The Dogs That Haven't Barked

The Trump administration is a regime of restoring male power. That includes being a pedophile protection racket covering for men who sexually abuse girls.

Few issues have inflamed the MAGA right and the Qanon conspiracy theorists quite as intensely as the theory that there is a vast and powerful cabal of politicians and business leaders who traffic children for systematic sexual abuse and enjoy the protection of the police, prosecutors, the media, and the Deep State. For the entirety of Donald Trump’s first presidency, outlandish claims circulated around the fringe right: That children were being sold in Wayfair armoires; that the Clintons were getting their gnarled hands on trafficked children in the basement of a DC pizza parlor. None of this was true, let alone remotely plausible. But it dovetailed with the paranoia that got Trump elected in the first place: That American politicians were not just woefully corrupt but almost unimaginably evil, and it would take a fearless outsider to expose and vanquish them.

As more emails and documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate are released to the public, the “powerful cabal of child sex abusers” part of the theory — a conspiracy I frankly thought was insane — is looking more plausible by the day. It just didn’t play out like it would on a television show. There were no armoires or pizza shop basements. There were instead private planes, wealthy men, underage girls, and a culture of male power and impunity that created a sense not just of consequence-free abuse, but a kind of naughty normalcy.

And now there actually is a vast effort by elected officials and people at the highest levels of government — the FBI, the DOJ, Congress, the Oval Office — to cover up the web of influential men woven around serial child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The coverup effort is happening right out in the open. And while some MAGA supporters do still seem to want to know what in the heck happened with Epstein, many decided to put the issue to bed the second it seemed Trump might be implicated. This is indeed the height of hypocrisy, and an important insight into the grotesque moral deformities endemic among those who strive to keep Trump in power. It’s also a continuation on a theme: This is an administration that has built its identity on white male power unfettered by “political correctness” or basic decency, unimpeded by the law or old norms, and unchallenged by the women or racial minorities who were increasingly competing with white men for power.

Most of us probably believed that child sex abuse — engaging in or covering for — was a red line for just about everyone. But why should Trump, whose appeal is that he doesn’t play by any rules, have to abide by this one?

The Epstein letters and emails show men (and some women) who understand that what they were doing, and what Epstein was facilitating, was wrong and could get them in trouble. But they also had a kind of cheeky in-group tone, like, “well aren’t we just bad little boys.” It was a culture of permission: There was a sense that they were all doing it, so sure it was wrong, but also kind of ok — because they were all doing it.

The latest Epstein emails are the most damning yet. Epstein writes to Ghislaine Maxwell, “I want you to realize the only dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him.” In another email, he tells journalist Michael Wolff that of course Trump “knew about the girls he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

What Trump asked Ghislaine to stop is unclear. “Of course he knew about the girls” seems… clearer.

Republicans in Congress, led by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, have fought mightily — even shutting down the government and refusing to seat a duly elected Democratic member of Congress — to prevent a vote that would require the FBI and DOJ to release a separate trove of Epstein documents. A small handful of Republican members of Congress, most of them women, have joined with Democrats to demand the release of the Epstein documents, and now that the government has been re-opened, the Trump administration is lobbying them to change their minds. Administration officials pulled Rep. Lauren Boebert into a meeting in the Situation Room — a space usually reserved for important national security discussions — reportedly to discourage her from pushing for the document release. Trump has also been calling Rep. Nancy Mace. In the meantime, the Trump administration had Ghislaine Maxwell transferred to a minimum-security prison where she is receiving “concierge-style” service, including puppy play time. She reportedly plans to ask Trump to commute her sentence.

Maxwell also told deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, in an interview that both of them understood was to clear the president of wrongdoing, that as far as she knew, Trump had never done anything untoward. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said. “The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

The latest Epstein emails cast serious doubt on that claim.

I’m not particularly interested in wild speculation here. Nothing in these emails proves that Trump had sex with underage girls (a side note, but can we please stop saying “underage women”? There’s no such thing). It is entirely plausible that Trump knew about Epstein’s crimes but didn’t commit any of his own. It is entirely plausible that there are national security concerns at play here (I am finding the Epstein-is-an-intelligence-source theory increasingly persuasive, but who knows). It is extremely weird that the administration is both claiming these emails are a “hoax” while also claiming that actually, they exonerate the president, while the president is giving extra-special treatment to Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator and lobbying his loyalists to block the release of any more documents. And there is something that turns my stomach about seeing a bunch of Democratic congressmen grandstanding about Epstein not because they care all that much about the sexual abuse of girls, but because they realize it’s a potentially effective political cudgel. Few people in this entire hideous display strike me as particularly principled or admirable.

And yet it has still been shocking and appalling to see how many conservatives, most of them men, wrapping Trump and by extension Epstein in a protective shield. “Trafficking underage girls for sex” should be the kind of principle that transcends politics, but here we are seeing that the rule on the right is more like “trafficking underage girls for sex is bad if Democrats do it” (and before anyone yells about the Clintons, I don’t see any collective effort on behalf of the Democratic Party to prevent the Epstein documents being released in order to protect Bill Clinton or any other Democrat, and if Clinton was involved then he deserves to be exposed and held accountable).

Powerful men protecting other powerful men is certainly a bipartisan exercise, and Epstein had friends on both sides of the aisle. But at this moment, only one side is doing everything it can to keep Epstein’s secrets hidden and to protect whoever else may have been involved in his crimes. I actually don’t think this would fly in today’s Democratic Party, which is heavily female and at least marginally feminist. Today’s Republican Party, though, is avowedly misogynist; it is a party that has built itself into a temple of white male grievance, and that promises not just to help white men get good jobs back, but to get impunity back — the freedom to behave as abhorrently as they wish, to treat women however they wish, to take the jobs that women and people of color rightfully earned simply because there is a presumption of white male deservedness. Some of the highest-ranking members of the Trump administration not only attend churches where the pastors say women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and must submit to male authority, but share videos making those same arguments. The young people staffing Republican politicians and organizing young conservative groups are a notoriously noxious bunch, with racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism simply part of the waters they’re all swimming in. Speaker Mike Johnson is a religious fundamentalist who worked to keep gay sex criminal, opposes no-fault divorce, and is himself in a “covenant marriage,” which Moira Donegan at the Guardian aptly describes as “a religious arrangement that formalizes men’s superiority and constricts women’s freedom to leave, designed for conservative straight couples who feel that no-fault divorce and gay marriage rights somehow degrade their own unions.” Men who see women as subservient, who believe that men have ultimate authority, and who intentionally set up systems of total male power and impunity — of course these are men who will cover for sexual predators. Of course some of these men are sexual predators.

You simply cannot create a culture or a party of wholesale male entitlement and not wind up with women and girls paying the price — being the ones who bodies, livelihoods, and lives those men feel entitled to. This is a MAGA-cult problem for sure, and the clearest test yet of whether there are any limits to what Trump can do and still maintain the support of his base. But it’s also a problem of the conservative He-Man Woman-Hater ideology this administration has embraced. Trump is a notorious moral reprobate, accused of sexually harassing and assaulting double-digit numbers of women, and using his current position to pardon violent criminals, do favors for “friends” he expects to repay him many times over, and enrich himself and his family. It is no surprise that his leadership has made a party that once boasted about their superior morality and “draining the swamp” into a pedophile protection racket.

Trump, Epstein wrote, was the only dog that hadn’t yet barked. Now he’s the leader of a whole cowed and silent pack.

xx Jill