I am not the biggest fan of Donald Trump.

Full disclosure: I voted for him in the last election. Not because I think the man is infallible, not because I have a MAGA shrine in my living room, and not because I believe every word that comes out of his mouth. I voted for him because, given the choices I had, I thought the alternative was considerably worse. That’s not the same thing as believing Trump can do no wrong, and I have absolutely no problem criticizing him when I think he’s wrong.

I know that apparently puts me in some bizarre political no-man’s-land these days, because according to the internet I’m required either to believe Trump is the second coming of Christ, personally chosen by God to save Western civilization, or that he is Satan and Hitler rolled into one orange package who spends his evenings kicking puppies and trafficking children.

How about neither?

I disagree with the guy on plenty of things. I think he says stupid shit. I think he creates unnecessary problems for himself. I think there are entirely legitimate reasons to criticize him.

But here’s where you people keep pissing me off:

I will defend somebody I don’t even like when you lie about them.

And somehow, once again, you have managed to make me defend him.

Yes, Trump Knew Epstein

The latest version is that Trump is supposedly a pedophile because he knew Jeffrey Epstein. Not merely that Trump associated with Epstein … which is absolutely true … but that his association has somehow mutated through the magical powers of social media into established proof that Trump raped children and participated in Epstein’s trafficking operation.

Those are very different statements.

Yes, Trump knew Epstein. They traveled in the same wealthy social circles. There is footage of them together. Trump famously called Epstein a “terrific guy” in 2002 and commented that Epstein liked beautiful women, including some “on the younger side.” According to a federal prosecutor’s email released in December 2025, flight records show Trump flew on Epstein’s jet at least eight times during the 1990s. Those are legitimate facts, and pretending otherwise is just MAGA-flavored bullshit.

But there’s another side of that relationship that somehow gets conveniently left out. Whatever friendship Trump and Epstein once had very clearly went to shit. Trump eventually barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago … although the exact reason for the ban is disputed.

More interestingly, a recently released FBI interview with former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter says Trump called him in 2006, while the Epstein investigation was underway, told him he was glad police were stopping Epstein, said people had known what Epstein was doing, and described Ghislaine Maxwell as “evil.”

To be precise, Trump did not start the police investigation; the call reportedly came after it was already underway. The Justice Department says it found no independent corroboration of the call, although Reiter himself has stood by the account. And Epstein’s own later emails sure as hell don’t read like correspondence about his beloved partner in crime.

By 2017, Epstein was telling Larry Summers that he had met some very bad people but “none as bad as Trump,” calling Trump dangerous and saying there wasn’t “one decent cell in his body.”

None of that magically proves Trump innocent of everything anyone has ever accused him of. But it makes the cartoon version where Trump and Epstein remained best buddies and secret co-conspirators right up until Epstein got caught considerably harder to swallow.

(I do find it amusing that people who hate Trump also quite rightly consider Epstein a monster and a liar … right up until Epstein says something horrible about Trump. Then suddenly we’re supposed to take Jeffrey fucking Epstein at his word? So which is it?)

The Island

But here’s another legitimate fact that tends to mysteriously disappear once this gets turned into a Facebook meme:

There is no documented evidence that Trump ever visited Epstein’s private island. The available flight logs don’t put him there, and fact-checkers examining the claim have repeatedly found no evidence that he went there.

Does that prove Trump never did anything wrong anywhere in Epstein’s orbit?

No.

It means exactly what it says: there is no documented evidence he went to the island.

See how easy that is? We can acknowledge facts without immediately stretching them until they snap.

“Katie Johnson”

Then we get to the most serious accusation: the woman who used the names “Katie Johnson” and later “Jane Doe,” who alleged in 2016 that Trump and Epstein sexually assaulted her in 1994 when she was 13.

That accusation is horrific.

If it were proven true, I wouldn’t give a flying fuck what political party Trump belonged to. Put him under the jail.

But it was never proven true.

The first federal lawsuit was filed in California in April 2016 and dismissed shortly afterward because the complaint failed to state a viable federal civil-rights claim under the statutes it relied upon. That distinction matters. The judge did not hold a trial, examine the evidence and declare the allegation false. But neither did the court establish that Trump committed the acts alleged.

The allegation was subsequently filed in New York. A later version was voluntarily withdrawn just days before the 2016 presidential election, after a scheduled press conference was canceled. Her attorney said the woman had received threats and was too frightened to appear publicly. Again: that is not proof that she lied. It is also not proof that Trump raped her. The allegation was never adjudicated.

And yes, the whole affair had some seriously weird shit surrounding it.

Reporting at the time connected promotion of the lawsuit to Norm Lubow, a former Jerry Springer producer and anti-Trump activist who had a history of bizarre celebrity claims. The Guardian reported that the lawsuits appeared to have been coordinated by him, while the attorney representing the woman insisted that he had actually communicated with his client.

That’s suspicious.

It is not proof.

And that distinction is the entire fucking point of this article.

It isn’t the only allegation of its kind, either. In March 2026, after reporters noticed the records were missing from the public release, the Justice Department posted FBI notes from four 2019 interviews with a different woman, from South Carolina, who claimed Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, when she was between 13 and 15, and that Trump abused her. The FBI wrote it down. Nobody has corroborated it.

So no, I’m not going to claim these women never existed. Real people made these allegations. Whether what they alleged actually happened is an entirely different question.

This is what intellectual honesty looks like, and apparently we now need archaeological equipment to find it.

