The resignation of Trump's Labor secretary, Alex Acosta, is only the most recent in a string of such scandals for Trump. In fact, what with all the things Trump himself has done plus those around him, his is surely the most scandal-ridden presidency in history. Let us just review the record, because it gets hard to remember them all after a while.

1. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta resigned because when he was a South Florida federal prosecutor, he gave accused pedophile and Trump party-buddy Jeffrey Epstein an incredibly soft plea deal in 2008. Also a scandal: he was no friend of labor.

2. Scott Pruitt is former secretary of the EPA (which in the age of Trump does not stand for Environmental Protection Agency but for Environmental Protection Abolition). He accepted a $50 a night sweet condo deal from an oil and gas lobbyist for his pied-a-terre when he was occasionally in DC, and charged taxpayers $4.8 million for his security detail and made it a point always to fly first class on the taxpayer dime, amid other financial irregularities too numerous to mention. Oh, and the real scandal was that he destroyed the environment, including allowing the pesticide chlorpyrifos, even small amounts of which can damage babies' brains.

3. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is under scrutiny for a Montana land deal and fully 17 other possibly illegal activities while in office. Oh, and he also helped destroy the environment.

4. Nominee to be secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan, withdrew over a 2010 domestic abuse investigation launched by the FBI. But the real scandal was that Shanahan had been a career high executive of Boeing and so would have been running the US government agency that buys all those shiny weapons Boeing produces.

5. Not a cabinet secretary, but former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had to resign over repeated calls before Trump was sworn in to the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, which he lied about. But Flynn's security company also developed a harebrained scheme to kidnap Turkish religious figure Fethullah Gulen, who was granted asylum in the US in 1998, and render him back to Turkey. Flynn may also have been an agent of Turkish influence in Ankara's attempt to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

There is so much more, I just have to go to bed sometime and this subject of Trump administration scandals is fit for a multi-volume book set, not a little blog entry.

And we haven't even gotten into Trump himself.

(c) 2019 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

What are the journalistic lessons of the Jeffrey Epstein saga so far?

The first is undoubtedly the importance of local and regional newspapers; and conversely, how foolish we are to watch helplessly as they shrivel and die.

The hero of this unhappy saga, aside from the brave women who came forward with their stories of abuse and intimidation, is the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, who stuck with this story for two years, winning the confidence of the women and exposing the shocking sweetheart deal that Epstein's lawyers cut with then-federal prosecutor Alex Acosta as well as the attempt by the office of Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., to reduce Epstein's sex-offender status.

Brown's doggedness is even more impressive for its relative rarity. I've written here recently about the dangers our democracy faces from the hollowing out of almost every local newspaper in America. Not even Miami, a big, cosmopolitan, coastal city, is immune to this trend. Its parent company, McClatchy, laid off 425 people in 2008-09 alone. Everybody else took pay cuts. Since then, according to a 2018 Columbia Journalism Review profile, the paper has lost many senior reporters and editors not only to The New York Times and The Washington Post as has always been the case, but also to small startups, nonprofits, and the ever-lurking PR firms. Massive increases in web traffic will never make up for lost print advertising and paper subscriptions, and the result is the disappearance of the thing that makes the paper valuable in the first place: news.

Since the layoffs, the Herald has moved toward what it terms an "audience engagement" model, meaning it is trying to figure out what people want to read and then allow that agenda to drive its articles. That might explain why the (remaining) newsroom erupted in cheers when Brown's Epstein expose displaced a story about farts on its "most read" standings. Human-interest stories have always been part of the menu of any news publication, but the danger today is that clickbait strangles the news people need to know. CJR reports that a journalist named Lance Dixon left that paper last year after having been assigned to cover local government in North Miami and Coral Gables, which have little in common and are nowhere near one each other. Following his departure, his beat was dropped, and a single Herald reporter was assigned responsibility for 30 towns and cities. Imagine how much local news those residents are getting. And perhaps more significantly, imagine how much fun it must be to be a corrupt official in one of those places without a watchdog keeping an eye on the people's tax money.

