Trump's Epstein problem, explained

Man runs for Biggest Bear on the Mountain. Man sets bear trap to catch other bears running for same office. Man gets elected Biggest Bear on the Mountain, forgets he set bear trap. Man steps on trap. Man is caught.

This isn’t one of those be careful what you wish for stories. It’s much better than that. It’s a story about what happens to arrogant, careless people when their arrogance and carelessness catches up to them.

Take a trip with me now to New York City in the 1980’s. The years of financial crisis and “Ford to City: Drop Dead” are behind us. The city is changing. You walk into your favorite restaurant on a street corner in the West Village. It’s a tiny place with one of those diagonal doors and white tablecloths and a single votive candle on each table and servers so silent they seem to float on a cushion of air from table to table. The word used in a restaurant review is “hushed.” It’s the kind of place you take your parents when they come to town to visit because it’s classy and quiet, evidence of how far you’ve come since you started out in a railroad flat in the East Village.

Push open the door on a Friday night, and you’re hit immediately by a wall of noise. It’s coming from two tables of men along the brick wall across from the window looking out on the street. Ties askew, they’re in shirt sleeves smoking cigars, the two tables pushed together, empty wine bottles everywhere, telling stories and jokes, recounting an Eagle one of them made on the golf course, shouting numbers at each other, a hundred thou, man…you kidding me…I’m talking about half a mil.

You sit down at a table in the back, as far as the hostess can get you from the table of loudmouths. She leans over conspiratorially: Wall Streeters. They’re taking over, she whispers.

Indeed. Evidence abounds: Lincoln Town Cars double and triple parked outside clubs and restaurants; four-figure rents in Soho; five-figure rents uptown; million-dollar townhouse sales. A friend is writing for a new magazine called “Manhattan Inc.” that celebrates money and power on Wall Street. The magazine is kind of distasteful, but the pay can’t be beat, he says.

Very pretty young women in high heels and skimpy dresses and puffy furs are everywhere. You meet one of them at a quiet New Years Eve dinner at a friend’s. She’s by herself. Her married boyfriend is with his family tonight. He pays for her East Side two-bedroom apartment, trips to Miami and the Bahamas and Europe. They’re flying to Brazil on his private plane next week with his business partner and his girlfriend, who lives a couple of blocks from the young woman’s apartment. They had dinner earlier in the week to plan the Brazil trip. Their boyfriends gave each of them a thousand dollars just to buy lingerie for the trip. She sounds astonished at her good fortune, but there is an empty sadness in her eyes as we watch the fireworks over the East River from a large window in the high-rise. She knows it’s not going to last. She doesn’t know what’s next.

This is the way it began, Manhattan awash in money and looks and luxury and cocaine and fun, until not even that was enough. The women got prettier, the outfits skimpier, the private jets had more seats and flew longer distances, the houses in the Hamptons got bigger, the parties more lavish, the restaurant dinners and bottle clubs more expensive, until even that wasn’t enough.

The really powerful men lived in world of confidences shared, secrets kept. Wives over here, girlfriends over there, insider stock tips on the golf course, after parties in hotel suites, people there to do everything from schedules to shopping to hiring and firing assistants to arranging dates for golfing buddies to keeping the lists of favors done, favors returned, and most important of all, who owes me.

There were rooms within rooms within rooms. On the outside edges were rich people with big apartments and houses in the Hamptons. Beyond the next door were really rich ones with houses on the beach in the Hamptons and private jets and helicopters to get there, and private chefs and homes in the South of France and St. Barts. Inside the next door were the people who owned the really rich people with the homes and apartments and jets and helicopters. They owned them because they were owed more than money. They owned them with secrets.

It wasn’t blackmail. It was dirtier and more illegal than blackmail, because the secrets were tighter and fewer. It wasn’t just one guy having secrets on another, or on others. It was people having secrets on each other, a private club of secrets that held them together like ugly, sticky glue. You read accounts about abuse within a church, or in a cult, or even in a small town. Secrets in a church or a cult or a town have a closeness of mutual belief and custom and culture to hold them within.

