At end of 2025, resolves based on the probability (rounded to 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%) that Trump ever (when above the age of 20) had any kind of sexual relations with a girl below the legal age of consent.
A broad but reasonable definition of “sexual relations” will be used. The age of consent is based on the laws of that jurisdiction at that time.
My plan is to resolve by averaging probabilities given on a poll of legitimate Manifold users. I will conduct this poll when 2025 is over, assuming that the correct resolution still needs to be determined. I may resolve YES early if clear evidence emerges.
Originally I said this market would resolve to my judgement (my current gut feeling is close to 50%), and I reserve the right to change the rules to ensure that the resolution is fair and reasonable.
General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.
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People used to ask "If Epstein files don't incriminate Trump, why doesn't he want them released." This week has taught us that even if the Epstein files don't incriminate Trump, mentioning his name a bunch times while talking about shady stuff other people did is enough to make Trump look like he personally raped kids.
@GG Cardinal Richelieu — ‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.’
@uair01 Trump drew an underage girl’s outline in his “enigmas never age” letter and was accused of raping a 13 year old with Epstein prior to ever becoming president and prior to Epstein’s second arrest.
@GG it's amazing the lengths people will go to defend the world's most abhorrent man. Is it irrelevant to you that he has bragged about sexually assaulting women, made sexualized comments about minors (including his own daughter), and was actually held liable in court for the assault of E. Jean Carroll? Does a decades long friendship (including sharing Thanksgiving in 2017 according to these emails!) with the world's number one pedophile just look like a coincidence?
@ScottO I added [read description] at the beginning of the title, which I probably should have done long ago
I'm confused about why the probability has gone up. As far as I can tell, yesterday's revelations are evidence against something like this having happened, see e.g. this Washington Post article titled "Epstein wrote that Trump knew of sexual abuse but didn't participate".
What am I missing?
@EricNeyman You are probably missing the fact that the market resolves to a poll and is therefore a popularity contest / minnow bait, having very little to do with the question in the title. Impressively bad resolution criteria for a mod.
@EricNeyman the wide array of emails that just came out where Epstein said Trump was dirty. Also the long history of their decades long close relationship
@ZaneJoiner the revelations are just that Trump knew about what Epstein was doing! We already could have guessed that, lol!
@ZaneJoiner yes, I think the odds are probably between 1 and 10% that Trump "had sexual relations with an underage girl"
@ZaneJoiner yes, those are the revelations! They reflect quite poorly on Trump! But they were (1) predictable and (2) I don't think any good forecasters had previously been under the illusion that Trump was of some sort of solid moral character around stuff like this!?
@bens This market is a constant reminder of how irrational people can be about their political enemies! Nothing revealed this week was at all surprising IMO. I've read up on this a bunch to bet on the relevant real money markets and Trump really does not seem guilty of any crime here aside from failure to report things. Terrible politicians are not necessarily pedophiles!
@Joshua I find people are very willing to give a guy who has openly admitted to sexual assault and has a laundry list of sexual assault allegations the benefit of the doubt for some reason, and typically those people are his supporters. I don't think he's a pedophile simply because I don't like him. He's got a lot of associated red flags and behaviors (including hanging out with the world's #1 pedophile for decades). I think for some people, the only evidence they'd accept is Trump himself saying he did it. What do you think that birthday card REALLY meant?
@ZaneJoiner "Red flags" are not nearly strong enough evidence to update what should be an extremely low prior on a very well-vetted public figure having a skeleton of this magnitude in their closet! Many famous people hung out with Epstein! Nowhere near 50% of them are pedophiles!
@Joshua again I'm staggered by how little it seems you know about this guy and his well-documented history of predatory behavior and sexualized comments towards girls! The "well-vetted public figure" literally bragged about sexually assaulting women ("grab them by the p****" ) and hung out with the #1 pedophile for decades, but somehow him being directly involved is impossible or ridiculous?
@Joshua what do you mean by "well-vetted" here? Sure there's been tons of attention on him, but never the way a campaign would vet a potential VP candidate with that person's cooperation.
@jcb Someone running for president is the most well vetted person on the planet. Billions of dollars incentivize finding evidence for things exactly like this. The man has the most debated wikipedia psge of all time. Every aspect of his life has been analyzed and re-analyzed to death. Not to mention Maxwell was imprisoned under Biden for four years with every incentive to testify against the most hated asshole in the country.
Our prior on his(or bill clinton!) having participated in Epstein’s crimes should be microscopic after all that and no evidence of wrongdoing. If we had an omniscient oracle to resolve on I'd bet this market to under 1%.