The Parts That Don’t Fit the Narrative

There are also facts surrounding Trump’s relationship with Epstein that don’t fit very neatly into the “Trump was Epstein’s secret partner in child trafficking” narrative.

Bradley Edwards, an attorney who represented Epstein victims, has publicly said that when he was seeking information in 2009, Trump voluntarily spoke with him and provided useful information. Edwards described Trump as cooperative and said the information helped his investigation. He also said Trump gave him no indication that Trump himself was involved in anything improper.

That does not canonize Trump.

It does not mean Trump spent the 1990s wearing a cape and rescuing children from Jeffrey Epstein.

It means an attorney representing Epstein’s victims wanted information from him, Trump talked to him, and the attorney says Trump helped.

There are also longstanding reports that Epstein was eventually barred from Mar-a-Lago, although the exact reason has been reported differently over the years. One account from an attorney for Epstein victims said the ban followed Epstein sexually assaulting an underage girl at the club; other accounts have involved Epstein recruiting someone who worked there or the deterioration of Trump and Epstein’s relationship. So, again, I am not going to turn a disputed detail into gospel merely because it helps my side.

And that is the standard I wish everyone would use.

The newer Epstein releases contain ugly material too. Epstein himself made claims in private correspondence about Trump knowing about “the girls,” and those claims absolutely deserve investigation rather than being waved away because somebody likes Trump. But Jeffrey Epstein writing something in an email is not magically the same thing as independently proving that thing happened.

Investigate it.

Release the documents.

Interview people.

Corroborate the claims.

Follow the evidence wherever it goes.

If Trump committed crimes against children, prosecute him.

Repeating It Doesn’t Make You Bulletproof

And while we’re here, maybe everybody casually repeating these accusations on Facebook, X, Reddit, or wherever else should remember something else: you don’t get some magical legal force field just because somebody else said it first.

Repeating a false and defamatory factual accusation can, depending on the circumstances and jurisdiction, expose the person repeating it to a defamation lawsuit too.

Now, Trump is one of the most public figures on Earth, which means the legal bar is high; he would generally have to show that someone knowingly spread something false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true. But “some guy posted it, so I repeated it to 40,000 people” is not the bulletproof defense people seem to think it is. Accusing someone of raping children is about as serious an accusation as you can make. Maybe have some fucking evidence before you put your name on it.

Show Me the Proof

And there’s another piece of this that I personally have a hard time getting past. This is an inference, not evidence, so let me make that perfectly clear: if there had been authenticated, slam-dunk proof sitting in government files that Donald Trump raped children, do you genuinely think it would have quietly survived both the Obama and Biden years without becoming one of the biggest stories on Earth?

Trump was investigated, impeached, sued, indicted, prosecuted, scrutinized by hostile politicians, prosecutors, journalists and congressional committees from every imaginable direction.

Maybe you think everybody involved somehow missed the one piece of evidence that would have politically detonated him. Fine. It’s possible. But I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that indisputable proof existed, was available to people with every incentive to investigate Trump aggressively, and somehow nobody ever managed to authenticate it and put it in front of a court or on the front page of every newspaper in America.

Does that prove no such evidence could possibly exist?

No.

Again, that’s not how evidence works.

But it absolutely matters when somebody tells me the proof is supposedly overwhelming, obvious, and sitting right there for everybody to see. If that’s true, then show me the fucking proof.

I genuinely do not give a shit what color tie he wears.

But what I will not do is skip every one of those steps and jump directly from “Trump knew Jeffrey Epstein” to “Donald Trump is a proven pedophile.”

That is not evidence. That is tribalism at best.

Crying Wolf

And this is the part of modern politics that makes me want to beat my head against a wall. People have decided that once somebody belongs to the opposing political tribe, literally anything said about them becomes believable. Trump is Hitler. Trump is a Russian spy. Trump is a pedophile. Trump personally engineered every bad thing that has happened since the invention of agriculture.

And then when one of these claims turns out to be exaggerated, unsupported, or just plain bullshit, nobody learns anything.

They just move to the next one.

Which is fucking maddening, because Trump gives his critics plenty of real material.

You don’t need to manufacture any.

Criticize his policies. Criticize his behavior. Criticize his narcissism, his spending, his immigration policy, tariffs, foreign policy, appointments, rhetoric, whatever the hell you want.

But if your argument requires taking an unproven allegation and casually upgrading it to established fact because it hurts someone you dislike, then you’re not exposing misinformation.

You’re creating it. And eventually people stop believing you. (Looking at you, CNN.)

That may actually be the biggest damage done by this shit.

Every time somebody screams PEDOPHILE!, NAZI!, TRAITOR!, DICTATOR!, WOLF! at maximum volume and the evidence underneath it turns out to be substantially weaker than advertised, you train ordinary people to ignore you when something genuinely serious happens.

You burn credibility for clicks.

I don’t want to defend Donald Trump.

I don’t wake up every morning thinking, Boy, I sure hope somebody makes another questionable accusation against Trump so I can spend three hours reading federal court dockets.

I have shit to do.

But there is a principle here that matters a hell of a lot more than Donald Trump:

People do not become guilty because you hate them.

Evidence still matters. Facts are important. And the truth is paramount even when the truth is inconvenient to your politics.

So criticize Trump all you want.

Hell, I’ll probably join you sometimes.

But stop turning accusations into facts, associations into crimes, and rumors into convictions because you desperately want the worst possible thing about the man to be true.

Goddammit. Stop making me defend Donald Trump.