Epstein and Trump: Two faces of the same broken system

M Nadarajah

Jeffrey Epstein’s insidious internal rot and US President Donald Trump’s overt external fury are not isolated anomalies.

They represent two poles of a single, festering system – one entrenched in neoliberal capitalist pathology and rooted in the darker side of Western civilisation–colonial cultures.

The West’s aggressive desire to dominate and extract from Africa and West Asia speaks to its failure to fully dismantle its colonial appetite or the toxic cultures that colonialism produced.

Epstein embodies the hidden interior of elite sex-trafficking networks, wrapped in affluence, secrecy and technological facilitation. It is, in many ways, a re-enactment of the cruelty of slavery.

Trump, by contrast, stages an outward spectacle of authoritarian aggression – scapegoating the poor, the different and the powerless to protect the predators behind the scenes, backed by military might and a cultivated culture of fear.

Together, they map a landscape of pain produced by the marriage of affluence, patriarchy, the eroticisation of power, colonial extractivism, toxic algorithms and the institution – visible and underground – of neoliberal capitalism. Power here is exercised through victims’ bodies, witnesses’ silence and the exhaustion of the collective conscience.

This piece transcends a mere indictment of two men. It seeks to make sense of the systemic roots that produce dangerous individuals who harm both the local and the global.

Figures such as Epstein and Trump chart the terrain of victims’ pain and the invisible everydayness of fascist politics. They also illuminate the emotional landscape shaping public intellectuals – especially those from the Global South – who live amid persistent colonial legacies, epistemic invisibility and ecological crisis.

Neoliberalism’s predator factory

Epstein and Trump are not aberrations. They are visible expressions of neoliberal capitalism’s moral architecture, intertwined with the historical residues of Western civilisation’s ‘civilising the other’ project.

Neoliberalism, as a historically specific form of capitalism, has hollowed out collective institutions and memories, undermined the eco-social futures of the young, constructed an edifice of lies and toxic narratives and created an ever-growing number of expendable bodies.

It has privatised social life, elevated unbounded competition as a way of being, and rewarded narcissism, corruption and moral indifference.

Success is defined by instrumentalising relationships, territories and bodies for personal gain – all while wearing the veneer of efficiency, democracy and peace. Even compassion.

Epstein is the personification of this inner logic. His immense wealth and connections – was he an ‘access agent’ of intelligence agencies as well? – gave him access to a global network of political, academic and cultural elites who treated his abuses as calculable risks rather than ethical breaches.

The Epstein scandal exposes a ‘sexualised industrial complex’ in which the trafficking of young girls is a systemic feature of hegemonic patriarchal capitalism – commodifying female bodies, normalising sexual violence and enabling impunity for elites within closed circuits of power.

Neoliberalism appears here as a regime that selectively enforces the law – loosened for the powerful and tightened for the vulnerable – to uphold entrenched hierarchies.

Trump, meanwhile, manifests the outward projection of the same logic. His authoritarianism is not a democratic aberration but an intensification of neoliberal populist fascism.

By weaponising the rhetoric of ‘national greatness’ against immigrants, Muslims and marginalised groups – whose labour, land and bodies remain vital yet expendable – Trump’s fury serves as a performative shield.

His willingness to direct American wealth and military might towards aggression, regime change and resource extraction says much about what America has been reduced to. His outward rage diverts accountability from systemic violence that fuels ecological collapse, socioeconomic impoverishment and everyday fascism.

Together, these figures reveal a shared moral economy: the celebration of individual will, the erasure of relational responsibility, the killing of people – including vast numbers of children – and the eroticisation of domination.

Neoliberal capitalism and colonial patriarchy do not merely coexist. They co-produce a pathology of power – self-serving, extractive and habitually violent – where the common good dissolves into profit and pleasure for the few.

It is, as a philosopher friend puts it, “blatantism” – an “I-can-do-anything-I-want” culture, locally and globally.

The cartography of victims’ pain

The pain generated by Epstein’s internal rot and Trump’s external fury is not monolithic. It is layered across continents, classes and generations.

At its core lies the pain of powerlessness – a condition in which victims, and those who speak for them, are structurally denied the capacity to narrate, resist or transform their many-sided suffering.

One dimension is moral injury: the rupture of an individual’s internal ethical compass when institutions meant to protect instead become complicit or indifferent.

For survivors of sex trafficking, the alleged collusion of judges, lawyers and political figures within Epstein’s network renders justice a cruel farce.

This moral injury deepens with the realisation that victimisation is a systemic feature of an order that treats marginalised bodies as disposable commodities.

Alongside this lies what might be called developmental grief – a mourning for all that might have been: the opportunities, community bonds and selfhood eroded by repeated violations.

For youth trafficked within Epstein’s networks, such grief becomes woven into the fabric of their lives.

Trump’s withdrawal from supporting the UN’s ecological initiatives, meanwhile, is part of the same process that turns the planet’s body into a commodity.