According to the Pew Research Center, America's newspapers lost 47 percent of newsroom employees between 2008 and 2018 and now Bloomberg's Gerry Smith tells us that the level of attrition in the news business regardless of platform had its worst quarter since 2009 (with a booming economy and stock market, it must be added). While the loss of Mad magazine has inspired most of the tears among baby boomers recently, the loss of The Vindicator-Youngstown, Ohio's 150-year-old newspaper-ought to be the real wake-up call. It served a metro area of more than half a million people, making it the largest in the country to lose its only daily paper. And it's not like it's the owner's fault. They've lost money for 20 of the past 22 years and received no interest from potential buyers. The economics are just not there for most newspapers, and we are about to enter a golden age of corporate, personal, and political corruption as a result.

Ironically, on a day when the Times was playing catch-up on the Epstein story, it ran another inside the paper on the way the Chinese Communist Party has succeeded in expanding its own opportunities for corruption by getting rid of nettlesome news as well. The Chinese press is now said to be "almost entirely devoid of critical reporting" today, owing to the fact that "under President Xi Jinping, such journalists have all but disappeared, as the authorities have harassed and imprisoned dozens of reporters and as news outlets have cut back on in-depth reporting." What the Chinese accomplish through Communist repression, America achieves through capitalist indifference.

A second significant lesson of the Epstein story are its revelations about how wealthy and well-connected people use the power of their money and mutual associations to control their media coverage. Why did Graydon Carter, then editor of Vanity Fair, take the accusations of molestation out of a profile in 2002? Was it really, as he says, because it hadn't been nailed down? Why did Michael Wolff make an "agreement that all fact questions would go through Epstein and only Epstein," for a New York magazine piece? And why is the lawyer Alan Dershowitz still fighting for his "brilliant" and "irreverent" friend and client, going so far as to write a public letter to the Pulitzer Committee calling the Miami Herald series "fake news and shoddy journalism?" It does make one wonder if Epstein's true power lays in his ability to implicate or reward other rich or influential people.

But it also lays bare a common problem in reporting on wealthy, well-connected, and heavily lawyered people. They can threaten expensive lawsuits, engender damaging personal and political attacks, and undermine relationships with funders or advertisers. All this can make publishing unflattering stories simply not worth the trouble. After all, it didn't cost Vanity Fair or New York anything to not publish stories that Epstein was an alleged child rapist. But it could have cost them plenty if they had. (Just ask all the reporters who tried to chase down the Harvey Weinstein story for years before it finally surfaced.)

The fact that Brown had to break through so much bullshit and that we are only now learning just how many important people and institutions kowtowed to this monster is perhaps the most glaring (and revolting) evidence we've seen so far that, as Senator Elizabeth Warren puts it, "the system is rigged." And by allowing local newspapers to die of a combination of starvation and inattention, we invite even more egregious corruption in the future.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly implied that Epstein's lawyers struck a deal with the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. The district attorney's office attempted to reduce Epstein's sex-offender status in court but did not strike an agreement with his lawyers. A previous version of this article also incorrectly stated that Alexander Acosta was a judge when he agreed to a deal with Epstein's lawyers. He was the US attorney prosecuting the case.

Trump and Pelosi are birds of a feather when it comes to beating up on dissident women of color.

In 2007 this columnist declared that Nancy Pelosi is our enemy. She was the new Speaker of the House after Democrats emerged victorious in the 2006 elections. But they didn't oppose George W. Bush and the Republicans the way their voters wanted them to. Little has changed since that time. Democrats mobilize in order to defeat the Republicans but still end up with snake in the grass leadership like Pelosi.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar dissented and voted against the latest compromise with Republicans to fund Trump's immigration enforcement. Immigration is supposed to be a litmus test issue which sharply differentiates Democrats from Republicans. But that is not how the game is really played.

Pelosi trashed her members in an interview with the New York Times. "All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn't have any following. They're four people and that's how many votes they got." Like a true gangster Pelosi conducted the beatdown in public.

