A long time ago, when sex scandals had a somewhat different bar for entry than today, there lived a man named Gary Hart, who was the envy of all the land. A handsome lad who rose to the top of American politics with charm and intelligence, he was anointed The Next Big Thing by corporate media, which later turned on him with the alacrity of Muhammad Ali’s1 leathered fists.
In 1988, the presidency was (almost) his for the taking. His only challenge would be facing off against a popular but also reviled (by some) president, Ronald Reagan.
These were different times. In those days, any gal sitting on a presidential contender’s lap helped pave the path to ruin. Photos like the one you see above this paragraph were enough to instantly obliterate a presidential campaign.
These days, a somewhat different set of standards exists.
Harmless, innocent lap visits between father and daughter happen all the time. But when daddy-daughter photoshoots with pre-conjugal poses,2 especially involving a known rapscallion, cause nary a whistle during a presidential campaign, we understand that times have changed. Consider, too, that the rapscallion’s close association with Jeffrey Epstein was no mystery at the start of his presidential campaign.
The Trump crime family’s protection of Epstein probably began in 2006
Epstein was indicted by a Palm Beach County grand jury in 2006, ten years before the rapscallion ran for president. Both piggies were known commodities in Palm Beach. Both could be considered the essence of nightlife among the monied in Palm Beach. How many of those monied Palm Beachers knew about Epstein or solicited his services is anyone’s guess, but since Palm Beach was the base of a multimillion-dollar sex trafficking empire, it’s safe to guess that there were a lot of them.
The same press that ruined Gary Hart ignored much deeper and serious rumors that have swirled around Trump for years. The press continued to ignore the Epstein affair long after word of Epstein’s exploits began filtering out to the public.
Epstein was brought to the attention of authorities by the parents of a 14-year-old girl who said Epstein paid her for a massage. Prosecutors discovered a trove of evidence indicating these kinds of crimes had been taking place at his Palm Beach mansion since at least 2002. To put it politely, massages were not always the end of the encounter.
After the initial county charges, the feds got involved and unveiled 60 criminal counts against Epstein.
Then, Alex Acosta, the prosecuting attorney for George W. Bush’s Justice Department, arranged a wildly lenient plea deal that cut Epstein’s potential imprisonment from a life term to 18 months in a minimum security facility.3 But get this: He was also allowed to leave the facility for 12 hours per day to do “foundation work.”
He was released after serving 13 of those 18 months. Survivors were furious because Acosta didn’t inform any of them of the plea agreement.
The mainstream press, however, was not aghast. They basically ignored the plea after devoting a few lines to it. You need to dig around a bit to find quotes like this from former federal prosecutor Elie Honig, this one from NPR, a news entity that is now persona non grata in Trumpland:4
I would call the plea deal that he got in Florida, the non-prosecution agreement, more than — more than highly unusual. I would call it completely unprecedented. I don’t know that I have ever seen a deal that lenient in a case like this.
Acosta was rewarded with the position of Labor Secretary under Trump 1.0. Those kinds of things don’t happen in a vacuum. Trump was neighbors and friends with Epstein. We now know how close their friendship was, even though in Trump’s world, there is no true friendship, only frenemyship.
Elie Honig’s reaction after learning about the subsequent charges that transported Epstein to the New York jailhouse, where he hung himself?5 Here, have a look:
I don’t see how he, in any sort of good faith or with a straight face, manages to remain as a Cabinet secretary in this administration.
That said, he’s not shown any signs of resigning. President Trump just today sort of reaffirmed his support for Secretary Acosta, which I think is completely inexplicable.
This deal that Acosta gave to Epstein years ago is completely indefensible. It’s unusual and unprecedented in several respects, in how short a term of prison Epstein faced, 13 months he ended up serving, and most of it on work release.
The fact that Acosta didn’t notify the victims violates federal law, and is something even a first-year prosecutor would know better than to do. So I have to think Acosta knew that and intentionally disregarded that obligation.
And the fact that Acosta signed a deal that immunized the co-conspirators, the people around Epstein, is very strange. Why would he want to do that unless he was protecting powerful people who he was afraid of?
So I think he’s got some very difficult questions to answer. I also think Congress needs to do its job here and dig in deep on what happened.
The media wasn’t particularly interested in finding out the answer, though, and Acosta stuck around as Labor Secretary until 2019.
Sorry,
, that your former office was tainted so.The women and children Esptein abused from 2002 through 2005, some of whom were 14 years old or even younger, would never have their day in court.
