Trump was a gleeful co-conspirator with Epstein. He wrote Epstein love letters to their shared passion for child rape. He used the power of the state to hide his crimes. These are public facts. If the US legal and political systems worked in reality the way they work in the liberal imagination, this public information would have already been sufficient to destroy him and virtually everyone in his orbit.

But the US doesn’t work like that. The overwhelming commitment of the US system is to perpetuate a status quo that benefits our elites as a class, and a key pillar of that status quo is elite cohesion and impunity.

This is how we ended up with Joe Biden as president acting as if Trump, in the wake of a failed coup attempt, was just another collegial former president rather than as a Gramscian State of Exception that needed to be dealt with expediently and aggressively.