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The Epstein Scandal Shows the Depth of the White House’s Dysfunction

Infighting and opportunism lead to chaos and endless war.

Donald Trump in the Situation Room during a strike on Iran, on June 21, 2025.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, John F. Kennedy decided that the White House needed a dedicated and secure location where presidents could receive up-to-the-minute intelligence during a national emergency. He commissioned the building of the White House Situation Room, which has ever since been the place where some of the nation’s most fateful decisions have been made. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, spent countless hours in the Situation Room as he pursued his disastrous war in Vietnam, as did George W. Bush during his disastrous war in Iraq. During the tense hours when the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was being carried out, Barack Obama and his team monitored the mission in the Situation Room, an event recorded in famous photographs.

In 2025, Donald Trump put the Situation Room to a new use: not as a meeting place to discuss a consequential foreign policy crisis, but rather as a useful cone of silence to plot out a cover-up of a scandal of his own making—specifically, the crisis caused by his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s repeated and inappropriate use of the Situation Room for this purpose is detailed in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, excerpted on Wednesday in The New York Times.

The story of Trump’s mishandling of the Epstein case is important in and of itself, but it also provides a window into the larger dysfunction of the current administration. In its failed attempt at a cover-up of the Epstein case, the Trump White House unleashed a carnival of sordid behavior, ranging from the president’s narcissism to the opportunism of his underlings, who constantly fought among themselves as they tried to both please their boss and varnish their public image.

The Epstein scandal has been a self-inflicted wound by the Trump administration in two crucial ways. First and most importantly, Trump’s relationship with the late pedophile is a legitimate cause for concern. Secondly, in the 2024 election, Trump and his leading supporters (many of whom took high-ranking positions in the administration) cynically used the Epstein case to discredit their opponents in the Democratic Party and the so-called deep state. This riled up the MAGA base, who turned against the White House when Trump’s team betrayed its promise of transparency.

Trump’s cynicism in the matter is shocking. As Haberman and Swan note, the White House “needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the........

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