Espstein finally faced another tranche of serious charges in 2019, when the following now-famous quote from the predator in chief was entered into our consciousness. Regarding Epstein, Trump said:
“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many of them are on the younger side.”
Crickets from the news media, at least compared to what Gary Hart faced.
Gary Hart’s different world
Gary Hart’s biggest crime against America was that he often came across as an old-school politician, the kind that people think about when they say, “I hate politics.”
He did a few stupid things that he thought would make him more presentable to the public, instead of simply being satisfied with who he was, a poor Nazarene kid out of Ottawa, Kansas, who worked as a laborer in the railyards before finding his way to Nazarene College, where he earned a degree in Philosophy. Then it was on to Yale, where he first earned a Bachelor's Degree in Divinity, then a degree from Yale Law School.
His political career began its ascent when he became national campaign director for George McGovern, who had just wrestled rules changes through the Democratic nominating process by cutting the power from under the feet of party bosses like Chicago mayor Richard J. Daly. Under the rules changes, power brokers could no longer dictate who was sent as a delegate to the national convention.6 Instead, they were chosen through the primary election process we are now familiar with.
Hart, though, made a big-time boo boo as McGovern’s campaign manager. He directed a strategy almost exclusively around winning state caucuses instead of primaries. Caucuses are mini-elections where only the party faithful participate. They don’t really measure the mood of the general electorate.
McGovern won enough of those to secure the nomination, but he wasn’t well tested with voters, so he got creamed in the general election by Richard Nixon, who won 49 states in the 1972 general election.
That didn’t affect Hart’s political career. After the election, he was elected Senator of Colorado, where his work turned him into a bit of a superstar, and whispers about a national future began to transform into louder voices.
Hart was no dummy. As a senator, he foresaw a potential problem with the American semiconductor chip industry. Fearing cheap foreign knockoffs, he co-sponsored legislation that established what amounts to a super copyright and patent combo over chip design called the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984. This was back in the day when Congress actually did stuff, so it was quickly passed, then signed into law by Reagan.
This didn’t stop foreign countries from reverse-engineering American chips, but it helped slow down the process, and still does.
Overall, it was agreed upon by people who matter that he did yeoman’s work as a Senator.
Hart then dipped his toes into the world of presidential politics in 1984, where he lost handily in the Democratic primaries to Walter Mondale after a promising start. It was his rookie season. He learned plenty for his next run in 1988.
Gary Hart faces a frenzied Southern media attack
Gary Hart’s real problems began when he decided to run again for president in 1988. That’s when George H.W. Bush’s political fixer, Lee Atwater, set his sights on him while working with Bush in the Reagan administration. Atwater, who would later chair the Republican National Committee,7 claimed on his deathbed that he was the one who ruined Hart’s campaign.
It was Atwater who, if a man dying of brain cancer on a redemption tour is to be believed, set Hart up for his political destruction.
Word began to leak out to the press that Hart had a bit of a womanizing problem, so newspaper reporters, especially from the South, began stalking him like paparazzi. Eventually, they found what they said was a smoking gun: A young woman named Donna Rice, a Hart campaign aide who, they said, spent the night with Hart at his townhouse.
They obtained information in advance from an anonymous tip, possibly planted by Atwater, that Rice would be there. After he was confronted by reporters who saw Rice enter the townhouse but never leave, Hart angrily denied any impropriety and issued a challenge to the media to follow him around, which, of course, they were already doing.
The townhouse had a back door that was not being surveilled by the drooling press. Nobody knows how much time Rice spent there. Five minutes? Overnight? Nobody would have seen her leave if she had left through the back door. But that didn’t stop the media monsters of that day from convicting Hart of infidelity.
Things got worse when the National Enquirer printed a picture of Rice and Hart on a boat (“The horror!”). That image of the two is our story’s cover image.
Atwater claimed that he leaked the famous Monkey Business photo to Florida newspapers. The redemption part is that he said he felt terrible about it. Then he died.
Despite the photo of Donna Rice and Hart on the boat, no allegations of extramarital affairs were proven. Rice has always maintained that she slept overnight aboard the yacht with another woman, while Hart and another man slept on a fishing boat anchored next to the yacht. The other woman in this story has never challenged Rice’s version of events.
Look again at that photo. There are approximately 900 billion similar photos between men and women not in romantic relationships on Instagram. It’s nowhere near as suggestive as the predator-in-chief’s photos with his own daughter. It’s just two people posing, probably in the middle of drinks.