This trauma is enveloped in a systematic culture of silence – carefully constructed and nurtured by much of the mainstream media. The Epstein Files reveal how elites exchange favours, shield one another and manipulate narratives to protect the powerful from scrutiny.

This engineered silence produces a pervasive, chronic fear: a sense that speaking out invites erasure, retaliation or gaslighting. It is built into the way everyday fascism organises everything, including educational curriculums.

This anxiety is intensified by neoliberalism’s relentless demand for competition and self-optimisation for the benefit of the system, not self-realisation.

Victims and the broader public alike are engulfed in shame and solitude. Social and market competition renders solidarity risky. Fear of doxxing, social annihilation or stigma perpetuates silence.

Disclosures are often met with delegitimization, demonisation or technocratic fixes rather than structural change.

Emotionally, survivors and witnesses are exhausted by guilt and shame in a system that refuses to confront its own decay. This loneliness extends to an entire ecosystem – law, media, academia, religion – that appears entangled in perpetuating abuse.

Yet within this pain also flickers something else: anxious hope and two forms of anger. There is lucid anger, which names the system precisely. And there is prophetic anger, which refuses the normalisation of brutality. These are not merely emotional responses. They are political acts – a refusal to allow violated bodies, memories and histories to be erased.

The Global South’s emotional ecology

The pain inflicted by Epstein and Trump permeates not only direct victims but also the emotional ecosystems of public intellectuals, especially those from the Global South.

Neoliberalism’s commodification disciplines intellectuals into precarious workers whose emotions must be managed, disciplined and productively (‘hegemonically’) channelled. Fear manifests in multiple forms – fear of professional marginalisation, of being labelled radical, of exhaustion within immovable systems.

Corporatised universities cultivate cultures of silence around the affective dimensions of hegemonic power, compelling scholars to ‘manage’ emotions rather than critically interrogate their origins.

In the Global South, this fear is amplified by colonial inheritance: legal and educational infrastructures that criminalise dissent, restrict sexual autonomy and normalise resource extraction guided by neither sustainability nor regeneration.

Neoliberal development paradigms perpetuate displacement, ecosystem destruction and gendered poverty.

The public intellectual’s pain is thus deeply relational – a shared grief for battered people and a battered planet, sacrificed at the altar of extractivism and global state violence.

This emotional landscape of pain includes the realisation that Western epistemologies, often uncritically replicated, perpetrate epistemic violence by erasing indigenous knowledge.

The West’s self-proclaimed moral leadership contrasts starkly with its complicit silence over genocidal campaigns and ecological devastation in the Global South.

The destruction of spirituality through the seduction of mindless, hedonistic materialism robs people of the patience, strength and courage to confront a deeply violent system.

Yet alongside fear and anxiety, prophetic anger persists – not destructive rage, but a clear refusal to normalise patriarchal-colonial-fascist violence.

Intertwined with this is eco-social grief – a mourning for forests, rivers and species sacrificed to neoliberal growth. This grief informs an ethical orientation that links the exploitation of human bodies with planetary devastation.

The pain of powerlessness thus becomes an unbearable but necessary form of witnessing – a refusal to look away despite the absence of immediate redemption.

Rot feeding fury, fury shielding rot

Epstein’s inward rot and Trump’s outward fury is better understood not as a contrast between inside and outside but as a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.

Epstein’s clandestine abuse networks constitute a ‘dark archive’ of leverage, blackmail and complicity – one that figures operating on the public stage can weaponise or conceal. This rot can be witnessed in many parts of the world, in one form or another.

Trump’s authoritarian spectacle projects moral clarity by targeting the ‘other’ with righteous fury, diverting attention from the elite rot festering within institutional corridors. This interplay deepens global wounds and renders resistance risky as the state colludes in cover-ups.

Technological tools worsen the dynamic: algorithms amplify outrage, surveillance tracks dissent, and digital platforms commodify trauma narratives, making collective healing fraught.

The neoliberal order thus emerges as a regime of authorised madness, one that structurally enables violence and irrationality rather than curbing them.

Victims of trafficking and authoritarianism are not exceptional casualties but predictable outcomes of a civilisation laundering depravity through charity, philanthropy and ‘rule-of-law-human-rights-and-democracy’ branding.

The pain from this interplay becomes a replicable cultural model.

It is the agony produced by structures meant to protect – law, education, healthcare, diplomacy – being co-opted for extraction and domination.

It is the pain of witnessing one’s body, the body of one’s community and the body of the planet reduced to substrates for the power, pleasure and profit of a privileged few – who are already planning to fly off to other planets.

In that space, the pain itself becomes a form of critique – a searing, embodied refusal to accept an order that makes madness the norm.

Dr M Nadarajah is a sociologist and Asian Public Intellectual (API) fellow whose work focuses on sustainability, regeneration and culture. He is associate director of Sejahtera Leadership Initiative and Global Sejahtera (Malaysia) and is involved in educational initiatives at the Centre for Constitutional Values and Dialogical Democracy, Loyola College, Trivandrum, India.

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