The President of the United States is a pedophile.
It is common, or at least it used to be, to portray Trump as a unique irruption into the American political scene: uniquely crass, uniquely rapey, uniquely popular. In that frame of mind, one might dismiss Trump's association with Epstein as yet another uniquely Trumpian deformity.
What if it isn't? What if the connection between reactionary MAGA politics and the sexual abuse of children is deeper than we want to admit?
The name for this idea is pedocon theory.
These ideas were so fringe 10 years ago that you would be looked at as a deviant yourself for even bothering to track how many republicans are caught committing child sexual assasult and grooming behaviors to lead to the same. I am looked at funny by conservatives and progressives alike for pointing out that challenges to age of consent and related topics ALWAYS come from the right, ALWAYS on the basis of religious exemptions to the law/freedom of religion, ALWAYS to promote the marriage of adult men to teen or pre-teen women they rape. This is biblical, according to them.
I don't know what it says about the state of 'discourse' that its a basically open and shut case that the president raped kids as part of an Israeli kompromat farm, and has now used the machinery of the federal government to not only cover it up, but provide the legal basis to make this all 'normal' in the future, forever. And I'm the weird one somehow.
In that sense, the pedocons have already won. This is already normalized and tolerated past the point of sanity. The erosion isn't happening, it happened already.