In the theater of modern American politics, there is a constant, exhausting effort to re-litigate the character of Donald Trump. His supporters see a divinely chosen strongman. His more timid critics on the right see a man who was corrupted by power. Both are wrong. Both are engaged in a collective act of willful amnesia.
The truth is far simpler and much more damning. There was no great moral decay. There was no corruption of a once-noble spirit. The man you see today is the same man who has been performing on the public stage for forty years. The predatory instincts, the casual cruelty, the transactional view of human beings, and the profound, bottomless contempt for women has always been his character. To feign surprise is to admit you haven’t been paying attention.
A Public Record of Predation
The recent pivot on the Jeffrey Epstein affair is a masterclass in this bad faith. Two years ago, Donald Trump Jr. was performatively demanding the release of the “Epstein list,” asking why anyone would protect such “scum bags.” It was a useful cudgel at a politically convenient time. Today? Silence. Now that his father, a long-time associate of Epstein, has decided the entire affair is a “hoax” designed to hurt him, the righteous crusade for transparency has quietly vanished. The answer, as Jr. once said, has indeed become “very apparent.”
The cynicism is not just the hypocrisy. It’s that his father’s entire public persona has been perfectly in character with the world Epstein inhabited. This was not a secret. This is the man who, on a hot mic, gleefully described his method for assaulting women, “grab ‘em by the pussy.” This is the man who spent years on Howard Stern’s show boasting about his sexual exploits and confirming it was okay to call his own daughter “a piece of ass.”
A Litany of Accusations
It is a documented pattern of behavior. At least 25 women have publicly accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment since the 1970s. The accusations are consistent: forcible kissing, groping, unwanted advances.
And then there is E. Jean Carroll.
This was not a case of “he said, she said.” This was a case that went to a jury. And that jury, after hearing the evidence, found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. A court of law has affirmed what has been obvious for decades. Donald Trump has a history of sexually predatory behavior and a willingness to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares to speak out about it. He was ordered to pay Carroll over $88 million in damages.
The Convenience of Forgetting
The attempt to memory-hole this history is the central project of the MAGA movement. It requires followers to believe that the man they saw and heard for forty years never really existed. It demands that they see a jury’s verdict not as a finding of fact, but as a political persecution. It asks them to forget the Access Hollywood tape, to forget the Howard Stern interviews, to forget the dozens of women, and to forget E. Jean Carroll.
But character is not a costume. It is the sum of a person’s actions over time. And the actions of Donald Trump, in public and on the record, paint a clear, unambiguous, and legally affirmed portrait of a predator. This is not a man who changed. This is a man who, for the first time, was given the power to act on his worst impulses on a global stage. To pretend otherwise is the ultimate act of bad faith.