Disillusionment, Disregard, and Distrust

“History always repeats itself,” has been a common term used when referencing the calamities and disputes individuals have gone through in our country today. World War I and II, the Holocaust, Vietnam War, Watergate Scandal, and 9/11, all are just a few of the events recorded that have had present involvement in the wake of government scandals, twisting our understanding of national and foreign conflicts. Living in the 21st Century, we are in a state of contemporary and unprecedented times, wary of what events could erupt or repeat, and how the government will approach them, fabricating a fluctuating distrust from citizens. 

Vietnam War (1955-75) and the Pentagon Papers (1971) The disillusionment of U.S. soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, sparked from the toll of more than 50,000 casualties but also protests of those serving overseas, fighting against the continuous draft of fellow soldiers being sent to risk their lives, and growing media coverage. Soldiers would remain doubtful of their trust in the government, as a “victory,” was reported to be approaching. Media outlets stirred attention, broadcasting the grim and uncensored truths of the war into American households. Affected by the atrocities having witnessed on television, college students, activists, and war veterans joined alongside soldiers, protesting antiwar movements during the 1960s and 70s.

Nearing the end of the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg, a U.S. military analyst and researcher, leaked the Pentagon Papers on Jun. 13, 1971, determined with the intention of having Americans know the truths about the concealed information kept discreet by the government. The Pentagon Papers reported a study on the Vietnam War and depicted the four U.S. presidential administrations of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson were misleading Congress and the public during the Vietnam war.

June 17, 1972 to’74 Watergate Scandal Five individuals set up by Nixon’s administration were revealed to have broken into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters on June 16, 1972, located in the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. The five men hired by members associated with the Nixon administration intended to make duplicates of important DNC files, and place eavesdropping devices in the offices. Security guards monitoring the hotel  that night in the Watergate complex discovered the burglars and arrested them. The arrest of Nixon’s aides, generated a public outcry for Nixon to resign, in which he would follow suit on Aug. 9, 1974, prior to a future motive of impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee.  

Post 9/11 Americans are fearful after the tragic Sep. 11, 2001, event in which four terrorists from the terrorist organization, al-Qaeda led by Osama Bin Laden, hijacked four airplanes, and crashed  a plane through both of the Twin Towers in New York City, killing almost 3,000 American victims in the planes, towers, or first responders trying to aid the wounded.

Starting in 2003, former President George W. Bush allocated for a United States-led coalition to invade Iraq, seeking to take down Iraq military led by the terrorist Sadddam Hussein. Hussein was suspected of terrorism, upon failing to comply with the Gulf War Settlement during the 1990s, after invading the country of Kuwait. Yet, the U.S. would withdraw from Iraq in 2011, as enforced by former President Barack Obama. 

2025 Epstein Files Dec. 19, 2025, the Department of Justice released records of hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs of offender Jeffrey Epstein and his assistant Ghislane Maxwell, for criminal actions with minors on Little Saint James island, also referred to as “Epstein Island.” President Trump, and well-known figures such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Prince Andrew, Michael Jackson, and former President Bill Clinton, were reported to have been in the files on account of images released by the administration. 

Though the records were released, a significant portion of the documents have been heavily redacted, offering little to no details on the criminals’ associations. Survivors of Epstein, prior to the documents released, have arisen to share their stories. On Feb. 12, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi faced criticisms upon her mishandling of the files, and refusing to face the survivors speaking up to fight for justice for themselves, demanding an apology, and reclaim the years that left them in the dark. 

Among the fluctuations of distrust in the U.S, statistics from 2025 found that 17 percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right, 2 percent to just about always do what is right, and 15 “most of the time” (15 percent), (Pew Research).  

An anonymous Bearcat shared their perspective on government distrust, “Unfortunately with how discreet the government has been, it wouldn’t be surprising if there’s more impactful events resulting from more things hidden from the people, just like we’ve seen throughout history and today. Even bringing up the state that our country is in right now in public is a sensitive topic itself. I don’t think the distrust in our government is going to go down in the near future.”

Loved ones and survivors recount the events they endured in-person or witnessed on live television, no matter if it’s a war crime, or the failure of individuals taking accountability. These are the stories recorded or documented in history textbooks, leaving the elder and American youth of today to question if there’ll be another imprint of more distrust in textbooks in the future?

Statistics from PBS show that 62% of Americans are actively engaged with seeking out the latest news on the Epstein files. They sit ready for the next release, salivating as they anticipate the next accusation, billionaire implicated, or the next celebrity brought into the frame of an unprecedented political scandal.

