President Donald Trump is desperately trying to divert attention away from his decision to cover up the Epstein files. Good luck. Whatever his role in the Epstein child sex trafficking universe, the cover-up is a separate issue, as the Catholic bishops could tell him. The fundamental problem is this country doesn’t like institutions—whether government, church, university, school, or sport—that cover up child sex abuse.
The biggest problem for Trump here is that he is either a possible defendant for child rape, aiding and abetting or conspiracy to abuse and traffic underage girls or, at the very least, a witness of circumstantial evidence. The men who cavorted with Epstein were scions of society from Bill Gates to Prince Andrew to Victoria’s Secret’s Leslie Wexner and Apollo Global Management’s Leon Black. There were hundreds of victims, and Epstein entertained the male elite in New York City and his private island. Only a woman, his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, has been prosecuted and convicted. That means the masters of the universe likely have been sweating out the slow walk to suppression and Trump’s fumbling now. No doubt some have had some frank or veiled conversations with the Trump administration if not the president himself.
For the populist MAGA folks to watch the man they believed would slay the dragon of the “deep state” deep-six the files of a global child sex abuse ring has to be devastating. It’s like the Roman Catholic faithful learning the Pope was involved in covering up clergy sex abuse—as has every Pope to date including Pope Leo.
Bringing institutions to account—whether the Church or the federal government—requires disclosure, prosecutions, and lawsuits. It also requires changes in the law from eliminating the statutes of limitation to criminalizing not just the act of abuse but the trafficking and grooming as well. The MAGA instinct to find justice for these victims is an American one, and there is a robust movement in the United States to reveal and bring to account all those who have let children suffer. Without the government’s records, it is hard to fully know what to change to make sure this never happens again.
Secret files and shielding the responsible hamper the best efforts to ensure children aren’t abused in the future.