TRUMP AND THE DEGRADATION OF TRUTH

Some stories don’t fade with time. They haunt the hallways of power, scratching at the paint no matter how many coats of whitewash are applied. What Donald Trump carries into the historical record is not just a political legacy defined by division, deception, and authoritarian flirtations—it’s the dark, unresolved ledger of how a man accused by at least 25 women of sexual misconduct still managed to command a following that chants his name like gospel. It’s the unbearable weight of silence, broken over and over by women whose accounts—detailed, consistent, aching—were met not with justice, but mockery, legal threats, and dismissal.

Take Jill Harth, a name that should ring out like a bell in every discussion of character. In 1992, while in the company of her partner and Trump, she says the now-former president attempted to grope her under a restaurant table. Months later, at Mar-a-Lago, she says he pushed her against a wall in Ivanka’s room and forced himself on her. She escaped. Filed suit in ’97. Then withdrew—pressured, outmaneuvered, or maybe just exhausted. It’s a pattern we’ve seen—lawsuits extinguished not by truth but by power’s smoke machine.

And then, the unthinkable. The story of “Katie Johnson” — a pseudonym, a shield for a 13-year-old girl who alleged she was raped at parties orchestrated by Jeffrey Epstein, with Trump as one of the predators. Four parties. Repeated assaults. A slap to the face. A threat against her life. The lawsuit was filed, dismissed, refiled, and then withdrawn again. Because that’s how fear works, it isolates, threatens, and shadows your every step. The press conference was scheduled, then cancelled. Death threats will do that.

People ask: Why didn’t she follow through? Why didn’t Jill press charges? Why did so many wait? The answer is as old as the corridors of male power: because it’s designed to break you. Because for every accusation there’s a media machine, a legal bulldozer, a Twitter army ready to call you a liar, a slut, a Democrat, a whore.

And still, Trump walked away. Not quietly. He tweeted his way through it. Mocked women’s looks, bragged about groping, and was rewarded not with handcuffs but with the presidency.

That’s what sticks with me: of all those accused and tied to Epstein’s videos of horror, Trump was the one who never truly left Epstein’s side from Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan to the Lolita Express and even rented his plane recently, as if the memories weren’t grotesque enough.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about power—the way it warps truth, silences victims, and spins a monstrous history into a punchline. But make no mistake: these stories, like Harth’s, like Jane Doe’s, are etched into the soul of the nation, no matter how hard some try to scrub them away.

We remember because forgetting would be a betrayal.
We write because silence is complicity.
We believe because someone has to.