I mentioned yesterday the importance of keeping up with stories that are absurd in their substance but real in their consequence. Along those lines I wanted to give you a brief update on the Jeffrey Epstein story. If you’ve been following it closely this may not be news. But I know not everyone is doing so. And while I said that it’s important for political journalists to keep track of these stories, that doesn’t mean that you (a non-journalist) have to.

So a few points.

The first is that Donald Trump really does appear to be seriously considering issuing a pardon to Epstein confederate, procurer and one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. I’m not saying he will. But I think it’s a real possibility. All the standard signs are there. He’s going into full “finding the real killers” mode, and getting “the truth” from Maxwell is central to that. The question has all the standard will he or won’t he drama. But this isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve been at this long enough to know the signs when Trump is warming to an idea and when he’s laying the public groundwork for it. We have the standard lines like, I haven’t decided to but I totally have the power to pardon her if I want. We’ll see. Everybody agrees I’m “allowed.” We’re seeing all the standard lines in the progression.

A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?

There are a few different ways to answer this. At one level, in MAGA world, Donald Trump is different. No rules apply to him. It’s good to be the king. At another level, it’s a complicated question comparing the horror of different kinds of sexual predation, or whether a person who does one is likely do do another. But there is one level of MAGA’s hyper-focus on pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy theories which needs to be emphasized. Because at a basic level, that obsession has nothing to do with pedophilia as a thing in itself — not as most of us might understand it.