@Joshua again, the man openly bragged about committing sexual assault. He's broken the law repeatedly without remorse and has a notable reputation for predatory behavior (as you can see on his wiki page). Epstein himself got a sweetheart deal from the government, so the idea that "there must be nothing there" is ridiculous. There's plenty of people who are incentivized to cover up his behavior because they profit off of him. Also, Maxwell has been given special privileges in prison during Trump's term! The man literally wished her well when she was arrested for her sex trafficking!
To me it seems like you just refuse to even acknowledge the possibility that the man who was Epstein's best friend was involved in his crimes. I could be totally wrong! But there's a lot of smoke for no fire. Surely at least some of the people who willingly continued to associate with Epstein participated? And again, what do you think that birthday card meant?
@ZaneJoiner no one is disputing that Trump is bad orange man! But this market is pretty explicit (although it unfortunately resolves via poll lol). I'm willing to believe that a poll of motivated users will lead to a % north of 50% on this question, but fundamentally, I'd place the odds of this actually happening at somewhere between 1 and 10% (I'm not quite as confident as @Joshua)
@Joshua Why would the federal government do so much to hide the evidence it didn't incriminate trump of something?
@bens Trump doesn't have to hide the evidence, he just needs to make it seem like he is making a good faith effort to hide it, so he doesn't get shellacked by the vested interests affected.
@bens i think several people are disputing that orange man is bad enough of a person to do this, and I have laid out my arguments as for why yes in fact, he is bad enough to have done this. The general argument against it has been saying "but surely he can't ACTUALLY be that bad, he's the president!"
@ZaneJoiner manifold is full of people who voted red. Often markets here are skewed very right and there are definitely posts and comments that feel kinda astroturfy, and whitewash trump, vance etc
@Joshua what’s up with Trump lying about never visiting Epstein’s little island? Not only he lied about that, he went there many times
@MaxE There is no evidence that Trump visited Little St. James, aka "Epstein Island".
Trump's name does appear on the flight logs for Epstein's jet, but those flights were exclusively between Florida and New York/New Jersey. The last time Trump's name appears on an Eptein flight log is January 5, 1997, 15 months before Epstein purchase Little St. James.
Edit: @BenMoore
@MaxE First, I'd like to apologize for tagging you in my comment, which was actually intended as a reply to @BenMoore's allegation that Trump "lied" about never visiting Epstein Island. Trump has done a lot of bad stuff but I think it's unlikely that he did that bad thing in particular.
As for why Trump didn't want to release Epstein files (before changing course now and saying he does), all I can do is speculate:
A)
It would be imprudent and in some cases illegal to release the full collection of Epstein-related documents. Some materials will contain information protected by law: victim identities, witness names, grand-jury proceedings, or details about investigative methods that can’t be disclosed.
Because of those restrictions, any public release will necessarily be incomplete. And whenever a document release is partial, people speculate about what is still hidden. So from a political-strategy standpoint, Trump may see little to gain from pushing for a release that will never look ‘complete’ to the public.
B)
A second issue is that many people only see headlines or social-media commentary, and this creates a cycle of misinterpretation. For example, Megyn Kelly’s ‘difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old’ remark was about Jeffrey Epstein, not Trump, but it was widely misread.
Other newly released emails include Epstein claiming that Trump knew about Epstein's sex abuses, (bad, but not the same actually raping children) or reference the long-public 2016 lawsuit alleging rape. These documents do not provide new evidence of Trump committing sex crimes, they simply show what Epstein and others were saying internally.
So Trump’s name appears in the documents without those documents independently establishing that he committed sex crimes. But casual readers will equate ‘mentioned in the file dump’ with ‘evidence exists.’ This pattern can lead uninformed readers to think the releases contain new proof of sex crimes when they actually do not.
@Joshua the “well vetted” argument is very out of touch with the constant scandals and insanity of the Trump campaigns. The guy was already accused of raping a 13 year old with Epstein in 2016 during that vetting process. It, like many other things which normally end political campaigns, such as making fun of McCaine for getting tortured, attacking the parents of dead soldiers, saying he might nuke Europe, saying Tiannamen square was a great show of force, saying Obama founded ISIS, having many credible sexual assault allegations (later with actual legal consequences in Jean Carrol’s case), etc. was ultimately buried by the constant churn of new scandals.
I mean he got re-elected after getting impeached repeatedly, having felonies, having indisputably cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star, pushing for people to “find him” enough votes to overthrow the election, etc. etc. The dynamics around Trump have never been about a lack of dirt and disqualifying information on him.
We’re in a post-truth world where this vetting no longer holds weight with his base and again, that vetting already did include accusations of raping a victim with Epstein. These accusations are like 10 years old.
yes he was vetted. And that resulted in this:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/assault-allegations-donald-trump-recapped
But it did not result in him losing.