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It's not about Trump actually having sex with 16 or 17 year olds, it's about spreading the message of guilt by association. He and Epstein were best buds. Epstein arranged underage sex slaves for his rich friends and contacts. Lurid claims of "I was raped by both of them when I was thirteen" just help that along. Nobody (except the dwindling number of people who do care about distinctions like "underage means under 18, not 12 years old" and "did this really happen?") cares if it's true or not, it's just convenient mud to throw.
He's a racist. He's a transphobe. He's a sexist. He's a rapist. He's a paedophile. He's a Nazi. He's a convicted felon (36 FELONIES!!!)
"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction. Conversely, "somehow missed all the red flags about Epstein being a pedophile despite palling around with him" would be pretty damning for Trump's intelligence even if it's ethically exculpatory. So if you establish a sufficient degree of regular association between the two that it has to be one of the two, you have a pretty tight case for Trump either being complicit, or incredibly dumb. Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?
No, that is not how being an accessory works in the slightest.
Not in the legal sense, but absolutely in the reputational sense.
Only if you accept the basic guilt-by-contagion premise of the left side of the Culture War.
Are you really saying that there is no such thing as a moral duty to report or otherwise act upon knowledge of evil deeds committed by others? If you're a passive witness to a murder or rape, and could identify the culprit, it's not at all immoral of you to move on with your life and keep the secret? Really?
When Epstein first got arrested, the investigator reached out broadly to Epstein's social caste for information. Purportedly, the only person to take the call and speak with him was Trump.
My google-fu is failing to find a cite for that; the current doc dump is obviously clogging the search results. But pretend for a second that it's true. In that hypothetical, would you say that such an action would make Trump uniquely righteous?
There's also the line from Trump saying Epstein likes women "on the younger side". It's hard to be sure without hearing the tone, but that seems like a polite, faux-friendly knifing, similar to the comments people like Seth McFarland made about Weinstein before his behavior came fully to light.
Do you think McFarland is more or less "guilty by association" than other celebrities who knew about Weinstein but kept silent?
This is an interesting point. I would hesitate to say "uniquely righteous" with no qualifications, insofar as providing information about evil deeds you were privy to if and when investigators reach out is considerably less virtuous than proactively volunteering it. If he did Know Things, then sitting on the information for that long isn't great. But it certainly casts Trump in a better light than not speaking out at all.
I doubt we'll ever get precise confirmation either way. My guess was that it was less privy to knowledge and more "broken stair" type rumors, and that the decision to take the call was heavily motivated by personal dislike.
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