The Brooklyn Rail

What has happened to us? How did we get to this point? How has the American dream of human emancipation come to this? Donald Trump’s State of the Union rant showed once again how he has brought much more than bad politics to America. He’s brought a taste for cruelty and meanness. He’s infected our imaginations with malignant thoughts.

But he has also developed an assumed immunity to actual facts and evidence. They have no effect on him. His image appears miraculously everywhere, wanted or not wanted. It’s become imprinted on our psyches. It’s the Shroud of Trump.

Just before Trump began his interminable State of the Union address on February 24, National Public Radio’s Stephen Fowler published a report on a series of documents in the Epstein Files about something that happened in 1983.¹ This transcript and notes on a 2019 interview with a woman, read in part: “[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her [a 13- or 14-year-old girl at the time] to Trump, who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” The victim says that Trump also “forcibly raped her,” as did Epstein.

The victim was interviewed by the FBI four times in the summer of 2019. They don’t interview a subject four times if they don’t think there is real substance to that subject’s charges. This victim was so credible that her account showed up in a slide used by the FBI titled “Prominent Names,” and she became a principle witness in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Fifteen documents are listed for this accuser, but only seven are in the Epstein Files database, and the missing eight include notes from three of the interviews. Other documents related to this account, as many as 50 pages or more, have also been removed from the Epstein Files by the DOJ. The discrepancy was first reported by the independent journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack on February 15. ² On February 25, Mike Baker and Michael Gold confirmed all this in the New York Times.³

Sollenberger and Fowler know how many files related to this one victim are missing, because each “302,” a report on an interview conducted by the FBI, is “Bates-stamped” with a document number. This is a process (invented by Edwin G. Bates in 1892) of applying unique, sequential identifying numbers to documents, especially during the discovery phase of legal cases. Since each document has an identifying number, you can tell when any of them go missing. When the DOJ removed the files about Trump, they left behind clear evidence of their subterfuge.

Again, the victim here was so credible that she was central to the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. As Sollenberger points out, “This claim would contradict the narrative that the sitting president has not been credibly accused of wrongdoing in the Epstein saga.” Attorney General Pam Bondi testified under oath before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on February 11, 2026, and said, “There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime.” This appears to be a false statement to Congress, under oath.

Is this the reason why Trump has refused to release the other half of the Epstein Files—the ones that are widely thought to be the worst ones—and he and his DOJ are doing everything they can to cover-up the Trump-Epstein Files? Yes, and so far, it’s working. But it won’t work forever.

Responding to the outcry over the suppression of these documents, DJT’s DOJ has said they could be “a part of an ongoing investigation.” So the question now is: Is Donald Trump under criminal investigation for the rape and assault of a child?

Trump has said he’s been “totally exonerated” on anything related to Epstein. To exonerate means “to unburden,” ex + onus, to take the onus off of one. And it’s come to mean to lift the burden of guilt or blame. Trump has always felt guilty, because he’s always done terrible things. Before being elected President for the second time, he had been convicted of 34 felonies, and was being indicted in three other cases.

When he finally found a public that would lift the blame and guilt from him, it was a great release. It’s even better when it’s done preemptively, for things you haven’t done yet, but are about to do. That’s what the Supreme Court did for him on July 1, 2024, with blanket immunity for anything he had done or would do in the future as President.

And his base did that, as well. Before his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump boasted, “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for me.” Now, it’s going to be, “I could rape and assault a child.” Or could he? Will they? Or will the base finally shift? Have they finally had enough?

“The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.” —W.E.B. Du Bois