this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Imagine there were hours of irrefutable video evidence of Trump doing unspeakable things to young girls. Do you really think reactionaries would care? I’m talking common everyday reactionaries in our offices and neighbors and churches. The same people who blame clothing choice for women and girls experiencing sexual abuse. Who fetishized and/or vilify queerness. These people reprimand young girls for not being modest while encouraging young boys to treat girls as objects of sexual conquest and flatted any other gender into the binary.
This is a land of rape culture. It is endemic. It is one of our foundational cultural modalities, like anti-intellectualism and rugged individualism. I honestly believe that such footage wouldn’t be outright dismissed but rather justified. Victims’ appearances and behaviors would be analyses endlessly, used to rationalize the actions of the abuser. You need not look further than the countless of similar cases where men are made into the victims of the abuse they perpetuate because their victims didn’t say no.
I wouldn’t say most people hold attitudes that uphold rape culture. But there are enough to propagate it indefinitely. Their jokes and comments and justifications worm their way into common parlance and corrode concepts like bodily autonomy and consent. For years I worked in child sexual abuse prevention education. At least once a day I would contend with children and adults who held beliefs that perpetuate rape culture.
To me, it’s laughable to think some files, however damning, would result in anything more than our collective despair.
Edit: I’m probably being too cynical. I’m fighting demons over here in my head so don’t let me damage any optimism you have.
No you're definitely right among the Evangelicals. These are people who would and do make a young teenage girl apologize to grown man for "seducing HIM" because he groomed her and SA'ed her but it's her fault for "tempting" him and not "just saying no". They go on and on about how men are both dumb brutish beasts who cannot resist the sight of a bare thigh on a 14 year old girl (and are sent into a lust-frenzy as a result for some reason) but also the intellectual and moral leaders of society who must be in control of women who are too emotional to be rational or leadership material.
Among the non-religious and less affiliated I think there would be some amount of outrage but the thing about reactionaries is they are very much about in-groups and out-groups and those in the group generally can be excused of anything if they're male patriarchs, especially if doing so can be used to shift blame onto women/girls who can be put into the out group. Any victimization of the in-group by the out-group is inflated wildly into persecution and victimization narratives while any victimization of the out-group by the in-group is downplayed as JUST, natural, the ordained order, caused by the behavior of the out-group, or at worst a temporary excusable lapse in judgement or character which you cannot use to define the rest of their life by, etc, etc.
While this is scandalous and revolting enough that I think if undeniable proof emerged some portion of his base would be disgusted by him I don't think it would be a large part and I think even of those who do they'd say he's a horrible man, did evil things, BUT they like and support his politics so will continue to support him carrying out THEIR political will of racism, reactionary culture war revanchism, etc and just want him kept away from teen girls from now on as some sort of compromise.
I think we can look to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal where Democrats, liberal feminists, etc closed ranks and did 180s on positions to make excuses for why this was okay by their guy as instructive. I'm just not sure anything can overcome that tendency to see this as a political attack because it is the Democrats doing it for cynical political reasons after dismissing it when they were in power. You'd need to have Republicans be the ones leading the charge on doing this for their base to accept it and not treat it as an external cynical politically motivated attack meant to derail implementation of the Republican political program and put them on the defensive. In that sense they're right because it's not about justice, some liberals may have illusions that Trump will be jailed but we all know that isn't going to happen and that Dems have no interest in actually exposing the entire depth of the Epstein operation including the likely ties to "israel", academia, etc.