Alan Zendell, December 21, 2025

I never saw or heard the word “misprison” until I asked Google, “Is failure to report a crime a criminal act?” It turns out that there’s a federal statute that addresses that question directly. 18 U.S. Code § 4 defines misprison as concealing a felony and not making it known to authorities. It is a felony under federal law punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. This arcane, six-letter word might have the power to bring down the Trump administration.

I believe in karma. Live a life devoid of morality – lying, cheating, and stealing your way through every venture – and one day, the universe will make you pay, and leaders of powerful nations are not immune. The piper always gets paid in the end, whether it’s Adolf Hitler putting a bullet in his own head or Richard Nixon ending his presidency in disgrace.

When former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, backed by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party and extreme right-wing organizations like the Heritage Society, created the political creature known as Donald Trump, it was an act of hubris. The intent was to elevate the views of a minority of Americans who rejected the fundamental concept of equal opportunity that underpinned our Constitution. They also rejected Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the foundational federal legislation that guaranteed racial equality, social security and a safety net for elderly, disabled, or impoverished Americans that defined the America we all grew up in.

But reversing ninety years of progressive maturation required silencing the majority of Americans who believed in that version of America. In an alleged democracy, that could only be accomplished by skewing elections through extreme gerrymandering and investing billions of dollars in broadcast and social media to mislead voters and create an alternate reality in which only white, Christian males would be empowered. Like many such movements throughout history, it worked for a while, and we are in the midst of the most corrupt, power-grabbing, anti-democratic administration in our history.

We are living through a patient, relentless coup funded by right-wing billionaires who want to tear up our Constitution and replace it with an oligarchy of sociopaths like Trump. Most of the country spent 2025 despairing of the future. The MAGA wave appeared to have the inexorable inevitability of a slow-motion avalanche, made worse by fears that the Supreme Court had been compromised by the same extremist dollars that put Trump in power.

Two-thirds of Americans fear that the MAGA juggernaut can’t be stopped. but our friends at the Heritage Society misjudged the situation. Enter Jeffrey Epstein, who built an empire based on sex-trafficking and sexually abusing women, including underage girls. Either Ailes and his friends at Heritage failed to realize the extent of Trump’s involvement with Epstein, or their arrogance convinced them that once in power they were invincible. Who could blame them after the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity for every despicable crime he committed in office?

Yesterday, the Department of Justice failed to meet the requirements of the November 19, 2025 law, which was passed with every member of the House of Representatives except one voting “Aye.” It required the release of literally every file and piece of information related to Epstein and everyone associated with his prosecution and conviction. The Trump administration is now involved in a coverup of horrific crimes that make Watergate look like a schoolyard brawl. The network of powerful, wealthy people who took part in these craven acts is desperate to hide their past actions.

Nixon might have gotten away with Watergate if not for the integrity of James McCord and the eighteen minutes erased from the Whtie House surveillance recordings. America dodged a potentially fatal bullet when Nixon resigned. The question we face today is whether Trump will, too. I believe his sycophants have seriously miscalculated. They believe that if they can prevent any evidence that Trump was directly involved in Epstein’s crimes from being released, the furor will die down before the midterm elections. They’re wrong.

An essential part of Trump’s base, without whom he never would have been elected are evangelists and other Christians (and non-Christians) who are strongly rooted in basic morality. They forgave his profane, amoral character because he promised to stack the courts with judges who would end abortion. They forgave misogyny, greed, and sociopathy. They will not forgive sex trafficking or pedophilia in any form, which brings us back to the idea of misprison.

Whether or not there is evidence that Trump was directly involved with those acts, he is almost certainly guilty of misprison of Epstein’s felonies. For decades, he was someone with a loud public voice who could have blown the whistle on Epstein’s activities. Instead, he has done and is still doing everything possible to distance himself from them and pretend he was never involved. It reminds me of the way H. G. Wells ended his novel, War of the Worlds. Just when all seems lost, and it appears that the invading Martians will destroy human civilization, they are defeated by microscopic organisms that Wells was happy to have his readers interpret as being saved by God.

Trump has lied to and misled religious Americans for ten years. He’ll live to regret that.