This Deviant Presidency: How Low Can Sexual Exploitation Go?
The central scandal in the Epstein sex abuse ring targeting children is not the sex. It's the children.
What powerful men do with grown-up women — that is, females 18 or older — bothers me little. I never cared much about Donald Trump's assignation with porn star Stormy Daniels. Other Trump critics tried to pile on another layer of immorality by noting that Trump was cheating on a wife who had just given birth. I wouldn't go there.
That was between Melania and Donald. One assumes that the third Mrs. Trump knew what she was getting into. I doubt I'm going on a limb to assume that what attracted Melania to Donald was not his winning personality. She made her deal, as was her right.
Trump has just given in to the inevitable. When it became clear that the House would vote to release the Epstein files, and the Senate would follow, he ran to the front of the parade. Trump is undoubtedly plotting ways to keep information he doesn't want disclosed out of the public's eye. His reluctance to release files on a pedophile ring in which his name appears repeatedly is understandable.
As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) famously complained in 1993, deviance has been defined down so that behavior that was once deemed intolerable is now accepted as normal. One of his examples of deviancy being defined downward was sexual exploitation.
How far downward we've come.
William J. Bennett was a conservative moral-mouth of the 1990s. He went into full fire-and-brimstone mode after Bill Clinton was caught having a fling with a White House intern. Bennett milked the moment with a book grandly titled The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. (On a roll, he followed with his pious The Book of Virtues.)
About adultery, Bennett wrote, "One reason society needs to uphold high public standards in this realm is because sex — when engaged in capriciously, without restraint, and against those in positions of relative weakness — can be exploitative and harmful."
Come 2016, Trump is running for president, and his adulterous escapades were public. A 1990 tabloid headline attributed to Trump's mistress Marla Maples (but actually planted by Trump while he was married to Ivana Trump) went, "Best Sex I've Ever Had."
Without a blush, Bennett argued that conservatives who refused to back Trump "suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country."
Clinton's tryst with Monica Lewinsky was vulgar and inappropriate, but she was not a child. Monica was a 22-year-old college grad, and consent was mutual.
What happened on Epstein's island was not technically adultery — sexual relations between at least one married person and another adult. When one is a minor, the legal term is statutory rape.
Some of Trump's fiercest defenders are now attempting to downplay Epstein's crimes, thus diving below the second circle of hell that Dante reserved for mere philanderers.
Megyn Kelly tried to sanitize Epstein's disgrace by saying on her show, "He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls." She goes on: "And I realize this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I'm just giving you facts, that he wasn't into, like, eight-year-olds."
To which we can add five-year-olds. Epstein was not into five-year-olds, and that's a fact, we think. However, one of the girls, Jena-Lisa Jones, was 14 and still in junior high.
The American public, including a large chunk of MAGA, deserves credit for finally drawing a moral line that they wouldn't let even Trump cross. The story's not over until the Justice Department releases all the files, victim names redacted. We're waiting.
Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
