Jeffrey Epstein, along with everyone else, watched Donald Trump’s announcement that he was running for president in 2015.
In some sense, he saw it like the rest of us: as a preposterous bit of mugging for the cameras. But, unlike the rest of us, he was aware that this could be something unique hurtling through the political and existential universe—and, not incidentally, directly towards him.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is the Donald Trump story. We might like to believe, as a form of moral flattery, that it is about the victims. But Jeffrey Epstein achieves his worldwide significance in the reflection of Donald Trump. He’s a Trump proxy.
While he certainly didn’t anticipate that, he understood that having spent more than a decade witnessing behavior that would have logically disqualified anyone from the presidency, this meant he was bound to Trump in a potentially troublesome way for both men.
Here, too, still like the rest of us, he did not yet, in 2015, see the presidency as a plausible outcome for Donald Trump.
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