 The Epstein files refer to a collection of documents and other items pertaining to the death of convicted billionaire trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. Being a billionaire, Epstein had connections to a whole gallery of powerful figures, and there’s been publicly available photographs featuring Epstein with individuals like current president Donald Trump for decades. (PBS). These documents have had a drip feed of a release from December of 2025 to earlier this year, generating a frenzy around this story. But this is only a microcosm of what has distinguished the Epstein Files from America’s previous presidential scandals.

On Jan. 30th, 2026 a seemingly large portion of documents were released, accompanied by multiple asterisk

s in the forms of redactions. There’s an infestation of black bars all over the documents, showing a lack of transparency from the Trump Administration. These redactions blot out the names of prominent lawmakers, congressmen, and billionaires. Names like Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, Elon Musk, and even Bill Clinton are just a fraction of who’s implicated.

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump

Multiple members of the current administration are directly implicated with the names of RFK JR (Secretary of Health), Howard Lutnick (Commerce secretary), and President Trump all making an appearance. With Trump being especially prominent, with his name and Mar-a-lao property being mentioned thousands of times within the released documents. Some of the strongest figures in the nation (and world) in and outside of the presidency are involved in this case. (Reuters).

The magnitude of this event is what truly sets it apart from the collection of presidential scandals in this country. As PRHS Junior Owen Winter puts it, “I would say just the magnitude of it, how many people were included in it, with Watergate it was just Nixon’s cabinet involved, not like the thousands of powerful people in the Epstein files.” With this comes an interest from young people in this scandal that’s never been present, not to the same degree, in America’s previous.

The kind of the crimes alleged to have been committed in the files would be disastrous for all involved, were they to get out. Reuters latest summary of crimes committed include sexual abuse of minors, human trafficking, threats to political opponents and their families, and even cannibalism have all been alleged. And these are just from the number of documents that were released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in January of this year. 

United Nations (U.N.). humanities experts were interviewed by Reuters in February, and in the interview they sought to convey the severity of the crimes committed, “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” (Reuters). The Epstein files don’t just implicate its namesake, it also implicates the numerous powerful people Epstein had tangible connections to. 

Another contributor to the Epstein files uniqueness among other political scandals is the clear lack of transparency in their distribution. The D.O.J. is tasked with releasing any and all documents, materials, and items relating to the prosecution of Epstein, and his partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell. This task comes directly from the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump himself signed into law on Nov. 19th, 2025.

The failure of the Trump administration to comply with the legal demands, some of which they set, of the courts is becoming increasingly comical. As of February 2026, by the admission of the DOJ, only half of the files have been released. Released with aforementioned redactions, blotting out many of the names mentioned previous. On Feb. 5th, 2026, multiple house democrats proposed legislation that could sue the D.O.J. for their refusal to release the Epstein files in their entirety on the date Trump himself signed into law, December 19th 2025.

In light of backlash like this many different figures from the Trump administration have attempted to justify the illegally slow release schedule of these files. Despite signing an act calling for full transparency with these documents, Trump himself has recently attempted to distance himself from the case. In February the president would tell reporters, “it’s really time for the country and the media to get on to something else,” (BBC). 

Why would the president feel a need to have the Epstein files exit the public consciousness? Winter posits, “Because he is trying to distract people from the fact he spent a ton of time with Jeffrey Epstein. 

He’s trying to get people to stop looking so hard at the horrible things he did,”. The current administration is intent on painting the Epstein Files as nothing more than the next political hoax, while simultaneously refusing to cooperate in having their contents be available in full to the American people.

This lack of transparency has allowed for the proliferation of conspiracy theories in regards to entities the files may implicate, and these range greatly in their believability. In the interest of highschoolers there’s the theorized involvement of lifetouch, the school phototaking agency, in the files. The connection between Epstein and lifetouch is a tangential one as noted by Longview news, “Lifetouch is owned by Shutterfly, which is owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo, is named in the Epstein files in relation to paying Epstein for professional advice.”. This vague theory is one that grabs the attention of students and parents concerned for their children’s safety, and it’s grown enough in popularity for the CEO of lifetouch, Ken Murphy,  to have to publicly distance LifeTouch from the files in a series of public statements. 

While there is no mention of Lifetouch in the Epstein Files, conspiracies like this will persist if transparency is not put first. Winter expresses a similar concern for misinformation surrounding this topic, “It really depends on what your feed is and who you’re getting info from, but a lot of it’s conspiracy.. People with more right leaning feeds will get told fake. But without looking at them yourself I don’t think you should be able to form a full opinion on the files without looking through the documents and emails.”. What we see now are the effects of a populous lacking media literacy colliding with what might be the most disastrous scandal in American history. This shortage of media literacy will only become more blatant and be given more of a platform, allowing misinformation to prosper, if the Trump administration doesn’t display the transparency it promised.