To people who didn’t vote for Trump, his sweaty panic over the Epstein files is perplexing.
⭐️The president’s enthusiasm for sexual violence is no secret.
It’s been nine years since the release of the “Access Hollywood” video, in which he bragged about how he liked to “grab them by” the genitals.
In 2023 and 2024, two civil juries found that journalist E. Jean Carroll told the truth when she said Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s.
The president has also made it a habit to reward men facing credible accusations of sexual abuse,
-- such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
-- with plum jobs.
⭐️But Trump’s most loyal voters, the MAGA base,
have developed elaborate mythologies to deny the truth about the president.
👉 In their imaginations, he’s not a pathetic genital-grabbing predator but a knightly hero,
sent by God to wage war on pedophiles and rapists.
Not the real ones, of course, who Trump is more likely to defend;
⚠️ MAGA prefers to fear imaginary pedophiles and rapists.
They project their own sins onto innocent people
— often LGBTQ+ people or Democratic figures
— and avoid thinking too hard about their lavish support for a man whose vile predilections haven’t been hidden.
There’s many variations of these bizarre fantasy.
At the most extreme end is #QAnon, an elaborate conspiracy theory that holds that Democrats and liberal Hollywood stars are part of a secret cult of child-killing pedophiles,
-- and that Trump has a secret plan to destroy them all.
Equally wrong, but slightly easier for GOP leaders and influencers to embrace, is the “#groomer” myth that LGBTQ+ people are a sexual threat to children that can only be contained by pushing queer people out of public spaces and employment.
In recent years, the MAGA base has become attached to the theory that the #Epstein files contain the evidence of a vast, Democratic pedophile ring,
and that Trump can release the documents and all their enemies will go to prison.
🔥Trump and his allies encouraged that fantasy during the 2024 election,
but now that he’s in office, it’s clearly dawning on him that those files might blow apart the already dwindling hopes among the MAGA base that Trump is a hero instead of a villain.
https://www.salon.com/2025/12/29/in-2025-epstein-showed-maga-who-they-really-are/
