The Accountability Gap

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, February 11, 2026

 

Chauvinism toward Europe is so fundamental to American identity that one can’t envy European culture without feeling a bit unpatriotic.

 

I’m not much of a patriot anymore, though, so I’ll cop to it. I envy the hell out of a country where an honest-to-goodness king feels obliged to cooperate with police as they investigate his own brother for corruption involving Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Try to imagine it happening here. Our own king doled out full pardons to his co-conspirators in a plot to overthrow the government and is presently at work turning the Justice Department into the legal arm of his mafia syndicate. No “made man” in the Trump family will ever pay for federal crimes they’ve committed or might commit, no matter how compelling the evidence might be. Every one of us knows it.

 

Get this, though: The “corruption involving Jeffrey Epstein” for which (the former) Prince Andrew is being investigated in the U.K. isn’t even what you think.

 

It’s not sex crimes that are the subject of the probe this time; it’s the fact that Andrew violated his duty of confidentiality as a British trade envoy by passing information about investment opportunities to Epstein in 2010. It’s an insider trading scandal, essentially, a form of sleaze that seems quaint—genteel, even—compared to the comically lavish corruption to which Americans have grown accustomed.

 

Andrew’s investment chatter was revealed in the latest tranche of the Epstein files released by the DOJ. So were many other communications between the late pedophile and prominent Europeans, which detonated like a series of bombs on the continent. Per ABC News: “Former UK Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden, and Slovakia.” The governments of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania have also launched probes based on the files.

 

Remarkably, not one of the foreign officials who have been pushed out so far due to their contacts with Epstein was accused of sex crimes. (At least one chatted with him suggestively about women, however.) “They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender” in 2008, ABC News notes.

 

That’s strange, no? Various people in and around the current U.S. government also maintained friendly relationships with Epstein after 2008, per the latest files, and not one of them has been toppled—or, to all appearances, been even mildly inconvenienced.

 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed last year that he cut ties to Epstein in 2005 after being creeped out by him. That was a lie, it turns out. The newly released files prove that Lutnick was still arranging get-togethers with the notorious pervert in 2012 and even joined him in a business venture.

 

Former DOGE supremo and GOP bankroller Elon Musk was also in touch with Epstein in 2012. Four years after the financier went to prison for procuring a child for prostitution, Musk emailed him on behalf of himself and his wife to ask “what day/night will be the wildest party on your island.”

 

Lutnick and Musk were pikers, though, compared to Trump flunky and potential 2028 presidential candidate Steve Bannon, who remained a loyal Epstein buddy to the end. Not only did the two plot a documentary aimed at rehabilitating Epstein’s image, they were in contact about it on the very day that the latter was arrested for the second time in 2019.

 

Europeans are punishing those who saw nothing wrong with socializing with a known child predator. Americans are not. Why?

 

Expectations and structure.

 

You can guess how a guy who writes a newsletter called Boiling Frogs is inclined to answer that. But for the sake of not being completely predictable, I think there are other differences between the U.S. and EU besides our national experiment with postliberalism that have contributed to the accountability gap on Epstein.

 

One is expectations. To Europeans, learning that some “respectable” local bigwig was chitchatting cheerfully with the world’s most notorious pedophile might come as a jolt. But in America, the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a well-connected member of the global elite is old news. The current president of the United States and a former president of the United States were known associates of his for years, for cripes’ sake.

 

“Every rich, powerful scumbag in the country was chummy with Epstein” isn’t a revelation in the USA. It’s the foundational fact on which the real suspicions about Epstein’s activities are based—that some of the scumbags in question joined Epstein in preying on children and may have been blackmailed by him with evidence he possessed of their crimes.

 

But the files released by the Justice Department haven’t proved that. What they’ve proved conclusively is that many celebrated figures in politics and business had no moral objection to befriending a child molester with mountains of money and an impressive Rolodex. In Europe, that’s a scandal; in America, where it was already understood, it’s a letdown. If there’s no cabal then there’s no story. (Stay tuned!)

 

The way Europeans structure their governments might also make them more sensitive to Epstein-related tremors than America is.

 

In parliamentary systems, power is fragile. Frequently the governing majority is composed of a coalition of parties in uneasy alliance with each other; if one grows disenchanted and withdraws its support, the government could fall at any time. Parliamentary systems are also led by prime ministers elected by their party rather than presidents elected directly by voters. When a prime minister grows unpopular, the party can and often will move to protect itself by replacing that person expeditiously. (Ask Liz Truss.)

 

And of course, parliamentary systems typically have more than two parties competing for power. Even in the U.K., which has been dominated by two parties for ages, no fewer than five are currently polling in double digits. A governing party that happens to enjoy a sizable majority in Parliament, as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party does at the moment, has to worry about its support being cannibalized by rival left-leaning factions if it governs poorly.

 

In America, by comparison, power is sturdy. The president gets four years to govern no matter how unpopular he becomes. Ditto for the governing party in the House and Senate, albeit for two years. There are no coalitions to worry about in our two-party system either: The only way the majority can lose control of the chamber mid-term is if some critical mass of members in its own ranks defect to the other side, which is vanishingly rare.

 

Add it all up and you see why Keir Starmer needs to worry more about employing Peter Mandelson than Donald Trump needs to worry about employing Howard Lutnick. Left-wing Brits scandalized by Mandelson might consider switching to the Liberal Democrats or Green Party; Labour MPs worried about losing those voters might consider dumping Starmer in hopes of placating them.

 

Whereas here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Trump faces no risk of losing support to some rival right-wing party and no threat of being ousted by congressional Republicans. That reality inevitably influences Americans’ expectations of political accountability, just as the mechanics of parliamentary systems influence Europeans’ expectations.

