Poor Donald Trump. Every morning at 10 a.m., he hits a candy-red button on his Craftmatic IV Adjustable Bed (“The Executive”) and feels it lever him up onto his feet, ready for another day of crimes. Then the TV — mother, lover, betrayer — blurts the name Jeffrey Epstein and ruins it all. The words send a cold trickle down his back and into the warm bed-sweat watershed. It’s a trauma response, and he will never make the connection.

Despite his execrations, Trump loves the media only a little less than he loves himself and money, so it must be comforting that the media seems as confused as he is about America’s newfound interest in his best friendship with the world’s most famous pedophile. The media is holding onto the Epstein story with the white-knuckled surprise you would get from someone who had never seen a gun before and dry-fired a 60-chamber revolver 59 times before feeling it go off on the last one. The only thing more terrifying than it suddenly working is not knowing why. 

In a pinch, though, this might do: Unless you’re the sort of neo-Nazi Twitter power user who winds up getting retweeted by Elon Musk a lot, you can’t actually “both sides” raping children. Of all the crimes Trump is accused of committing, this is the only one with a constituency that nobody — not even the media — will bend over backward to perform empathy for. 

This isn’t to say the story hasn’t had Trump’s help. For someone whose wormed brain produces thoughts as coherent as a radio dial being cranked like a drunk taking foosball power shots, he has remained uncannily focused on an issue this damaging. His need to return to and embroider it — despite any additional words on the matter coming at his expense — suggest something like whatever would pass for a guilty conscience for someone without one.

He tried blaming everything on Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Maybe Obama fabricated this story to keep Trump from being elected, then forgot to use it. Or Biden did it to keep Trump from being reelected, and also forgot to use it. Their fingerprints were allegedly all over the crime that didn’t happen and the scene that didn’t exist. Back to the drawing board, which apparently included “send a deputy attorney general to give immunity to Epstein’s convicted procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, who has never admitted wrongdoing or expressed remorse and has nothing to lose and everything to gain from lying.” Say what you will about the fictional FBI, but they didn’t even offer a deal that nice to Trump’s main man, the late great Hannibal Lecter — and that was when Buffalo Bill was still at large and killing. They definitely never flirted with a full pardon.

Making matters worse, Trump claimed his friendship with Epstein ended when the latter “stole” Virginia Giuffre from him. A quick look at the timeline reveals that they remained friends for years after this supposed breach; and in any case, his conceptualization of Epstein’s most famous alleged victim as a stolen commodity falls on the scale somewhere between witless phrasing and Freudian slip. “I stopped hanging out with the guy who treated little girls like property when he took my little girl property from me” is just the underlying accusation rephrased as exculpation.

Now, CBS News is running minute-by-minute analyses of the prison footage from the night Epstein killed himself in his cell, which directly contradicts the conclusions presented by former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr. The latter’s father, it should be noted, was headmaster at the elite $64,000/year Dalton School when it hired Epstein to teach math, despite his not having a degree. It’s probably nothing!

Trump’s poll numbers on the Epstein issue are now underwater, with half of Americans thinking the Epstein files implicate Trump and a majority of his supporters believing the truth is being hidden by the government. People who’ve bent over backward to confabulate a secret mission for Trump to take down elite government-running pedophiles are uncomfortably close to recognizing that he’s an uncannily perfect avatar of their enemies. It’s his most precarious position since the Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” tape. Without an audience determined to view each new detail as confirmation of a conspiracy proving the opposite of what they hear every day, what Trump says or does has started to sound dangerously like itself. In June, cryptically winking about shared secrets with the world’s most famous pedophile and turning your signature into a sketch of pubic hair might have been deep cover, or at least the sort of thing you get to do when you’re famous; in August it just sounds like the part of the true crime documentary when they stop, roll back the timeline and the narrator says, “Of course, there were signs,” and you stop a moment to think whether the kids can hear you before shouting back at the TV, “No shit.”

You can see the bewilderment at this reversal of interests on social media, with journalists expressing astonishment at the sudden desire for follow-up stories on things reported during Trump’s first term. Inexplicably, things matter now as much as they always should have, and the only question is which aspect of the story will be renewed tomorrow. Could it be his telling Howard Stern he can no longer date girls younger than his underage daughter? Or his bragging about walking in and ogling nude underage participants in his beauty pageant? Or his first wife accusing him of rape? Or the woman who accused him of raping her when she was 13?

No one could possibly be more bewildered than Trump himself. He tried to overthrow the government, issued a blanket pardon to his insurrectionists (including multiple sex offenders), and the media books his co-conspirators as talking heads without one blush. His casino couldn’t have seemed more mobbed up if it had been called “A Legitimate Italian Businessmen’s Gaming Club,” and it’s never mattered. He invented a fake executive department, and everyone pretended it was real. His original fortune came from his father conducting $500 million in tax fraud, and nobody even mentions it anymore. So why would this, of all things, be the thing that finally grabs everyone’s attention and refuses to let go?

The only explanation left devoid of ideology or conspiracy is that Trump is finally getting undivided attention for a crime that has no legitimate other side, no sympathetic exponents who are owed the performance of sympathy either individually or institutionally. 

Mention tax fraud, and legacy media can instantly conceive of a constituency that believes any tax on inherited assets is fundamentally wrong and find a guest columnist to say so. There is an entire tech aristocracy Dunning-and-Krugering its way into the discourse, insisting that the Department of Government Efficiency is not only effective but necessary and granted the presumption of expertise and relevance. A press corps that will never once ask if a Black man dealt drugs because he had no other effective economic choices will nevertheless labor to envision and humanize the economic anxiety and politically existential dread of a bunch of car dealers and off-duty law enforcement trampling police to get at the vice president and hang him. Voters who never cast a ballot for total ethnic cleansing will have a eugenic panic narratively foisted on them so Trump’s new American SS can represent their soothing salvation.

No one will try to make room in the discourse for the concerns of those who want to rape children. At best, the counterclaim is always that it didn’t happen, the child is lying, the charges are a conspiracy; it’s never that pedophilia has some inherent unexplored value, and anyone who would say so doesn’t get a seat on the panel. The same “won’t someone think of the children” refrain that’s used to end debate on the need to criminalize classified ads, put age restrictions on the internet and keep trans athletes out of sports is regnant and implacable here.

Until now, Trump’s only two superpowers have been making up a story that blames someone else, then, when all other counterfactuals have been disproved, dismissing the story with a variation on, “I did it, I can do it, it’s legal, you can’t stop me, and, anyway, what I did was good, actually.” That the first trick was failing for years is what brought us here, to a place where the second trick can never be anything more than what it always was: an admission of guilt. Only now the subject is so vile that even a media browbeaten, sued and intimidated into compliance can confidently refuse consideration for the other side. 

Either Donald Trump didn’t rape children or he did, and there is no law the captive Republican Supreme Court can ignore or rewrite to make the latter okay. There is no undiscovered diner constituency of child rapists to permit the old amoral analysis, “Sure, it’s evil, but it’s effective.” Donald Trump is either the unluckiest guy in the world on this single subject, or he’s even more of a felon than he already was. If that’s the case, he should neither be president nor free. The only other side to this story takes place behind bars.

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