Donald Trump is probably a pedophile
Trump pardoned multiple known pedophiles who were at the Capitol on January 6, but there's much more
Opponents of Donald Trump have noted in recent weeks that he showed no compunction about pardoning confirmed pedophiles convicted of swarming the Capitol on Janury 6, 2021. That got me wondering: how numerous and tight are Donald Trump’s ties to pedophiles in general?
They turn out to be very numerous, some loose, some tight. Are they enough evidence to prove that Donald Trump himself is a pedophile? I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, but the preponderance of evidence, in my opinion, favors that hypothesis.
That judgment of mine is based on the below summary of evidence. I didn’t find any summaries online that satisfied me, so I spent a little time looking up pardoned January 6 pedophiles and recalling the links between Trump and pedophiles that I’ve heard about over the years. Fact-checking and writing them out took a while because there are so many of them. For the same reason, this postletter is rather long (so your email client may truncate it), but I’ve chopped it into sections that should stand on their own.
The age of consent varies between 16 and 18 across US states. Here I use the lower age, 16, meaning that someone has to be an adult sexually pursuing a 15-year-old or younger child (or a child of unrecorded age) to get cited below as a pedophile. (No one can accuse me of nitpicking about 18-year-olds sleeping with someone about to turn 18.) I allow myself just one exception: the time Donald Trump tried to have a beauty queen agree that his daughter Ivanka was “hot” when Ivanka was 16, because, ew.
Trump pardoned several pedophile participants in the January 6 lynch mob
Donald Trump pardoned 1500 “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021”, including the following 10 men.
Kene Brian Lazo, who was arrested in May 2021 for participating in the January 6 lynch mob, and then arrested 3 months later for allegedly “contributing to the delinquency of a child under the age of 13; aggravated sexual battery of a child under 13; intercourse by force, threat or intimidation; forcible sodomy by force, threat, or of an incapacitated or physically helpless person over the age of 13” “around 5 p.m. on August 22”.
Andrew Quentin Taake, who was arrested after spending a few weeks as a fugitive, for allegedly sending “sexually explicit messages to an undercover law enforcement officer who was posing as a 15-year-old girl” in 2016. (The FBI caught wind of Taake’s attacks on police officers in the Capitol from a woman subject to Taake’s bragging on a dating app.)
Landon Manwaring, sentenced in November 2022 to 30 days in prison for entering the Capitol on January 6. Four months earlier he’d pled guilty to “a felony count of dealing in materials harmful to a minor”, using a dating app to “sen[d] a sexually explicit photograph of himself and describe[…] a location to meet” to a cop he thought was a 13-year-old girl.
David Paul Daniel, in whose home police found “electronic devices containing images of child sexual abuse”, had been accused by “a minor under 12 years old” of “sexually abus[ing] her between 2015 and 2019”. The police had conducted the search as part of an investigation into his participation in the attack on the Capitol. One judge reckoned that the “government’s forecast of evidence [wa]s compelling and suggest[ed] Defendant engaged in sexual acts with two young girls in his own family”.
Kyle Travis Colton, newly indicted for “receipt of child pornography” for a year and a half after the January 6 attack.
Jeffrey Newcomb, whose January 6 case was dismissed under Trump’s pardoning order, is 41 or 42 years old and lives in Polk, Ohio. In July 2001 he would have been 17–19 years old, when a 19-year-old Jeffrey N Newcomb gave beer to a 14-year-old deaf girl at an Ohio School for the Deaf party and then “anally raped her”. There also appears to be something of a visual resemblance between Ohio’s Jeffrey Newcomb (accused January 6 rioter) and Ohio’s Jeffrey N Newcomb (convicted child rapist).
Andrew Kyle Grigsby, who pled guilty last year to two child-porn charges.
Theodore Middendorf, who pled guilty in May 2024 to penetrative “Predatory Criminal Sexual Assault of a Child”, that child being a 7-year-old.
