Trump and the Pedo Files

In October 2014, comedian Hannibal Burress did a standup set that included a bit about Bill Cosby. He felt that Cosby’s alleged history of raping women pushed him out of eligibility for scolding young Black men. If your first thoughts on seeing the name Cosby today are similarly negative, you owe that perspective at least in part to Burress, whose rant hammered a peg into the news cycle that outlets could, and did, hang a lot of re-reporting on.

At the time, my first thought was, “I wonder if Hannibal reads Gawker.” Before it was murdered by noted fascist Peter Thiel, 10 months before Burress’ standup set, Gawker’s Tom Scocca published a blog titled, “Who Wants to Remember Bill Cosby’s Multiple Sex-Assault Accusations?”, which itself engendered at least a trendlet of outrage from the sorts of younger writers legacy media pretend not to read. The pretext for Scocca’s February post was a letter from Dylan Farrow outlining her abuse at the hands of Woody Allen, which became journalism’s Monomania of the Day when that sort of thing still applied to someone other than Donald Trump. What struck Scocca about the Twitter-take efflorescence over the Farrow letter was that “there was not much really new about it. … Vanity Fair had covered the case, in grim detail, more than two decades ago.” 

What Scocca was (rightly) hoping to capitalize on was a tendency many of us have to register outrage about something horrible not so much when it’s there as when it’s still there. Consciously or not, we triage information all the time, seizing on things directly applicable to our interests and letting the abstracted and not-immediate information float on by. Even if we are not naive and would never presume that — somewhere — the forces of good are working to remediate whatever ill we consumed and then memory-voided the day before, it’s easy to fall prey to a psychological defense mechanism and assume that most of these crimes, misfortunes or injustices we just learned about are — somewhere — just kinda-sorta somehow being taken care of. They were in the newspaper, after all, and the fact that they’re in them again months or years later signals a disconnect in the world.

One thing that has been written in every legacy paper, glossy magazine, scurrilous blog and on the walls of every warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse is that Donald Trump was a decades-long party buddy with Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most famous pedophile, whom future Trump lawyer and fellow Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz arranged an immunity deal from future Trump Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. Epstein not only considered himself Trump’s “closest friend,” but on many occasions when they were Florida neighbors, Jeff brought the girls over to Mar-a-Lago. 

The reason all this comes to mind again suddenly is that, after suggesting that she had the “Epstein client list” on her desk as well as access to thousands of videos of acts of pedophilia, Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo stating that there was no client list at all. Worse, the Department Of Justice also released “raw” footage of the cell where Epstein committed suicide that, amongst other things, had three minutes cut from it. To borrow a headline from Mother Jones’s excellent Anna Merlan, one volte face and one clumsily stupid — albeit probably innocuous — lie are enough to make this “Epstein forever.”

As Merlan and others have pointed out, Trump is here because he put himself here. By 2017, Trump’s tweets appeared to be tenuously flirting with the same subject matter as the QAnon conspiracy — a baseless backformation from antisemitic blood libel and Chan-culture references that claims a cabal of Democratic lawmakers is kidnapping and sexually abusing children both for love of the game and to harvest and ingest a chemical produced by their victims’ brains. QAnon claims that Trump has been secretly working all this time to bring about The Storm, a mass exposure and lynching of these Democratic malefactors.

By 2019, Trump’s Twitter flirting with QAnon had hit cruising speed, complete with campaign ads featuring Q banners waving in the foreground of Trump rallies. By the 2020 election, Trump’s account had promoted more than 200 QAnon-related posts. By Inauguration Day 2025, The Storm was ready to resume gathering. But in the words of another famous White House adulterer, Trump foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger and ended up inside. His most internet-poisoned, broken-brained followers were promised a reckoning with elite impunity; what they got was their elite walking away just seconds from the culmination of their most fervid fantasies, and what they have now is unalloyed moral outrage being hushed by the world’s most unemployable unsubtle mouthpieces.

It would be entirely unsurprising if Trumpworld manages to move on from the Epstein issue. It is a world already constructed out of compensatory fantasies existentially hostile to — if not running from — observable reality. QAnon itself might as well have been invented as a coping mechanism: A sexual cretin and subsequently adjudicated rapist with 20-plus claims of sexual assault against him — with a lifelong sex offender in his advisory orbit and running as the candidate of a party whose longest-serving Speaker of the House was a pedophile — could only be a heroic solution to the world’s ills if he were secretly saving us all from a conspiracy ultimately responsible for all of them. In this mental framework, the worse Trump is as a person, the better he is at working undercover.

It’s not even clear how much that cover is necessary. The imagination requires distressingly little labor to conjure a vision of Trump’s most ardent supporters dismissing incontrovertible proof of child sexual abuse. Raping underage girls in this world is just down the street from grabbing women by the pussy: It’s something you get to do when you’re rich and famous, whether you’re a billionaire or David Bowie or Jimmy Page. Age becomes just an expression of exclusivity. Like drinking 200-year-old wine, it’s not about the flavor but the number, and the number’s most important meaning lies in how few people get to do it. If someone had told Donald Trump years ago that the wealthiest and most exclusive figures in the world all fuck luxury sedans, we’d now be talking about the time someone caught him with his dick in a Lincoln Town Car.

On the other hand, the easy spread of QAnon paranoia through the ranks of Trump supporters didn’t come from nowhere. People develop specific fears about things they know, and when “every conservative accusation is a confession,” that means there are things to confess to. Specifically, Trump voters have watched as legions of pedophiles were unmasked in the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and — repeatedly — the Republican Party. Moreover, these are people who have incorporated into their lives the sort of patriarchal-authoritarian worldview and social structures that create the conditions in which pedophiles flourish and are accorded the power to be judged only by themselves. This is a sin Trump supporters know. There’s a heartbreaking yearning for catharsis behind taking a cartoonishly outsize avatar of the abuse you know and making an avenging angel of him.

Whatever happens, this is a problem for the Trump administration, both for its subject matter and for its stubborn persistence. Why Jeffrey Epstein considered himself Donald Trump’s best friend for a decade is a question. Why Trump celebrated Epstein for being surrounded by young girls is a question, as is why he bragged about getting to walk in on naked beauty pageant contestants. How Epstein died is a question. Before stupidly supplying the least satisfying answers, the Trump administration stupidly led us to ask all those questions again. Countless people who would never support Donald Trump heard the Epstein story and shrugged, waiting for it to go somewhere. All Trump and Pam Bondi did was make them ask why it was back and didn’t have an ending yet.

Journalism plays the “whatever happened to …?” game often, and while it’s always successful at filling column inches and airtime, its ability to effect change is hard to predict. If the Epstein story tells us anything, it should be that “whatever happened to …?” deserves to be less an SEO-friendly headline phrasing and something more like an assignment editor. Every Trump lie is a lie told before; every Trump excuse is an excuse deployed before; every hasty Trump accusation against a critical voice or outlet is one shaped just like one you’ve heard before. The Democrats and media could have been ringing the Epstein bell daily for the past six years, and every day they could be opening the Internet Archive to the front page of the New York Times on this day in 2017, 2018, 2019 or 2020, surveying the fertile landscape of familiar lies and forgotten crimes and asking where they are now and why they sound so familiar.