Today, something cracked in the armor of American impunity. Dozens of Jeffrey Epstein's survivors stood before cameras in Washington, recounting years of systematic rape and trafficking that began when they were children. At precisely the same moment, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office calling their testimony a "Democratic hoax" while ordering military flyovers to drown out their voices.
The juxtaposition was obscene even by Trump's standards. Maria Lacerda, recruited at 14. Virginia Giuffre's brother, speaking for his sister who was taken at 16 from Mar-a-Lago. Haley Robson, threatened into becoming a recruiter herself after being assaulted. These women described being trafficked to Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Israel—passed around, as Giuffre once said, "like a platter of fruit."
While they spoke, Trump literally said: "I don't want to talk about this anymore. It doesn't matter."
But here's what changed today: The Republican wall of silence began to crack.
Anna Paulina Luna, a hardcore Trump loyalist, walked out of yesterday's House Oversight Committee briefing visibly shaken. "I don't think anybody understands how far reaching and huge this is," she said. "There are a lot of very powerful people that need to go to jail." Nancy Mace left the same briefing hyperventilating, unable to process what she'd heard. Today, Marjorie Taylor Greene—yes, that MTG—stood beside Democrats demanding the release of the Epstein files.
The survivors revealed something else: According to banking records the DOJ possesses but won't release, Epstein withdrew $1 million in cash in a single year from JP Morgan Chase to pay victims. Even at the conservative estimate of payments, that represents thousands of incidents of abuse. The FBI, CIA, and DOJ have all of this—the banking records, the surveillance, the names—locked away as classified material.
Brad Edwards, the victims' attorney, dropped another bombshell: In 2009, Donald Trump cooperated with their investigation. Back then, before he was president, before he understood how deeply the money trail might implicate him, Trump was happy to talk about Epstein. Now he calls the same victims he once tried to help "a hoax."
The most damning evidence comes from Trump's own mouth. A month ago on Air Force One, when asked about losing spa attendants to Epstein, Trump said: "He stole them from me." Not "hired"—stole. Like property. Multiple young women, by his own admission, were taken from Mar-a-Lago to Epstein's operation.
As Lev Parnas pointed out during our discussion, this isn't just about Trump anymore. It's about the 212 Republican members of Congress who could sign the discharge petition and force the release of these files tomorrow. James Comer, Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan—they're not just enablers. They're active participants in a cover-up of industrial-scale child rape.
The bipartisan coalition forming around this issue—Thomas Massey and Ro Khanna leading the charge—needs just two more votes to force a floor vote that would compel the Justice Department to release everything. Trump can't stop a congressional order without creating a constitutional crisis that would make Watergate look like a parking violation.
The GOP marketed itself to America as the party that would expose the deep state pedophile cabal. QAnon radicalized millions with promises that Trump would release the Epstein files and expose the elite trafficking rings. Now we watch in real-time as Trump and his party desperately work to keep those very files buried.
This is the inflection point. Either the Republican Party stands with child rape victims, or it stands with their rapists. There's no middle ground when survivors are begging for transparency and the president calls them liars.
Today's press conference wasn't just about the past—it was about what America will tolerate going forward. These women, after twenty years of PTSD and silence, found the courage to stand together and demand justice. The least we can do is amplify their voices until the walls of this cover-up come crashing down.
The question now isn't whether Trump is implicated—his panic confirms what we already knew. The question is whether 212 Republicans in Congress will continue to be complicit in protecting a network that raped children on an industrial scale, or whether they'll finally choose country over a criminal.
The survivors showed us the path forward. Now we need to walk it.