Michael Gerard Marroquín, a Texan who “moved from Austin to Bolivia” as a lay missionary, was convicted in Bolivia (where the default age of consent is 14) of statutory rape of two girls and human trafficking of a third in 2008. By 2021, he was living back in Texas, enabling his visit to the Capitol to participate in the January 6 lynch mob. He was arrested for the latter in 2023, and Trump pardoned him this January.
Sean Michael McHugh, who fought cops in the Capitol while heckling them about “protecting pedophiles”, turned out to have served prison time for statutory rape of a 14-year-old.
Notice that the list includes 4 men convicted of, or who admitted to, penetrative sexual assault of children no older than 14. Trump enthusiastically pardoned all of these men on the grounds that it would be “very, very cumbersome” to check the rap sheets of the 1500 Capitol convicts. But the media seem to have managed to check them, while juggling all of their other reporting!
Trump pardoned other high-profile pedophiles
Trump not only pardoned January 6 rioters, but had previously pardoned Roy Moore, “overtly accepting his denials of child sexual abuse and teen-age skirt chasing”, as well as Ted Suhl, owner of Arkansas residential treatment facility The Lord Ranch, where “the camp’s director of social services” is accused by 8 men of “habitually rap[ing] and sexually molest[ing] minor male residents”.
More recently (last month), Trump pardoned Trevor Milton, convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors as founder and ex-CEO of electric-vehicle manufacturer Nikola. Milton resigned as CEO of Nikola in September 2020, and in the week after his resignation two women accused Milton of sexually assaulting them when they were 15 years old; one accused Milton of raping her with his fingers, and the other, Milton’s cousin, accused him of groping her breasts after a family funeral.
Trump walked in on girls changing at Miss Teen USA pageants
While owner of the Miss Universe franchise, Trump would walk in on contestants as they changed their clothes, including at Miss Teen USA beauty pageants “where girls as young as 15 were in various states of undress”.
Also, though she seemed to mention it as a sort of aside, makeup artist and former pageant organizer Jill Harth recalled in a 2021 interview that she had to watch “underage” girls “like hawks” around Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. She also referred to Epstein as Trump’s “wingman”.
Trump talked about his daughter Ivanka being “hot”, including when she was 16
Trump has commented over the years on the hotness of his daughter Ivanka, including telling The View that if the then-25-year-old weren’t his daughter, he’d be dating her, and telling Howard Stern that Ivanka had “actually always been very voluptuous” (note “always”).
Trump made most of those comments once Ivanka Trump was grown up, but in 1997, when Ivanka was 16 and hosting the Miss Teen USA pageant, Donald “turned to Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, Miss Universe at the time”, and asked her “Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?”.
Trump had 3 advisors who covered up or perpetrated sexual assaults on children
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump selected Robert Preston Morris, founder of the Gateway Church megachurch, as a spiritual advisor, and Morris had, by his own later admission, engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a 12-year-old in the 1980s. (The 12-year-old grew up to accuse Morris of raping her with his fingers, among other things.)
George Nader, who published the magazine Middle East Insight from his home and an office near the White House, was indicted in 1984 “on two charges of mailing and importing child pornography” after a customs inspector found magazines of “naked boys engaged in sexual acts” in a package bound for Nader from Amsterdam, and when customs officers subsequently searched Nader’s home they found more “material of a similar nature”. Nader beat that rap because the search warrant was invalid, but in 1990 he was busted trying to import child-porn videos “hidden inside sweet tins” through Dulles airport, and pled guilty. Nader has also been accused of sneaking 14-year-old boys into the US in 1997 and 2002, and in the 1990s, a former colleague found Nader crying in Middle East Insight’s office over “a photo of a Czech teenage boy”; Nader was later imprisoned in Czechia for child sexual abuse.
According to Nader, he would later develop contacts with the Clinton and Trump 2016-election campaigns. He met Erik Prince and Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in August 2016, then had a meeting with Mohammed bin Zayed, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon immediately after Trump won the election. For a few months after that Nader visited the White House “frequently”, “bec[oming] friendly with […] Steve Bannon, visiting his office regularly”.