Jeffrey Epstein had something much smaller and more specific: fear that was even more powerful because the secrets were terrible in their ordinariness. There was no blood. Nobody died. Even the sex was ordinary: The way you hold his penis is like this. The only thing not ordinary was the power of the secret keepers and the powerlessness of their victims: girls in their teens who could at once be frightened and enticed into silence.

It went on for years…for decades actually. The money accumulated along with the luxuries and the excess. Apartments became townhomes. Travel became private jets. Hotel suites and beachfront homes became a private island. It’s as if you got past the rope at Studio 54, and then you got invited to the basement, and then you went into the room beyond the private door in the other room in the basement. That is where the action was. That is where you wanted to be.

Donald Trump was one of those men with money in the early days of go-go New York City. He put up a building with his name on it on Fifth Avenue. He owned hotels and condos and then he owned casinos and he owned a private plane and a private helicopter and he owned golf courses and then he owned one of the largest, most famous homes in Palm Beach, and he ditched his first wife for a more beautiful and glamorous and younger wife, and then he ditched her for another beautiful and glamorous and younger wife, and he got on the list of the 400 richest men in the U.S., and it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough. He ran for president. He was elected. That wasn’t enough. He stole nuclear secrets, and that wasn’t enough. He got himself elected president again, and that wasn’t enough.

What was enough? It’s right there in his prose-poem to Jeffrey Epstein: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” To Donald Trump, his note tells us ten billion dollars worth of truth about him. That’s how much he sued his former friend Rupert Murdoch for printing it. What made that little note worth $10 billion? There’s nothing in the words about sex, nothing about underage girls, nothing about private parties, nothing about all the salacious stuff we’ve heard about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and what they got up to that involved enough illegality to get her 20 years in federal prison and cause Epstein to either commit suicide or be murdered in jail. It doesn’t matter what happened to Epstein, really, because there is already enough information out there to paint a picture none of them want us to see.

It doesn’t matter what Ghislaine Maxwell said to Todd Blanche. We already know she pimped for Epstein and Trump and others. We already know she arranged for underage girls to have sex with adult males who were rich and famous and powerful. All of this is already known to us.

Ghislaine Maxwell will learn sometime after September 29 if the Supreme Court will take up her appeal of her conviction. She will not face questioning by the House Oversight Committee until after the Supreme Court makes up its mind about her case. It doesn’t matter what the issues of Maxwell’s appeal are, or whether the Supreme Court will hear her case, or whether she will take the Fifth or answer the questions of the Oversight Committee.

None of this matters because we already know enough about the entire Epstein story to put the lot of them behind bars in our minds, which is as close as we’ll ever come to see any of them punished for their unthinkably terrible deeds with underage girls. A few secrets will leak out here and there – the Trump birthday wishes to Epstein is such a leak – but none of the secrets will matter, either.

None of it matters because Donald Trump is President of the United States, and Todd Blanche, who was his private lawyer, is now the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and he runs the day-to-day business of the Department of Justice. So, we know that whatever Ghislaine Maxwell told Blanche, no matter what she knows about Trump and other famous and powerful men, nobody will be charged, and nobody is going to end up behind bars like she is.

What matters is that Trump set a trap to catch other bears and stepped into the trap and caught himself instead. What matters is that he chained the trap to the MAGA tree, and he lost the key. What matters is that the fear Epstein and Trump used for years and years to keep their secrets has now engulfed him. He’s not afraid of Putin. He’s not afraid of the Democrats. He’s certainly not afraid of his fellow Republicans in the Congress. But Pam Bondi told him that his name is everywhere in the Epstein files, and he is afraid of something that’s in there.

What matters is that Donald Trump is afraid. That should change everything for the Democrats if they play their hand right, because a Donald Trump who is scared can be beaten.