Jeff Schechtman 04/21/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
What Swalwell, Gonzales, Trump, and Epstein all share — and what Washington keeps pretending to forget about the nature of men in power.
Long before there were political consultants, opposition researchers, or 24-hour news cycles, writers and poets understood something essential about men in power: The higher they climb, the more exposed they become — not to their enemies, but to themselves.
It runs through Shakespeare’s kings undone not by their rivals but by their own nature — Antony losing an empire for Cleopatra, Macbeth’s ambition inseparable from Lady Macbeth’s hold on him. Through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where the man who destroys her life is not a villain but simply a powerful man who wanted what he wanted and never imagined the cost would be his to pay. Through the blues, where desire and ruin have always been understood as the same song. Through every novel about ambition that doubles, always, as a story about what ambition cannot contain.
The Greeks built an entire dramatic tradition around the idea that greatness and catastrophic vulnerability are not opposites. They are the same force, wearing different faces on different days.
We just don’t talk about it that way when it happens in Washington.
Last week, Eric Swalwell (D-CA) resigned from Congress after multiple women detailed experiences ranging from unwanted sexual advances to allegations of rape, ending both his seven-term congressional career and what had been a serious campaign for governor of California.
Tony Gonzales (R-TX), followed him out the door, having admitted to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide. Two men, two parties, one week, one ancient story.
The temptation is to frame this politically — another #MeToo moment, a bipartisan reckoning, a lesson about workplace power dynamics. And all of that is true, but none of it is really the point.
The point is something far older and far less comfortable: Men of a certain ambition carry within them a complexity about women that the whole architecture of modern political life is designed to suppress, but suppression is not the same as resolution. That complexity waits. It finds its moment. And when it does, it is rarely subtle.
We tell ourselves these stories are about weakness, hypocrisy, the abuse of power, the exploitation of vulnerable women by men who should know better. And they are. But what they are more fundamentally about is harder to say and harder still to fix, because it isn’t really about bad men behaving badly. It’s about the nature of men — specifically men in the particular hothouse of political ambition — and the way that nature doesn’t transform when you win the election or get the corner office. It intensifies.
The hunger that drove the ambition doesn’t dissolve once the ambition is satisfied. It looks for a new object. And in positions of power, the normal friction that keeps most men in most circumstances from acting on every impulse is simply… removed. The feedback loops go quiet. The word “no” gets said less often, and then less often still, until some men stop hearing it altogether.
This is not an excuse. It is a description of a mechanism.
What makes Jeffrey Epstein different — what makes him genuinely singular in the entire history of powerful men and their appetites — is that he saw this mechanism clearly and decided to build a business around it.
Not a criminal enterprise that happened to involve sex. A deliberate, sophisticated operation premised entirely on a single insight that no one before him had ever quite thought to monetize:
That the most powerful men in the world are, in the domain of desire, the most exploitable. That lust is the one lever that doesn’t care about your net worth or your security detail or your carefully managed public image.
But here is what has never quite been said about Epstein: He was, in his way, a genius. A dark and predatory one, but a genius nonetheless.
He understood the interior lives of ambitious men better than their therapists, their wives, their chiefs of staff — better, it seems, than the men understood themselves.
He grasped something these men only half-consciously believed: that desire was the spoils of their ambition. That they had worked and schemed and clawed their way to the top, and that this — this — was part of what they had earned. Maybe Trump said it best in the infamous Access Hollywood tape, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Most powerful men feel that pull and suppress it, or sublimate it, or simply live with it. Epstein saw the suppression and offered the alternative. He didn’t seduce these men with money or access or ideology. He gave them permission.
And in the process, with the precision of a venture capitalist and the patience of a spider, he extracted from them the two things they valued most: their power and their money. Nobody in recent history had ever thought to build that business. Nobody had ever seen it quite that clearly.
That is what makes Epstein not just a criminal but a case study in applied psychology at the highest level. If he had been a decade older and operating on the East Coast political circuit, Swalwell’s name would almost certainly be somewhere in those files. The profile fits that precisely.
The women in these stories are too often treated as variables — the accusers, the destabilizing forces, the October surprises. But they are something else entirely. They are the one feedback mechanism that exists completely outside the bubble. They cannot be managed, spun, or consolidated. When they speak — and they always eventually speak — they aren’t breaking a story so much as restoring a reality that power had temporarily suspended.
Don Draper, a fictional stand-in for the Swalwells and Weinsteins of the world, got away with it for a decade. He got away with it because the culture had constructed, with great care and considerable investment, a world in which the desires of powerful men were simply the weather — ambient, inevitable, not subject to comment or consequence.
That world is gone, though not without a fight, and not completely. Barack Obama held it together. George W. Bush did, too. Which tells us this isn’t inevitable — it is, to use the clinical term, a failure of integration. An inability to hold the full complexity of one’s own nature without needing to act it out.
Literature has always known this. Stendhal knew it. Fitzgerald knew it. Roth made a career out of it. The powerful man undone not by his enemies but by the part of himself he never quite managed to govern — that story is as old as storytelling itself.
Washington just keeps acting surprised.
- Jeff SchechtmanJeff Schechtman’s career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.