In 1980, Linda McMahon, along with her husband Vince, co-founded Titan Sports, which would later become World Wrestling Entertainment. Mel Phillips, who worked for the company as boss of the “ring boys” (men and sometimes literally boys, some runaways or in foster care, who worked as wrestling-ring crew) and an on-screen ring announcer, was publicly accused in 1992 of sexually abusing a boy, triggering an FBI investigation; Penthouse apparently reported at the time (though I haven’t located the specific issue myself) that Phillips was “once spotted in the backseat of a car in Pennsylvania performing a sexual act on an 11-year-old boy”. In 2020 Business Insider reported that Linda and Vince McMahon, while both expressing public shock about Phillips’s predilections, had “actually tolerated them for years”.
This did not deter Trump from selecting Linda McMahon last August to co-chair his transition team. Then, last October, Linda and Vince McMahon were sued for negligently allowing 5 ring boys to be sexually assaulted. Most of the victims reported having been 13 years old when the abuse started. The month after that, Trump picked Linda McMahon to lead…the Department of Education, a position to which she was confirmed in March.
(Lower-profile figures with weaker connections to Trump have also been busted for involvement in child sexual abuse, of course. Republican National Committee ad designer Ruben Verastigui pled guilty “to charges of having 162 videos and more than 50 images of child pornography”, having expressed a “preference” for videos of babies in an online pedophile group. Adam Hageman, a former Commerce Department official and administrator for Turning Point USA, pled guilty in 2022 to “a charge of receiving child pornography”; a pre-trial detention memo claimed that Hageman had admitted to sex with a 15-year-old in, you guessed it, another online pedophile group.)
Trump was very close to both Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein
The reader may well have seen the following photograph of Donald Trump, Melania Trump (then Melania Knauss), Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell — or a photo much like it.
This photograph is one of several taken in the club at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, and it is not the only photograph of Trump & Maxwell hanging out. Just one photo agency, Getty Images, offers over a dozen such photos, taken between 1997 (“Donald Trump Out On The Town”) and 2002 (“Dolce & Gabba Opening”).
Two decades later, when Maxwell was charged with trafficking children for sexual abuse, Trump said he “wish[ed] her well, frankly” and had “met her numerous times over the years” during a coronavirus briefing, then wished her well again when challenged about wishing her well the first time. A former business partner of Jeffrey Epstein, Steven Hoffenberg, insisted that Trump and Maxwell “knew each other well” and liked each other. Quoted in another article, Hoffenberg called Trump “crazy about Maxwell”.
I mention Maxwell first because Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is widely attested and better known. But since I am endeavoring to be reasonably comprehensive, I now try to summarize Trump’s relationship with Epstein.
The 2002 New York magazine article “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery” quoted Trump as claiming to have known Epstein for 15 years, and calling Epstein a terrific guy. Trump continued:
He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
The 2019 Washington Post article “Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partied together. Then an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion came between them.” opens with this paragraph:
For the better part of two decades starting in the late 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump swam in the same social pool. They were neighbors in Florida. They jetted from LaGuardia to Palm Beach together. They partied at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and dined at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.
The article goes on to mention that, according to Jeffrey Epstein’s brother Mark, Trump flew on Jeffrey’s plane “numerous times”, the latter two men being “good friends”. Trump also allegedly “used to comp Epstein’s mother and aunt at one of Trump’s Atlantic City casino hotels”. And the article notes that Trump ate at Epstein’s mansion in 2003, and that Epstein’s infamous “little black book” included 14 telephone numbers for Donald Trump and people closely related to Trump, including Melania.
Author Michael Wolff talked at length with Jeffrey Epstein in August 2017, and recently released audio recordings of those conversations capture Epstein displaying a lot of apparent knowledge about Trump, calling himself “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years”, and bragging that Donald Trump first slept with Melania Trump on his plane (nicknamed the “Lolita Express” by reporters). Related to that last point, it appears that Donald first met Melania at a 1998 party to which he’d brought Celina Midelfart, a cosmetics heiress who, according to Maxwell’s then executive assistant Cimberly Espinosa, had dated Epstein “around 1996”; it seems likely that Midelfart dated Epstein, then Trump, just months apart. (Getty Images has photographs, from 1997 & 1998, of Trump and Epstein wearing Midelfart as arm candy.)
