The year of the Old Boys

This was the year we saw exactly how the Old Boys dismiss high-stakes favor exchanges as silly male play. The nexus these Old Boys form isn’t just class- or age- or power-based, and the alliances being revealed don’t reduce to simple profit seeking. Profit alone does not explain why Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, helped Epstein reach a nonprosecution agreement structured in a way that locked the victims out. He is now Trump’s labor secretary; an outcome like that one no doubt figured into his calculus. Profit alone doesn’t explain why Michael Cohen—aspiring Old Boy—claimed he’d made hush money payments to Stormy Daniels out of the goodness of his heart, or why the publisher of the National Enquirer paid Trump’s former doorman $30,000 in 2015 for the rights to a story that Trump fathered a child with an employee—only to never use it. It wasn’t simply profit that inspired Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to respond to the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico by awarding a $300 million contract to a two-person company from his hometown. It’s profit-plus. It’s what pushed Chris Christie into Bridgegate. It’s the timeworn social code of the Old Boys’ network, in part. But it’s also the thrill of feeding appetites that can’t actually be satisfied, of gloating, of winning the game.

And the dangerous thing is that they never feel like they’ve won. Hence their ill-temper, and their astonished outrage when asked to account for their actions. The Old Boy is in a double bind of his own devising. His loyalty to his own greed means he can never, by definition, be satiated. If you notice Old Boys getting more abusive, or flailing more desperately, this is why: The philosophical endpoint of a junkie’s increasing resistance is panic that satisfaction will never come. All the money and power in the world won’t get the Old Boy what he wants because what he wants isn’t a thing but the dopamine rush of victory (and nothing wears off more quickly). What he wants isn’t anything in particular; it’s just more.