If there were any evidence that Donald Trump had engaged in criminality in this matter, Occam’s razor says we’d know about it by now.

I can’t help but be extremely skeptical that the United States government has evidence that Donald Trump was directly involved in illegal activity in association with Jeffrey Epstein and that it is now covering it up at Trump’s or his allies’ behest.

We are ten years into the Donald Trump Era of American politics. The man has contested three high-stakes general elections against the Democratic Party — and two of those elections occurred while Democrats controlled the Department of Justice and the FBI. Trump, as we all know, is hated, vilified, and feared by partisan Democrats. To Democrats, he’s an ogre who haunts their dreams. He “erases” trans people, he is a fascist, and he is the destroyer of American democracy.

I find it very hard to believe that the same Democratic officials who would use the so-called Russiagate investigation to try to destroy Trump and the same Democratic officials who would try to prosecute Trump in Washington, D.C., Georgia, and New York over January 6 and his mishandling of classified material, wouldn’t use any available evidence of Trump’s illegal actions in association with Epstein against him.

Even if you eliminate 2016 from the mix because of Bill Clinton’s known associations with Epstein and the way in which that would have complicated Hillary Clinton’s political prosecution of Trump during his first general election, there is no plausible reason Democrats would have refused to use the Epstein weapon against Trump in 2020 or 2024 if they had the weapon to hand.

What’s more, I’m sure that they poured immense resources into opposition research about the possibility of this silver bullet to use against Trump to its bitter end.

Even if there were some powerful Democrats who would have preferred to let this particular sleeping dog lie — out of some theorized uniparty pact of Mutually Assured Destruction — is it plausible that not one ambitious Democratic politician or operative would not have gladly leaked to the press whatever he knew on the subject?

In today’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty writes:

Whether or not Trump ever engaged in illegal sexual activity with a minor around Epstein, there is little doubt that Trump finds his years upon years of Bacchanalian debauchery with a notorious sex trafficker to be extremely embarrassing — even for a man who can seem so shameless — and wants to downplay it as much as possible. The most generous interpretation of Trump’s actions in those years is that he noticed his friend, the single hedonistic billionaire was always around girls who looked younger than 18, but it never crossed his mind that something illegal could be going on.

I think that’s right. And I’d add one thing: If there were any evidence that Donald Trump had engaged in criminality in this matter — as opposed to being happy to associate himself with Epstein and party with him as a pair of Palm Beach cads and playboys, of which there is ample evidence — Occam’s razor says we’d know about it by now.