THE allegations against Donald Trump are just that – allegations. But, my, what allegations they are.
The President of the United States is mentioned in the Epstein files over a million times. That’s according to Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, speaking after running a name search on redacted documents made privately available to congressmen and women. The New York Times says Trump appears in what files it has examined nearly 40,000 times. You pays yer money and takes yer choice.
On Tuesday, an NPR investigation found that files relating to Donald Trump and the sexual abuse of women and minors have gone missing. These include FBI interview transcripts and notes from conversations with witnesses pertaining to the alleged sexual abuse of minors by Donald Trump.
California Representative Ted Lieu last week said: “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files there are highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”
The starkness of his words was chilling.
After his death in 2011, a tsunami of allegations against Sir Jimmy Savile emerged, so many indeed that it’s now believed that Savile could well have been one of the most prolific sexual abusers in the history of the United Kingdom. When Savile was buried and the allegations were swirling, journalists, commentators, politicians and biens pensants of every stripe stepped forward to wonder how on Earth such a monster could have continued to live the high life as a BBC celebrity never having known the cold touch of steel handcuffs, when so many people knew – just knew in their bones – that Savile was a wrong ’un.
Savile’s headstone was even removed from his grave some months following his death because of the depth of public anger at the claims being made against him and the detestation that the very mention of his name elicited in the ordinary Jo Soaps of the kingdom.
But get this: Great as the suspicion was that Savile was a child-abusing beast as he filmed his TV shows, ran his charity marathons and did his volunteer work in hospitals, the evidence of Savile’s crimes lacked the heft of what we actually know about Donald Trump in February, 2026.
Time will tell whether the torrent of allegations against Trump in the Epstein files (and most of the files have not yet been seen) have any substance. But enough has been proven both in a court of law and via his own vainglorious admissions that Trump is a voracious sexual predator. He was found liable in a civil court in 2023 and 2024 of having raped writer E. Jean Carroll and then defamed her, being ordered to pay his victim $84 million in punitive damages. Trump’s appeals have been rejected, as was his attempt to claim Presidential immunity.
In the past, Trump has boasted of being so famous that he could grab women he doesn’t know by the genitals. He talked in crude sexual terms on the radio about his own daughter. He admitted to creeping the dressing rooms of beauty pageants he owned in order to see women and girls (of indeterminate age) with little or no clothes on.
Had a Taoiseach or Prime Minister admitted to or been found culpable of one of these things his feet wouldn’t have touched the ground. But Trump survived the rape, abuse and general sexual creepiness admissions and went on to win a second term as President. As the Epstein child sex allegations swirl around his preposterously bouffanted head, the civil court judgment and Trump’s own lurid admissions are compelling admonitions to the United States – and to the world – to treat the Epstein files allegations with the utmost seriousness.
But it’s an admonition that has been cheerfully ignored by Loyal Ulster, which has confirmed that this year it will send another sizeable delegation of senior DUP and UUP figures to the White House for shamrock and Guinness photo opps with a man at the very centre of what’s alleged to be the biggest, most dangerous and powerful child sex ring ever to have existed.
The protocol should be obvious. If, for instance, a man accused of raping and abusing children appeared at a political event in an MLA’s constituency, would said MLA pose for a picture with him on the basis that said man was innocent until proven guilty? Of course not. Don’t be silly. Any political rep anywhere on the islands of Ireland and Britain with a semi-developed survival instinct would go to great lengths to avoid that picture. Recent history has shown us what happens when they don’t. Is the Office of the President of the United States so solemn, so awesome, so uniquely demanding of respect and deference that the basic and bog-standard rule of don’t-get-into-a-photo-with-a-possible-nonce goes out the window?
Paddy’s Day in DC was a peculiar one last year. As the diddly-dee music played, the Irish dancers pranced, the porter flowed and the shamrock wilted in the heat and Oirish bonhomie, unionist reps looked on with awkward smiles, no doubt wondering whether a bit of tartan and sword-dancing would have killed the White House party-planners. As they queued up for pix with the Pres, professional and selfie, the Epstein files hadn’t been released. All Donald Trump was guilty of was the civil rape thing, the genital-grabbing, the daughter dirty-talk and the changing room voyeurism. No biggie. At least not in comparison with what’s being alleged this year.
The biggest – indeed the only – punishment meted out to those political, media, judiciary and police types who failed to do their jobs in relation to Sir Jimmy Savile is the occasional and humiliating appearance of pictures of them in the super-predator’s company.
No unionist thought twice about jumping in frame with Trump last year, but one wonders whether the Damoclean sword that hangs over the President’s orange head is sharp and wickedly gleaming enough to give them pause for thought this year.
It might be alright to get a quick pic, who knows? Trump may have been on Epstein’s sex plane for entirely harmless reasons. The girls in the golfing fleshpot of Mar-a-Lago that Trump and Epstein admitted to enjoying so much might all have been over 18. The missing files may remain missing. It might even be that those nasty allegations being thrown around by elected reps about him raping children and threatening to kill them are baloney.
But when those unionist MLAs go into what’s left of the old White House as Trump reconstructs it as a 1920s bordello and they get the chance of a Trump group shot or even a selfie, they’ve a decision to make. Is this a cracking screensaver? Or could it turn out to be a Jimmy Savile job?