When Ocasio-Cortez truthfully stated that the remarks were disrespectful and showed a pattern of attacking women of color, Pelosi, the corporate media, Democratic party propagandists, and lap dog Congressional Black Congress (CBC) members all sprang into action. Gregory Meeks joined in ganging up on his colleagues and threatened Ocasio-Cortez with a primary challenge. Kamala Harris weighed in with a seal of approval for Miss Nancy.

The bottom feeders' attack was supported by none other than Donald Trump. "Cortez should treat Nancy Pelosi with respect. She should not be doing what she's doing. She is not a racist," said the man with very questionable credibility on the subject.

Trump knows that Pelosi is his friend. She is in no way part of an opposition to his administration. She is the rainmaker for the Democratic Party and the wielder of discipline against progressives. The two tasks are linked, of course. The very wealthy speaker brings in the cash from her equally wealthy friends. They give with the expectation that nothing even vaguely resembling progressive policy will ever see the light of day.

That is why she took the time to disparage the four members. If she doesn't, others might get the idea that they too can show a little bravery and the entire rotten enterprise would be at risk. Independent minded members are not what Pelosi wants to see.

Trump then helped Pelosi with a racist rant against the progressives. He used everything from love it or leave it, to go back to your shithole country, when only Omar is foreign born, and exhibited the full gamut of race baiting. Pelosi only issued a mild rebuke about xenophobia. Trump's remarks let Nancy Pelosi off the hook and protected the Democratic Party enforcer. The Democrats have their theatrics and Trump has his. Pelosi probably rose in his estimation when she dismissed her brown skinned caucus members.

Of course Trump's rant was vigorously attacked as it should have been. But the offended progressives didn't question Pelosi, the person responsible for the ugly episode. Anyone paying attention could see the fake outrage in action. Unnamed Democratic Party sources suddenly claimed to have evidence that the woman popularly known as AOC is a drag on the party and will doom Democrats to defeat.

Obama hatchet man David Axelrod took to twitter, a la Trump, to complain about the Democrats who have gotten out of line. "With his deliberate, racist outburst, @realDonaldTrump wants to raise the profile of his targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party. It's a cold, hard strategy."

Why shouldn't Democrats defend their members? What's wrong with people who are slightly progressive being emblematic of the party? The questions are rhetorical. All of the Democratic Party leadership are committed to shutting down anyone who strays from the fold. Their attacks are worse than Trump's. He is a known race baiting provocateur but the Democrats pretend to be the party of inclusion yet they always end up firmly in the right wing.

Anyone who is outraged by Trump's appeal to the racist hordes ought to extend their anger to Nancy Pelosi as well. She and Trump are birds of a feather. She hides her animous a bit better but not well enough that perceptive people can't see how the duopoly works.

In September 1993, Bill Clinton came to Congress to deliver an address on health care reform. But the wrong speech was in the teleprompter. This would have been an epic calamity for the current occupant of the executive mansion but President Clinton adroitly ad-libbed and remained on topic for some ten minutes while the problem was fixed.

I knew the operator who was running the prompter that night. I worked with him at the White House on several occasions during Clinton's first term-a good guy and a consummate professional. Nevertheless, he never lived down that momentary gaffe.

Still, I'm sure he would rather have that as the blot in his copybook than be the person with the responsibility of trying to harness mulish Donald Trump and make him read the copy that rolls before his eyes whenever the president makes a prepared speech.

For one, Trump's not very good at it-his delivery has all the flair of a company rep reading aloud Google's Terms of Service.

What's more, he suddenly tries to ad-lib or frequently mangles copy as he reads and tries to recover by coming up with a word or words that sound vaguely similar. He then plummets into a linguistic abyss of non-sequiturs that he sometimes blames on the machine malfunctioning.

That was the excuse after his Fourth of July extravaganza of self-love, during which he proclaimed, according to The Washington Post transcript, "Our army manned the [unclear], it [unclear] the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do." Trump's dog-ate-my-homework explanation: "I guess the rain knocked out the teleprompter, so it's not that, but I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. But the teleprompter did go out. And it was actually hard to look at anyway because there was rain all over it." Uh-huh.