Other politicians got hammered later with the same kind of scrutiny: Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and Mark Sanford, to name a few. But never Trump.
Hart launches fundraiser, gets raided by feds
Hart officially launched his 1988 campaign on April 13, 1987, at two Los Angeles fund-raising events. Those events were promptly raided by federal marshals, who seized most of the money raised to satisfy a $162,754.57 judgment against his 1984 campaign for advertising services rendered by Santa Barbara ad agency Semper-Moser Associates.8
Although it helps to remember that Atwater was already slinging mud for Republicans in those days, and that Ronald Reagan, who gave us Iran-Contra, was in office at the time, the official story from Semper-Moser was that it was they who initiated the call of federal marshals, as they had won judgment against the Hart campaign in a U.S. District Court the previous December.
It helps, too, to remember that Reagan’s vice president was Atwater beneficiary George H.W. Bush (whose biggest crime against humanity was serving up Dubya to the world). Sometimes it’s fair to guess chicanery, even if we can’t supply firm evidence.
I wouldn’t say such a thing if the raid hadn’t happened on the night of Hart’s announcement. But I’m a cynic that way. What can I say?
Donna Rice and Gary Hart have continued to deny having a sexual relationship since the scandal first surfaced.
During the 1988 campaign, Hart was ripped for other character issues. “The character issue” even became a bit of a meme before memes were born. But the issues of character the press focused on were trivial.
One of those issues was triggered when it was discovered that he changed his last name from Hartpence to Hart, as if that is something that never happens. Press snoopers also discovered that he changed his stated birth year, too, which is admittedly a little weird, but nothing as weird as whatever Donald Trump is probably doing right now.
The press seemed fixated on Hart’s sex life. Reporters complained that he romped with Warren Beatty for a while and claimed that Hart liked to unzip his pants a bit too frequently, but there was little evidence of the behavior beyond Hart’s insistence that his romantic past was nobody’s business.
Hart remained married to his wife, Lee, until she passed away in 2021.
The press even managed to turn his refusal to take PAC money for his first presidential campaign into a character flaw, because he mortgaged his house to run it, then ran into trouble paying it off (leading to the ad agency lawsuit). Angry creditors hit the newsrooms and called him irresponsible. The press ate it up.
Pause a moment to reflect on that. A presidential contender refuses PAC money, drives himself into a state of near bankruptcy trying to fund his own campaign, then gets torn apart by the press for it when he has trouble paying it back.
Fast forward thirty years or so to witness a presidential contender who never pays his bills, stiffs small businesses contracted to help him build his mafia-like real estate empire, miraculously bankrupts a casino (a nearly impossible feat), and ruins a professional football league (the USFL), all with a collective shrug of the shoulders among the same mainstream press establishment.
Under the Hart Rules, one of those events alone would have destroyed Trump’s campaign. The mere whisper of an association with Epstein would have sunk it on Day One, in the golden escalator days. Instead, the press worshipped him. Not because he was cool, but because he was, and remains, a cash cow.
The lack of interest on the part of the mainstream press, though, profitable or not, is a curious phenomenon. It’s the kind of thing that makes an old Chicago boy like me visualize money in big envelopes changing hands in the dark alleys behind the strip joints that some reporters are known to frequent (for research!).
It’s fair to point out, given the mainstream media’s patronage of everything Trump, given corporate media’s sanewashing, and given the takeover of much of corporate media by right-wing oligarchs, that without Substack and other alternative media writers pounding away daily at his corruption and vileness, the resistance against him would die. The recent Epstein file vote victory may never have happened.
Only Donald Trump could ruin sex scandals for everyone
When people say Donald Trump ruins everything, they ain’t kidding. No amount of gold plating or ornamentation can change it, and sex scandals are no exception. Whether it’s killing hundreds of thousands of Americans with blatant ineptness over a pandemic or becoming the only human on earth capable of bankrupting a casino, he’s a unicorn.
Sex scandals should at least be entertaining. We should be able to laugh at other people’s inpropriety without wincing or wretching. Those days are over. He’s turned sex scandals into something that makes us physically ill.
Maybe that’s one reason it took people so long to come to terms with it. Trump has made us all feel physically ill. This is yet another piece of that.
Are You Dying?
A friend of mine recently told me that she’s been sick on and off for the past year. She has kids. She’s used to little humanoid petri dishes walking around her house. In the past, she’d occasionally catch one of the bugs they brought home from school. Still, overall, she developed immunities and the bugs bounced off her, looking for another, more vulnerable body to attack. Until this year.
