President Trump has shown himself willing to sue those people who libel him. I hope he’s paying attention to the libelous statements that Democrats are making by trying to tie him to Jeffrey Epstein. 

To date, the tens of thousands of Epstein documents already available do not show that Trump was guilty of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s perversions. Indeed, Trump seems to have been the only public figure to sever ties with Epstein long before the police caught up with him and, once they had caught up with him, to work with Epstein’s victims to help them. Moreover, Epstein’s victims have explicitly disavowed engaging with Trump or seeing him engage with anyone else.

That hasn’t stopped the Democrats. They’ve been rewriting history to “prove” that Trump was entangled in Epstein’s web. So far, based on the available evidence, they can’t touch him. Instead, they succeed in smearing him only through outright lies, suppression of facts, or innuendo.

The GOP-led House Oversight Committee put together a long thread showing the way Democrats are misrepresenting Trump. Cloudflare’s failure prevents my embedding it here, but you can read the thread yourself, and I urge you to do so. It reveals how Democrats are dishonestly manipulating the record.

Other Democrats have come right out and accused Trump of pedophilia—which, under the old English common law, could make them liable for the tort of “libel per se.” This is a special class of accusations that are automatically assumed to be damaging.

A type of defamatory statement that falls in this class is to accuse someone of having committed a crime of “moral turpitude.” Pedophilia falls squarely within that category. If you can prove someone said the words (easily enough done here), and you can prove that the words were untrue, you are automatically entitled to damages.

So, who’s been doing the accusing? One of the people who has paired Trump with pedophiles is Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass). He tried to be clever because he didn’t name Trump explicitly. Instead, he stated that a child sex trafficking ring was being run out of Mar-a-Lago—and Mar-a-Lago, quite obviously, means Trump himself. The two are indistinguishable in the public mind:

If (as I anticipate) future Epstein documents continue to show that Trump is innocent of wrongdoing, Rep. McGovern cannot claim the Speech or Debate Clause as a defense to legal action. That clause applies only to statements made on the floor of the House or Senate. McGovern made this statement on X.

And then there’s the entity known as Occupy Democrats, which even Wikipedia says “publishes hyperpartisan content,^[15] clickbait,^[21] and false information.^[23][24]” Occupy Democrats’ Facebook page boasts 11 million followers, and it’s very active, putting up sometimes dozens of posts a day.

One of those posts, with Occupy Democrats’ name proudly appended, relayed McGovern’s potentially libelous statement:

In another post, Occupy Democrats deployed a very peculiar type of “logic” to challenge Karoline Leavitt’s robust and factual defense against the pedophile claims. It insisted that “an avalanche of Epstein files reveals that “Trump ‘knew about the girls’ was ‘dirty’ and ‘spent hours’ at the pedophile’s house.” (In other words, Trump is a pedophile.)

Occupy Democrats was forced to concede that Virginia Guiffre (whom Democrats tried to disguise as just a “VICTIM”) explicitly said that Trump was never involved. That left only innuendo, with the absence of evidence filling in for proof:

Even if Trump did not prey on Giuffre — and it's possible that she was simply afraid of accusing him of wrongdoing — that doesn't preclude him from having preyed on other underage girls. He spent an enormous amount of time with Epstein, clearly knew about his predations, and is himself an avowed sexual predator and adjudicated rapist.

The Occupy people were also forced to concede that Trump broke with Epstein—a fixture in Palm Beach—long before anyone else. (Indeed, Trump was the only one, even as Democrats like Bill Gates, Larry Summers, George Stephanopoulos, Katie Couric, and others, continued to pal around with Epstein despite his sex crime conviction.)

Nevertheless, to Occupy Democrats, Trump’s righteous behavior is proof of his guilt:

Trump has admitted that the real reason that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago was that the pedophile billionaire "stole" Giuffre and other workers. The use of the word "stole" highlights how Trump viewed these women as objects to be hoarded and fought over. His problem with Epstein wasn't that he was a creep, it's that he was out-creeping him.

The post continues in this vein, dismissing facts as irrelevant and asserting what is currently baseless supposition as fact. The obvious conclusion it’s pushing—that Trump is a pedophile—is something it’s doing without any evidence. And that, absent a change in the available information, could be the basis of a libel per se lawsuit.

I sincerely hope that Trump sues people who wrongfully call him a pedophile. That smear is not mere “politics as usual,” that is, the slings and arrows of attacks that occur if you’re going to step into the public arena. Instead, it is a smear so vile that, for centuries, the English common law system said you didn’t have to prove damages. Being defamed in this way is fundamentally damaging and deserving of redress.