Craig Unger’s book American Kompromat, excerpted in Vanity Fair, characterizes Maxwell, Trump, & Epstein as a decadent trio of close friends bound together by the mortar of social events and young women (and models allegedly as young as 15). It asserts that “Trump was often the center of Maxwell’s attention, and women who entered Trump’s orbit sometimes ended up being associated with both Trump and Epstein”. A 1992 party featured “no fewer than 28 attractive young women […] flown in to participate in a calendar-girl competition”, but “only two male guests”, Trump & Epstein. An unnamed associate of Epstein claims that Epstein later showed him “potentially compromising photos”, including one where Trump was “with a topless young girl” and another where “two young girls” laugh, pointing, at a wet spot on Trump’s pants.
In 2024, Stacey Williams, who worked as a model and briefly dated Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s, claimed that Epstein had introduced her to Trump, that Epstein and Trump “were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”, and that Trump groped her in front of Epstein when Epstein led her into Trump Tower to visit Trump, which Wiliams suspected was “somehow orchestrated”. Williams appears to have been in her 20s at the time, not a child, but the incident would indicate that Trump knew Epstein well enough to feel comfortable groping a visiting girlfriend of Epstein. Williams underscored the strength of Epstein and Trump’s relationship in an ABC News interview, where she said that Epstein “talked about having just seen Donald […] every time we spoke”, and that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the 3 people “Epstein talked to her about the most”.
And I guess I’m obliged to embed that one NBC archive clip, originally recorded in November 1992, of Donald Trump partying with Jeffrey Epstein at Mar-a-Lago, replete with Trump making Epstein fold over with laughter, Trump pointing out someone offscreen to Epstein and saying something like “she’s hot”, Trump dancing on the spot while contorting his face with the white man’s overbite…and a woman who sure looks like Ghislaine Maxwell glancing around in the background behind them (the left side of her head’s visible over Epstein’s left shoulder in the automatic thumbnail).
Trump’s administration and political party pursue pro-pedophile policies instead of taking Jeffrey Epstein seriously
The latest release of “Epstein files” came from the Department of Justice on February 27. Attorney General Pam Bondi hyped up the files before their release, before they turned out to contain precisely zero new bombshells, and to be partially redacted. The official X account of the Republicans of the House Committee on the Judiciary posted a troll xeet,
🚨 #BREAKING: EPSTEIN FILES RELEASED: https://tinyurl.com/EpsteinFilesV2”
with the link pointing not to any Epstein files but to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video, a type of prank commonly known as “rickrolling”. (archive.is captured the prank xeet before the House Judiciary GOP account deleted it.) Handpicked right-wing influencers and commentators walked, smiling, out of a White House meeting bearing big binders containing paper copies of the files.
Thus the Trump DOJ and House Republicans turned the release of the Epstein files into a circus. They inflated the significance of censored, recycled material, staged a photo op, and trolled people genuinely interested in learning about Epstein’s serial sexual predation. (Far-right comedian(?) Sam Hyde has claimed that liberal public figures “want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it’s funny”, but I don’t recall any MSNBC anchors or Democrats seeking laughs by rickrolling people trying to read about a kid-rape investigation.)
Trump’s policies also have a discernible pro-pedophile slant.
The Trump DOJ threatened to pull funding from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) unless it “remove[d] any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials, [...] and deadname[d] trans kids in their reports”. The NCMEC is “an information clearinghouse” for children who go missing or are exploited, “operat[ing] a national toll-free hotline” and working with law enforcement. It participates in the Child Victim Identification Program to identify and locate children in sexual images and videos. And the NCMEC complied with the order, putting transgender children at risk of exploitation.
Trump’s DOJ also threatened to block grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women to pay for cities’ services for victims of intimate-partner violence, which would endanger children in predatory households and homeless children.
