Photo: Allison Robbert/AFP/Getty Images
Conservatives used to care about Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes, at least in public. Consider Kash Patel, who promoted Epstein conspiracies long before Donald Trump made him FBI director. Epstein had become a proxy for the “deep state” to Patel and others, who thought his sordid life and strange death could implicate prominent Democrats, including Bill Clinton. Patel had argued last November that the U.S. government should release any files it held on Epstein, and that Trump could “expose the documents that these folks have written for decades, allowing [their] corrupt activities.” Yet revelation is not at hand. The Justice Department announced this month that Epstein was not murdered, that he did not keep a “client list,” and that there was no evidence he had ever blackmailed powerful men. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had wished Epstein a lewd 50th birthday. “May every day be another wonderful secret,” the president allegedly wrote in 2003.
Trump denied the report and is suing the paper, which has mollified most of his supporters. “We’re so back,” Jack Posobiec told Steve Bannon. “Everyone is firing on all cylinders. The MAGA movement is completely united behind this fight.” Though Elon Musk has fallen out with Trump, and even accused him of being named in the Epstein files, the billionaire defended him after the Journal published its report last week. “It really doesn’t sound like something Trump would say,” he posted. Laura Loomer said the Journal had “falsely accused” Trump, and in doing so, “reunited” MAGA around the president.
No one can say with certainty that Trump will brush this one off, but history is on the president’s side. The Access Hollywood tape didn’t stop him from winning in 2016 and the E. Jean Carroll case did not stop him from winning in 2024. His ties to Epstein, a convicted sex offender, have been public for years. Everyone knows that Trump is a misogynist, and either his base doesn’t care, or likes it. The president is an aspirational figure precisely because of his chauvinism, which is part of his brand as a great business mind. Like any other member of his class, the thinking goes, he is entitled to people who are beneath him: their commerce, their labor, their bodies. If there is ever proof that Epstein provided Trump with young women or girls, the base is primed to dismiss it, or glorify it. To them, girls and young women are one more commodity that he has the right to collect. Sexual abuse is more like property damage.
That conviction did not originate with Trump and it is not unique to the GOP, though conservatives are becoming its most prominent avatars. If hierarchy is the natural order of the universe, as authoritarians believe, no one has a right to their own body. There are rules, expectations, and obligations, all determined by whoever sits above you in the chain. Should the right refashion the world in its image, women will have few liberties, and children will have fewer still. That’s the point of the whole endeavor. When people are objects, it’s much easier to use them up and discard them at will. Sex, then, is a thing someone takes, not an act people share. Some on the right are quite open about this, and have been for a long time. The influential far-right theologian Douglas Wilson has written that when a man has sex with a woman, he “penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants” while his partner “receives, surrenders, accepts.” In Wilson’s view, that’s why “men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the ‘soon-to-be-made’ willing heroine.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Wilson also welcomed a convicted pedophile back into his congregation and even presided over his marriage to a young woman.
I don’t believe that Wilson or his ilk are closet pedophiles, or that they approve of pedophilia and rape in a literal sense. But we can and ought to draw conclusions from their rhetoric. If women want to be “ravished” by a conquering male, how can anyone distinguish marital rape from consensual sex? And if a pedophile can be rehabilitated by marrying a woman, how dangerous is he, really? Rape and pedophilia no longer look so aberrant – if, of course, they ever did. As Phoebe Maltz-Bovy observed in her newsletter, “it was not quite pedophilia-coded” in the 1990s and early 2000s “to declare barely-pubescent girls the world’s most beautiful women,” a trend heralded by some as the manifestation of harmless male desire. “Only a liberal hag of 21-plus would mind hearing that age 15-20 is, as John Derbyshire argued in 2005, the peak female form,” Maltz-Bovy added, wryly.
Even Roy Moore had his defenders. The devout Moore was running for Senate in Alabama in 2017 when the Washington Post reported that he had sexually pursued girls as young as 14. Though some Republicans asked him to step aside, others told voters to support him anyway. Tully Borland, a philosophy professor at Ouachita Baptist University, argued that dating teenage girls “is not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family” and is preferable to supporting a right to abortion. “What’s the big deal about a 32-year-old man courting a 14-year-old girl?” asked UT-Arlington professor Keith Burgess-Jackson in a piece for his personal blog. After all, his grandfather did it: “My maternal grandmother was 15 years old when she married and 16 years old when she conceived her first child. Her husband was 41 and 42,” he added. Moore lost, but I’m not convinced we’d see the same outcome today.
More recently, some pronatalists have recommended “early” or “young” marriage as a cure for a rumored American fertility crisis. That is not necessarily an argument for pedophilia, but context does not always improve it either. In the absence of unfettered access to abortion and contraception and childcare, teen girls and young women are especially vulnerable to predatory older men. As Boland put it years ago, a young wife is capable of bearing more children, and her husband “needs to be well-established and able to support the family,” which means he will be older. A 2021 study by the advocacy group Unchained at Last discovered 60,000 marriages between minors and adults. Only 12 states banned child marriage as of 2024 and Republicans have often resisted efforts to end the practice. One New Hampshire lawmaker argued that a ban could raise abortion rates by discouraging youth “of ripe, fertile age” from getting married. Girls owe sex, and babies, too.
The Epstein story could peel some conspiracists away from MAGA world, where most aren’t mourning Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein survivor who took her own life this year. The real crime, to them, is misallocation: that the wrong men had access to girls and young women. Trump himself promoted that idea in 2019, when he reposted a video that blamed the Clintons for Epstein’s death. As Trump and his defenders would have it, liberals are the ones with something to hide. This is partly correct – sexual predation is a bipartisan activity – but the right-wing is committed to a world where abuse will only flourish. If there’s no check on the wealth and power of those at the top, they are free to hurt whoever they want. Moreover, sexual gratification is one more reason to pull yourself up the ladder. If a young man is willing to hustle and grind, he can buy women like cars. The Christian right puts a theological gloss on the phenomenon, but the promise is largely the same. You can be the lord of your very own fiefdom. Maybe you’ll even be president.
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