Jeffrey Epstein Really Can Bring Trump Down

Two lives that tell the same story

Jeffrey Epstein was one of the only people I knew, back when Donald Trump was still, at best, a novelty candidate, to believe that Trump would become president. He was also, from the first, terrified of this outcome. Both views came from the same place: he understood that Trump was uniquely ruthless, with a preternatural, or as he put it “sociopathic,” focus on getting what he wanted.

They had spent more than ten years side-by-side in pursuit of fashion models (age of little consequence), in a post-playboy climate of permissibility, and access to capital, as markets and opportunities were geometrically expanding. At some point these two quests became, for both men, finely intertwined—money, power, permission, entitlement. But by the time Trump was running for president in 2015, their friendship had broken up with great enmity and promises from each man that they would be the agent of the personal destruction of the other. Epstein believed that if Trump became the president of the United States, he would not be safe from his former friend.