Also also, Trump’s DOJ dropped a lawsuit against “the largest provider of housing for unaccompanied minors”, Southwest Key, intended to hold Southwest Key accountable for its employees’ alleged harassment of detained children and discouragement of reports of rape and sexual harassment through threats.
Trump signed an executive order “ramm[ing] through new Title IX rules for federally funded K-12 schools […] changing how they deal with sex assault claims and LGBT students”, “resuscitat[ing] the Title IX policy changes Trump implemented in 2018”. These include reducing “the liability placed on schools in sexual misconduct cases”.
Trump’s family-separation policy shattered immigrant families, with 1360 children still not confirmed to be reunited with their parents as of March 2024, remaining vulnerable targets for predators. The Trump administration still puts child migrants behind bars, but now with their guardians, and targets them for deportation while trying to “deprive them of access to legal services and representation”, “putting them at heightened risk of violence, exploitation, and trafficking”. In January Trump’s administration ended a years-long ban on immigration arrests at schools (and churches and hospitals).
Trump’s administration is threatening to cut grants to programs that fight child labor, forced labor, labor abuses, and human trafficking. The Washington Post quotes “a federal employee with knowledge of grants” as worrying that the cuts would force children to work “in forced online sex exploitation.”
A woman accused Trump of raping her when she was 13
I save the most direct accusation against Trump for last. Pseudonymous woman “Katie Johnson” filed a lawsuit against Trump and Jeffrey Epstein on April 26, 2016 for “conspiring to […] mak[e] her their sex slave”. She accused Trump and Epstein of repeatedly sexually assaulting her in 1994, Trump’s assaults allegedly culminating in Trump tying her to a bed and raping her. Versions of this lawsuit rattled around until November 2016, when “Katie Johnson” canceled a press conference scheduled to take place at the offices of lawyer Lisa Bloom, then instructed Bloom to dismiss her lawsuit.
I have no special knowledge of the veracity of the lawsuit’s claims, but they are patently germane, and according to Bloom “Katie Johnson” dropped the lawsuit only after receiving death threats. I note that Bloom was secretly working for Harvey Weinstein’s legal team roughly when “Katie Johnson” supposedly instructed Bloom to drop her case against Trump, leading me to the speculative possibility (for which I freely admit that I have no other direct evidence) that Bloom might have been a double agent engaging in a “Catch and Kill” operation to suppress the “Katie Johnson” accusation, just as Weinstein was able to “Catch and Kill” accusations against him for years.
In short: Donald Trump is deeply implicated in pedophilia
Time to sum up.
One person has explicitly accused Trump of raping them as a child.
Trump’s administration pursues policies that put children, directly and indirectly, at risk of sexual predation.
Trump was very close, for years, to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and wished the latter well when, years later, she was busted for child sex trafficking.
Trump selected a woman who covered up serial child molestation to co-chair his transition team and lead the Department of Education.
Trump picked a man who sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl to be a spiritual advisor; he picked a man who imported porn of boys, then (allegedly) imported boys, then was imprisoned in Europe for assaulting a boy, as a Middle East advisor.
Trump tried to get a beauty queen to agree that his then-16-year-old daughter was “hot”, and walked in on beauty-pageant contestants as young as 15 when those girls were changing their clothes.
Trump pardoned 10 men — all of whom participated in a lynch mob at the Capitol — who were arrested for child porn, or for sexually assaulting children, or for sending sexually explicit material online to cops they thought were girls under 16.
Trump also pardoned the higher-profile men Roy Moore, Trevor Milton (accused by two named women of sexually assaulting them when they were 15), and a residential-treatment camp’s owner who covered for a serial molester of boys.
It is possible that the direct accusation against Trump is false, and that Trump just happened to dine and party with pedophiles, consult with pedophiles, inflict pro-pedophile policies on America, pardon pedophiles for their unrelated crimes, and insist on how hot his (16-year-old) daughter is, without lusting after children or touching them with prurient intent.
Seems like a stretch, though.