 

So when the same scandal hits both continents, we should expect one to be more responsive to it than the other. And it has been.

 

Culture.

 

But yes, needless to say, the dismal, decadent political culture of the United States also contributes immensely to the accountability gap. Boiled frogs won’t suddenly leap out of the pot in shock upon discovering a dubious email from Howard Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein.

 

The whole point of boiling them, from postliberals’ perspective, was to desensitize them to moral outrage. Why would anyone be surprised to find that modern Americans are, in fact, less sensitive than Europeans?

 

Here comes the “to be sure” paragraph: To be sure, the postliberal right isn’t solely to blame for that. Convincing Americans not to hold influential leftists accountable for their moral disasters has been a cherished Democratic Party priority for ages. The Kennedys and Bill Clinton are notorious examples, but even the brief reckoning inspired by the #MeToo movement ended in recriminations.

 

The most sainted Democratic politician of the last 100 years, Franklin Roosevelt, was the proprietor of concentration camps for a disfavored racial minority. Frog-boiling didn’t start with Trump.

 

What’s different and innovative about postliberalism, though, is that it’s a moral system unto itself. It doesn’t accept conventional morality while insisting that occasional deviations should be overlooked in the name of some greater policy goal, as Democrats routinely do for their sleazebags. Postliberalism has its own moral code. Ruthlessness towards opponents is the supreme virtue; the law should protect friends and harass enemies; prioritizing an abstract moral or civic good over your or your tribe’s self-interest is “weak;” loyalty to one’s leader is absolute.

 

Postliberalism is designed to make voters un-scandalizable. And it’s awfully good at it, if not quite perfect.

 

The right-wing majority that’s adopted it as a moral system won’t be meaningfully scandalized by anything the president and his lackeys do because it can’t be, having abandoned conventional morality as the proper yardstick in judging its own side. But the rest of us, inured by now to the right’s indifference, struggle with indifference too: It’s hard to feel scandalized at the majority party in Washington for doing nothing to hold Republicans like Lutnick, Bannon, Musk, and Trump accountable when we’ve spent 10 long years learning to expect nothing less.

 

That’s the reason we all know and, on some level, accept that no Trump ally will do time for a federal crime during the president’s term. The morality of postliberalism to which we’ve all grown numb forbids it. As if to prove the point, at a moment when Bannon’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are all over the news, the Justice Department chose yesterday to announce that it’s dropping a criminal case against him stemming from his refusal to testify about January 6 before Congress. The timing felt deliberate, as if to flaunt the extent of legal impunity that Trump cronies now enjoy. Not only will Bannon pay no price for Epstein, the DOJ seemed to say, but his toadying to Trump will shield him from paying any price for completely unrelated crimes.

 

For a grassroots example of the phenomenon, look at the late Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk advocated for marriage, children, and family values, the backbone of conventional morality. But on Sunday, to counterprogram anti-ICE Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show (which featured a bona fide wedding), Turning Point handed its microphone to Kid “Balls in Your Mouth” Rock. The next day it weighed in on Texas’ Senate primary by endorsing Ken Paxton, an adulterer who was impeached and very nearly removed as state attorney general for corruption, over Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Wesley Hunt. That’s postliberalism in action, forever cynically paying lip service to mom and apple pie while elevating the grubbiest amoral avatars of right-wing ruthlessness it can find.

 

Many Americans support all of this, many more are by now numb to it. A country conditioned to be un-scandalizable will need a lot more than Howard Lutnick having lunch with Epstein after the latter went to prison for soliciting a minor to feel shocked.

 

Partisanship.

 

There’s one more ingredient to the Epstein accountability gap between our two continents. Americans have become extreme tribal partisans to a degree that Europeans haven’t.

 

I think. Making sweeping pronouncements on partisan dynamics across the ocean should be above my pay grade, but I can read the results of the last U.K. election as well as you can. The sort of landslide Starmer’s Labour Party won due to public disaffection with the Tories is unthinkable in modern America, where only one presidential election this century was decided by more than 5 points. And in that case, it took the Iraq war and a global financial crisis to crack the ceiling.

 

We can blame that to a degree on our two-party system, which forces Americans into the sort of binary mindset that turns every election into a cultural death match. Europeans aren’t so burdened. For the same reason, we can safely assume that U.S. political media is more binary, and therefore more tribal, in its allegiances than the typical offerings abroad. If, for instance, America had a center-right party to complement the MAGA GOP, that party’s media organs would have a strong electoral incentive to publicize dirt on Lutnick, Musk, and Bannon. Instead right-wing media has an incentive to suppress it: If they’re reporting on Epstein news that hurts the White House, only the left stands to benefit—and no one wants to be accused of helping the left.

 

Needless to say, the cult of personality around a charismatic authoritarian like Trump has also made hyperpolarization and the perverse political incentives it creates worse. No offense to Keir Starmer, but I don’t get the sense that many British Labour voters would feel they’d committed an unthinkable national betrayal if they supported his ouster. Republicans do feel that way about Trump, however, even knowing that he’d be replaced by the like-minded J.D. Vance. So naturally they’re less inclined to desert him or demand that he punish anyone for being buddy-buddy with Epstein.

 

And of course the right’s cultishness over the president has always flowed upward to its representatives in Congress, functionally nullifying the impeachment process and reducing the House and Senate little more than a glorified Duma. To ask why there isn’t more accountability for connections to Epstein in a country that couldn’t produce accountability for a g-ddamned coup is to succumb to absurdity. Who, precisely, is supposed to extract this accountability? Who in our morally numb country expects accountability enough to seriously demand it at this point?

 

The frogs in Europe might not be boiled, but the ones in America are. Which is a relief, I suppose, for those of us here who aren’t so patriotic anymore: At least there’ll be someplace to go once postliberalism becomes intolerable.