a coup when all the senior officers oppose them.
One moment from a congressional hearing on Feb. 11, 2026, illustrates the problem. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, was testifying about the Epstein files. She was shouting and ranting at the Representatives, trying to avoid answering any direct questions. But she slipped up, and Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu said into the microphone, in a soft quiet voice, “I think I just heard you lie under oath.”
Watch the video, and you can see rage on Bondi’s face, and then the sudden realization that maybe she will eventually go to jail.
Now everyone around Trump has to consider their future.
The Republicans have sent Congress home until the election in November, to prevent them voting for another bill Ro Khanna is bringing forward to insist on the release of the three million more incriminating documents not yet released from the Epstein files.
All these processes mean Trump is getting politically, physically and mentally weaker.
SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL
Trump is now trapped alongside Israel in a war with Iran. Trump and Netanyahu are losing that war. And support for Israel is leaking away all the time.
We saw at the start of this article how Vance is moving away from Israel. And Vance is now echoing Tucker Carlson’s theory that Mossad ran the Epstein operation.
I have been following the Epstein case closely for eight years, and I still don’t know if that is true. Vance’s formulation is probably right: maybe true, and maybe not, but Epstein certainly had close contacts with the leadership of both the CIA and Mossad.
In any case, the political genius of that accusation, from the point of view of Carlson and Vance, is that it ties Trump’s unpopular support for Israel to Trump’s unpopular support for suppressing the truth about Epstein.
It’s important to be clear here that it is not just the left in America who are turning against Israel. The right are doing the same.
There are other straws in the wind in America and beyond.
Ed Sheeran removed Macklemore from his place as one the four opening acts in Sheeran’s forthcoming US stadium tour. Sheeran did it because Macklemore had said Free Palestine on stage. In response, all four of the other acts resigned within two days. So did Sheeran’s backing band. This may well be a career ending mistake. Gaza was too much for too many people.
The Houthis took control of the entire coast of Yemen in 48 hours. No one fought for the US, Saudi and Israeli backed “government” of Yemen. There were many contingent reasons, but the main reason was that the Houthis and Iran are now fighting Israel, and Gaza is just too toxic.
The Houthis are also at war with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi armed forces have always been weak and riddled with incompetence. This is one reason the Saudi army is fleeing. But the larger context, again, is that the Saudi regime is allied with Israel and the United States.
A film about Gaza by two Israeli directors won the Special Jury Prize and a 25 minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. The film revealed how the Israeli drone operators decided to kill Hamas leaders not at their work during the day but instead at their homes at night, where they would die along with their extended families and all the adults and children in their house. This was the main reason why all the members of more than 2,200 families have been wiped out in Gaza.
The extraordinary thing about the film is that 24 different Israeli soldiers and military intelligence operatives spoke to the film makers. Their identities have been concealed, so far. These were people who actually organized and delivered massacres. They were taking extraordinary risks in talking to the filmmakers, and they knew what they were doing. Respect to them. People change.
You may remember a book by Omar al Akkad about Gaza called One Day Everyone Will Have Always Have Been Against This. It was published early last year. We can just see that day beginning to come.
These are only straws showing which way the wind is blowing. This is not the destruction of Israel. But it is the beginning of the weakening of Israel.
REMOVING THE PRESIDENT
I don’t how Trump will lose power. There is no obvious precedent. Nixon resigned in exchange for a pardon. Woodrow Wilson, Reagan and Biden were protected by their wives. Melania will not do that, and it is not clear Trump’s children even know how.
The constitution does allow for the removal of an incompetent president, but his cabinet members have to do it. He can be impeached by Congress. He might die. He may break.
As he grows politically weaker, there is likely to be increasing crisis and upheaval.
CONSEQUENCES, GOOD AND BAD
Breaking Trump will have important consequences.
First, American military power in the world is already much weaker. This process has been ongoing for years. But the war with Iran has accelerated the process. Everyone knows America can be beaten. Moreover, ordinary Americans will be deeply reluctant to go to war again. After Vietnam it was a generation before a president could take the country to war again.
Second, regimes that have depended on American support are now vulnerable to popular unrest. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are obvious examples.
Third, we have begun down a path where American support for Israel will erode. No Israeli government could survive without American backing. We are not at that point yet, but it is possible to see how that could happen.
ME TOO
Fourth, before 2024 many voices were saying that Me Too was old hat, too woke, largely defeated. But there has been an almighty class struggle over the Epstein files.
On one side of that struggle are the women from Epstein’s business. They were once the girls from Royal Palm Beach High School, girls from poor families who could not afford nice clothes. Their childhood and high school years left many of them damaged and vulnerable. Yet the working class women they have become have fought tenaciously for twenty years.
On the other side of the struggle are several billionaires, two presidents, a former prime minister, many government ministers, bankers, lawyers and distinguished Harvard and MIT professors.
For the moment, the working class women are winning. They can do that because of all the struggles by survivors of sexual violence as children and adults who have fought to tell the truth over the last forty years. The fact that those men and women fought with such bravery, in so many parts of the world, gave the Palm Beach women the courage to do what they did. Those long struggles also meant that when the Palm Beach women spoke out, people could hear them and understand what they were saying.
What those women have already achieved will shift the balance of power between abusers and abused in many places. If the Epstein files in their entirety are released, the impact will be enormous.
THE FAR RIGHT
Fifth, there are the consequences for the far right.
In America, the far right may be greatly weakened for a time. More generally, the far right leaders who have been closely associated with Trump will be shamed and lose support. Examples include Bolsonaro in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Farage in the UK and of course Netanyahu in Israel.
But we should be careful not to be overconfident here. Modi in India and the AfD in Germany have not been badly hurt so far by Trump’s troubles.
Moreover, in America and many other countries, the racist and sexist far right is now an established political tradition. They have networks of activists with deep roots in many communities – in a way the left used to have and now does not.
Critically, the far right have been able to build where ordinary people’s lives have been such shit for so long. The far right can embody the rage this produces. They turn that rage into a rhetorical attack on the elites and real world violence against the weakest in society.
Most of the Democrats in America, or Labour in Britain, cannot articulate a rage at the elite because they are the elite.
There are exceptions, like Sanders, Mamdani and Abdul. But most politicians in America and the UK behave as if it is enough to present popular policies or attractive politicians. It is not. People do not vote for policies or statistics. People vote their lives. If their lives are terrible, they vote against the politicians obviously responsible.
So the left, the Democrats, the Greens, whoever, need to do things in government that make people’s lives obviously better in ways they can feel. That means, above all, Tax the Rich, and in the US, Medicare for All.
Absent those changes, the far right will come roaring back.
INSTABILITY
We are entering a whirlwind, a period of instability, of sudden swings, surprises and horrors. We are moving into the realm of events. It becomes possible that Israel will use their nuclear weapons. It becomes nearly certain that there will be more wars, more massacres, and more persecution of fleeing refugees. And if we do not halt climate change, we will be lost.
After Trump will come the whirlwind. But in that instability, after the very public defeat of one monster, there may be room for new kinds of politics. We will have everything to lose, and everything to fight for.
Courage.