Notes
Sources for the Ivanka lap images confirmed by fact checkers as true:
Wrona, Aleksandra. 2025. “Fact Check: Old Photos of Trump with Ivanka Are Spreading Widely Online.” Yahoo News. July 30, 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-old-photos-trump-100000488.html.
Wrona, Aleksandra. 2025. “Fact Check: Photo of Trump and Daughter Ivanka Posing on Bed Together Is Real.” Yahoo News. July 24, 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-photo-trump-daughter-130000718.html
Shan, Cindy. 2025. “Another Old Photo of Trump and Daughter Ivanka Makes the Rounds Again.” Snopes. Snopes.com. July 24, 2025. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-photo-ivanka/.
Hey, if you liked this article, remember that every time someone restacks one of my posts, an angel gets their wings.
Footnotes
Ali, who passed away in 2016, was the great boxer of that era, sort of (still famous, but his fighting career was over in 1981), hence the reference.
I personally don’t think Ivanka was one of his direct victims, at least from a physical assault sense. She seems intelligent enough to be able to calculate that both she and other women would be better served by coming forward, for one thing. In a sense, his dark, but unfulfilled, fantasies about his daughter may have been part of what drove him towards Epstein’s girls. She sat on his lap and posed for pictures like that because she simply didn’t know any better. She was a child. She doesn’t owe the world any explanation for having a father who treated her as a sex object, even if she’s still in denial of it. We should never blame the victims. And being a sex object of daddy does not implicate her in anything, even if he did not act on his fantasies. And if he did act on them, she deserves our care and nurturing, not ridicule. If he did not act on them, she still doesn’t deserve our ridicule. Children who are the object of their parents’ desire deserve empathy, understanding, and patience until they acquire that elusive Courage to Heal.
Chappell, Bill. 2025. “Jeffrey Epstein Files: Tracing the Legal Cases That Led to Sex-Trafficking Charges.” NPR. July 25, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5478620/jeffrey-epstein-crimes-timeline-legal-case.
“The ‘Completely Unprecedented’ Plea Deal Jeffrey Epstein Made with Alex Acosta.” 2019. PBS News. July 8, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-completely-unprecedented-plea-deal-jeffrey-epstein-made-with-alex-acosta.
There’s been a lot of chatter about this. He killed himself. He was murdered. I’m not sure it matters much in the long run, but I found this review of the situation compelling, so I just assume it was suicide by bedsheet:
Mersey, William. 2025. “Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself 100%.” Medium. Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs. May 20, 2025.
(Gift Link)
Overall, no matter how it happened, the world seems better served by his demise. There’s enough evidence floating around that nobody needs his testimony.
Some political nerds, like California reporter Ben Bradford, claim that these reforms helped bring us to where we are today because they began the process of candidates appealing to a party’s most vocal and extreme voters, who tend to be the ones who vote in primaries. He argued that party bosses and other party professionals helped stabilize the process and make candidates appeal to the general population. According to Bradford: Centrists good, everyone else bad. Even if he‘s right about that (he’s not), my counterargument is Barack Obama, who was as centrist as a human being can possibly be when he ran. Party bosses also gave us Kamala Harris, who would have won if she hadn’t been a (somewhat dark-skinned) woman. For better or worse, they ceded the nomination to her. She may have won through a more traditional process, but she still would likely have lost the general election because 4 out of every 10 Americans say they know someone who will never vote for a woman. Source: I read it somewhere, and I believe it.
Atwater later gave us the infamously racist Willie Horton ads, which tore into presidential candidate Michael Dukakis when running against George H.W. Bush during the 1988 presidential campaign after Hart dropped out. Horton is a convict who committed serious crimes, including rape, while out on a furlough program that Dukakis had supported as Massachusetts governor. A convicted murderer, he is currently in the waning years of a life sentence.
Simon, Roger. 1990. “HOW a MURDERER and RAPIST BECAME the BUSH CAMPAIGN’S MOST VALUABLE PLAYER.” Baltimore Sun. November 11, 1990. https://www.baltimoresun.com/1990/11/11/how-a-murderer-and-rapist-became-the-bush-campaigns-most-valuable-player/.
BALZAR, JOHN. 1987. “Marshals Seize Hart’s Funds to Satisfy ’84 Debt.” Los Angeles Times. April 17, 1987. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-04-17-mn-580-story.html.