Those supposed 18th century airports set off a wave of social media hilarity, including a #RevolutionaryWarAirportStories metadata tag that inspired such brilliance as "Dearest Martha, please find enclosed a tracking number for my lost luggage at Philadelphia. It shall arrive to Mount Vernon via carriage in 21-25 days. Also enclosed is a receipt for the cost of parking my horse at Dulles for the weekend."

You know and I know there were no airports in 1776-the carriage lobby actively fought against them and made large campaign contributions to John Adams -but just in case, this week I paid a visit to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. I could not find a shred of evidence corroborating Trump's airport claims.

In truth, I was there because I'm a confessed history wonk and have wanted to visit the new museum since it opened two years ago. With exhibits spread across two floors and 16,000 square feet, they've done an excellent job explaining the causes and events of the revolution, from the traditional familiar stories to current scholarship. There are enough period rifles and muskets in the joint, along with their requisite accessories, that it could be called the National Museum of the Powder Horn, but turn a corner and there's a pair of baby shoes made from a British soldier's redcoat or a replica of the deck of an American privateer's sloop.

And throughout, reminders that this is a nation founded in protest, that it was created in a crucible of Enlightenment fervor and a knowledge of civilizations past, that it was built on a bedrock of ideals that then, as now, has not always been lived up to in real life.

The museum has done a fair job of inclusion; there are mentions of women's role in the fight and the hypocrisy of those founders who decried their own enslavement by the crown but themselves kept others bound in servitude. Slaves pledged their loyalty to the side they hoped would set them free and for many that meant the British.

The same goes for the Native American population; much is made of the divide within six nations of the Iroquois confederacy; the Oneida and Tuscarora people splitting with their brethren and siding with the revolutionaries, while the others aligned with the British. The Oneida contributed millions to the museum's construction, so I was curious that there was no mention of General John Sullivan, who on George Washington's orders in 1779, brought death and destruction to the native villages of those who opposed the independent colonies. History needs to be as discomfiting as it is illuminating.

As the fighting ended, physician and patriot Benjamin Rush wrote, "The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed." Wandering the museum, ever aware of our current "leadership" and its actions, his words were a reminder that not only is the revolution unending, it remains highly uncertain these days whether our noble experiment won't collapse in tragedy and downfall.

A short walk away in Philadelphia, near Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, there's a sort of companion to the Museum of the American Revolution -the National Constitution Center. Opened in 2003, this, too, is a stirring tribute to the founders, in this case honoring the endurance of the United States Constitution. It's filled with documents and artifacts illustrating the constitutional crises that have wracked the republic since its beginning, some redounding to our credit, others to our dishonor and shame.

Currently, there's an exhibit called "Civil War and Reconstruction." Its displays, including a copy of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, a pike bought by abolitionist John Brown for the raid on Harpers Ferry and a Klansman's hood, also are reminders that at least when it comes to where we are today, we've sort of been here before. We know how extreme, how low we can go in our abuse of others and until recently had hoped it would never happen again.

So much for hope. For anyone who cares about the country, its past, present and future, the way that Donald Trump bulldozes our constitution, except when it suits his purposes, his refusal to accept the balance of powers-interpreting Article II to mean he can do whatever he wants -is a despicable abuse of democracy and basic human decency.

The week has seen planned ICE raids, more evidence of horrific inhumane conditions in immigrant detention centers and the playing out of Trump's unconstitutional ploy to jam a citizenship question into the 2020 census, an attempt that didn't succeed but not for lack of trying-and accompanied, of course, by a Trumpian refusal to admit failure.

He launches a racist tweet attack on members of Congress who come from immigrant families and tells them to go back where they came from. The hosts of Fox & Friends make jokes about them. These immigrants, the people Abraham Lincoln described as "the electric cord" of the Declaration of Independence, who no matter their nation of origin, link "the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."

And Trump continues to block all attempts to get the bottom of his skullduggery while favoring the wealthy, including himself and his family, at the expense of country.

"There never was a democracy yet that did not end in suicide," John Adams warned. Watching this president and his enablers mangle the Constitution far worse than he mangles the English language is an exhausting and soul-wrenching experience.

Walking through the Museum of the American Revolution and the National Constitution Center should be a celebration of liberty, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was more like a eulogy. November 2020 can't come soon enough.