Why Trump's Base is Turning on Him

Hint: it's not because they care about the children

Content warning: rape, child rape

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On November 4, 2016, four days before the presidential election, a woman known only as Jane Doe was due to hold a press conference in Los Angeles. The subject? Her allegation that Donald Trump raped her when she was 13, in 1994, at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. She alleges Trump had her tied to the bed with pantyhose by Epstein’s handler, Tiffany, before he proceeded to rape her. According to her testimony in a video:

He ripped off all my clothes and he started to basically have sex with me and I was… I’d never had sex before, it was my first time and Tiffany was yelling at him too. She was saying I was a virgin and he told us to just shut the fuck up and just basically took my virginity while I was crying and telling him to stop and basically begging for him to just stop…

[Afterward] he comes over mad because I was crying and he said that I should be thankful that someone like Donald Trump took my virginity. Well, he basically didn’t say took my virginity. He said, I should be glad that someone like Donald Trump popped my cherry and not some pimply little 14 year old. And I just was like, “What if I get pregnant?” Not even talking to him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I was talking to Tiffany and he said, “Well, you’ll get an abortion then, bitch.”

Both Trump and Epstein were named in the civil law suit, which alleges both men knew she was underage. “I understood that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein knew that I was 13 years old,” wrote the then aspiring teen model. (In fact, Trump allegedly enjoyed her likeness to his then also thirteen-year-old daughter, Ivanka.) Two law suits had previously been filed containing these (among other) allegations, by the same woman, using the name Katie Johnson. They were always withdrawn, despite her compelling testimony and supporting affidavits. Katie says that threats, including death threats, are responsible for her silence. She tried once more to revive the matter, in 2024, with very little uptake.

The response on the part of Trump’s base at these times? Total silence about the existence of credible evidence impugning Trump as a child rapist.

And now, suddenly, MAGA affects to care about Donald Trump’s well-known association with Jeffrey Epstein and the possibility that he preyed on and sexually assaulted teen girls. What explains this apparently wild inconsistency? (And never mind the fact that Trump is already a legally declared rapist, vis-à-vis E. Jean Carroll, a verdict that did nothing to negatively affect his popularity.)