The conclusion of Dr. Stacey Patton’s Substack piece “Trump Ain’t the First Person to be Accused of Pedophilia.”

In my forthcoming book on child lynchings, I argue that white communities routinely externalized their own intra-familial sexual vulnerabilities by imagining Black male sexuality as the primary danger to white girlhood, even as instances of incest and child abuse within white families were widespread and often unaddressed. The spectacle of lynching thus became a ritual performance of racial purification and an attempt to stabilize white domestic order by violently policing an invented threat while refusing to confront the pedophilia, incest, and rape occurring within white homes.

In this sense, the period’s child-protection reforms and racial terror were mutually reinforcing as both served to preserve white reproductive futures, fortify racial boundaries, and obscure the extent to which the true crisis of pedophilia was rooted not in Black communities but within white patriarchal households themselves.

Mandatory reporting laws, introduced in the 1960s, were the first attempt to treat child abuse systematically, but even these were born from medical rather than child-centered frameworks. Sexual abuse was added almost incidentally and remained inconsistently enforced for decades.

Institutions, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts, responded to allegations of abuse by protecting predators and silencing victims. Elite men benefitted from networks of judges, bishops, lawyers, donors, and editors who saw institutional reputation as more valuable than children’s lives. Media organizations, universities, athletic programs, and political parties have followed the same pattern: delay, deny, discredit, and disappear the victims. These patterns did not occur accidentally. They are the logical extension of centuries-old norms that viewed children, especially nonwhite children, as expendable, and elite white men as pillars of national stability.

The American project has long depended on believing that powerful white men must not fall, because their fall would expose the fragility of the entire system. This is why every revelation about Trump’s involvement with Epstein feels anticlimactic, even predictable.

And Trump keeps surviving because his profile matches the oldest protected category in American life: the powerful white man whose predation must never destabilize the nation’s myth of itself. Until this country confronts the historical foundations of that protection, from the colonial household to the modern political machine, every “new” revelation will feel like déjà vu.

We are not learning anything new about Donald J. Trump. We are learning, again, what America has always chosen to be. A nation that does not simply fail children, a nation that fundamentally hates children.