“Barely Legal”: When the Hinge Becomes a Crack-Up
The Epstein files don’t just threaten Trump; they threaten the entire ontological universe of his movement.
Hinge
Jeffrey Epstein and pedophilia have long been at the hinge point of Donald Trump’s ability to project power, dating back to his first presidential campaign. False accusations of child trafficking and sexual abuse have been the currency of Trump’s base since John Podesta’s emails were hacked by the Russians in 2016—and systematically reconstructed into a hoax-mythology aimed at Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
This mythology metastasized into Pizzagate and QAnon—and now suffuses the entire MAGA belief system. Trump’s moral status as a savior against “deviant pedophile Democrats” is the glue that keeps a large part of his cult on board with his project, regardless of what he says or does.
Meanwhile, the most closely guarded open secret in the world—that Donald Trump committed crimes against children with Jeffrey Epstein—has become impossible for anyone still in contact with objective reality to deny. The latest revelations by House Oversight Democrats—that Trump was a major subject of conversation between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and that Trump was “the dog that didn’t bark”—are just one more small step toward the full revelation of his deviant behavior.
“Barely Legal”
As an example of the effect this is having on his followers and punditocracy, former Fox and NBC host Megyn Kelly said this week that trafficking and abusing young teenage girls is not pedophilia after all—it’s “barely legal.”
“We have yet to see anyone coming forward to say I was under 10.”
“He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls.”
“There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In point of fact, there is no legal difference between a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old for the purpose of determining whether a child sex crime was committed. A fifteen-year-old is a minor in all fifty states. No fifteen-year-old is “barely legal.”
Kelly’s obvious goal is to redefine pedophilia as a controversial preference—to move the moral goalposts from rape to aesthetic choice. She smuggles in an invented moral boundary—“10-year-old,” “under 14”—and then uses it to argue for a new category of behavior: “barely legal.” This category, of course, would include Donald Trump.
Crack
This attempt to shatter the Overton Window around child rape is isomorphic to moral shifts around racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. It is a symptom of a regime and a movement sustaining it, trying to reverse moral polarity itself: from order to entropy, from growth to trauma, and from good to evil. It is full-spectrum ontological warfare.
However, the same neuropsychological mechanisms that tie Trump’s base to him—that cause his followers to mirror his emotions rather than evaluate his claims—are the same mechanisms that spell his ultimate destruction—and he knows it. His desperate gilding—and gelding—of the White House, his imminent invasion of Venezuela, and his sadistic attack on American cities are all signs of his internal terror of Epstein. He is reconstructing reality to erase the threat of his own ego-annihilation.
While Trump’s behavior is guaranteed to worsen for those exact same reasons, Epstein continues to present the greatest opportunity to fracture Trump’s coalition, enough to pull ourselves out of this authoritarian nosedive before it becomes permanent. The hinge is now a crack—and that crack can become a crack-up.
Trump is pardoning virtually everyone he knows; he’s distorting the justice system beyond all recognition to go after his personal enemies; and he’s making sure Ghislaine Maxwell has puppy privileges in cushy Camp Fed. It is comic-book, over-the-top lawlessness—all because of his own collapsing psychology.
A malignant narcissist faced with the void of shame and exposure has no limits beyond his power to change the world around him. Unfortunately, in the case of Donald Trump, he has a lot of power to change the world—and he has engineered it so no one around him will stop him.
Crack-Up
However, a lot of power is not infinite power, despite Trump’s pronouncements to the contrary. The simple fact that Trump is faced with a vote next week in the House on releasing the files—whatever the outcome—is an example of his ultimate impotence to stop the truth from coming out.
After 43 days of a shutdown, including deliberately delaying Adelita Grijalva’s swearing-in to prevent a vote, time is in fact running out on Trump’s ability to hide his guilt in the House. It also appears the Supreme Court may claw back Trump’s illegal seizure of the power to tariff, which will further erode his self-image as a total dictator.
All of this is going to cause Donald Trump’s deterioration to accelerate. This is a psychological guarantee. At some point, whether through his own physical degeneration and mental decompensation, or through external intervention, he will be stopped. He will not and cannot get better, and ultimately his dysfunction will be too much for his own people to handle. When they start leaving, the whirlpool will engulf him.
Demolition
One important outstanding question relevant to the aftermath of Trump’s upcoming collapse is the actual content of the Epstein files—and who is implicated. For example, this email from 2014 was released by the Democrats, about a meeting that Peter Thiel told Joe Rogan was about “tax advice”:
Jeffrey Epstein: “That was fun , see you in 3 weeks”
The furious, desperate nature of Trump’s efforts to prevent the release of Epstein information may not just be about himself. There may be others with a long-vested interest in Trump’s success that could be brought low, if not down, by the contents of the files.
If members of the PayPal Mafia have exposure, for example, that doesn’t just threaten Trump, it threatens the entire infrastructure that supports him, including the Vice President’s legitimacy—and trillions of dollars in inflated valuations in Palantir, Tesla, and crypto.
Fair warning, it is very rough seas ahead—entropy is accelerating. But on the other side will be a chance to reverse this ontological aberration, to rebuild our systems of meaning and the government that supports them, and to reset our moral polarity to order, not chaos.
Megyn Kelly is the fever, the symptom of a sickness in our collective mind. But like all fevers, it will break.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
— Carl Jung
If you are able to help me continue my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It really means a lot. Thank you!
Here are a few benefits to upgrading:
Live Zoom call each Sunday
Ability to comment and access all content
Wonderful, supportive community
Helping independent journalism fill in the gaps for our failing media
Thank you for reading and sharing my work. Grateful for your support.
If you’d like to help with my legal fees: DefendSpeechNow.org.
My podcast is @radicalizedpod & YouTube — Livestream is Fridays at 1PM PT.
Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
The people must come to grips with the fact that the fall of dangerous, criminal leaders, who never should have been elected in the first place, rarely comes from a rejection of their lies, crimes, and insane predatory policies. There has to be a scandal, too, long after outrageous damage has been done. The people are always capable of being conned into following mad men. Minds are stolen, not persuaded. That is the awful legacy we must live with. It will not end with Trump. But he must be made an example anyway, if not for the future, for us.
absolutely brilliant, as always 💕ty