Epstein’s emails are the end of America as they ruined it

The ex-skipper of Harvard, and the professor(s). A billionaire (from Silicon Valley), but not many wives — and featuring guest appearances by the MAGA publisher of Breitbart News, a former Israeli prime minister, a past president … and a future one.

This metaphorical Epstein Island — people sending, or featured in, the emails of the late disgraced financier and sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein, released last week by a House committee — is kind of like TV’s Gilligan’s Island … if everyone had a truckload more money than Thurston Howell III, and was also a lot dumber.

Last week’s stunning document dump by the House Oversight Committee of Epstein’s emails, mostly from the 2010s, among 20,000 pages from his estate, can and should be viewed through several prisms. The main media focus has understandably been on his leering close friend in the 1990s and 2000s, now-President Donald Trump, who is mentioned many times over. There’s arguably no “smoking gun” directly linking Trump to any specific act of sexual misconduct in Epstein’s lurid world, but more than enough innuendo that POTUS 45 and 47 “knew about the girls,” and possibly much more, to fuel a Watergate-level frenzy.

I don’t know if the emails, so far, are enough to take down Trump, but the president should be even more worried — and he probably is — about the much deeper rot that’s already been laid bare about the entire decrepit class of men (because they’re almost all men) who rule the world with atrocious grammar amid a nonstop booty call.

I’m not a financial expert, but if I had disposable cash, I’d avoid the hyperinflated artificial intelligence bubble and invest in a company that manufactures pitchforks.

The QAnon folks were almost there! These emails prove there really is a global cabal of the world’s most powerful and wealthy elites, linked to the most repulsive child sex trafficking operation we know about. No, it doesn’t involve pizzeria basements or blood-drinking rituals — at least as far as we know so far. But these missives do reveal the evil banality of the world’s most rich and famous, whose vast pursuit of money or teenaged blondes or whatever knew no bounds, or, at long last, any sense of decency.

The Nation’s Jeet Heer nailed it when he wrote after the email dump that the Epstein scandal “has always been a scandal about the ruling class as a whole, not one individual or political party,” adding that “Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together.”

And ignorance is no defense. By the 2000s, the murky but wildly rich financier’s predilection for underage girls was hardly a secret. In 2008, in a sweetheart deal, he pleaded guilty in Florida to a charge of procuring a 17-year-old girl for prostitution, but prosecutors had evidence linking him to about three dozen other girls, including some as young as 13. And yet, most of the emails from powerful people released by the committee came after those revelations, up through his 2019 second indictment and his death in a federal jail in Manhattan under mysterious circumstances.

Some of the most telling exchanges are not the more than 1,000 emails from Epstein, his convicted partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell, or their pals that mention Trump (who, wisely for him, never learned to use email), but involve Epstein’s misogyny-soaked friendship with Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and Harvard president.

Summers had lost that plum Ivy League post in 2006, in good measure because of a speech in which he’d questioned the intellect of top female scientists. During the 2010s, when the Obama administration or cable TV wasn’t still treating him as an economic seer, the married Summers turned to this convicted sex trafficker for advice on how to hit on a younger, attractive protégée, or just to commiserate.

“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote Epstein in 2017, referring to this episode at the school. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”

You may remember that 2017, the first year of Trump’s first presidency, is when the #MeToo movement against male sexual harassment and misconduct exploded. That email from Summers is one of the very few that even alludes to the social upheavals of the tumultuous 2010s that also included Occupy Wall Street, the tea party, Black Lives Matter, and other movements targeting privilege and inequity. Most of this prattle is instead just rich dudes talking about how to get themselves richer … or just how to get off.

Still, as Heer captures in his analysis for the Nation, the thought-to-be-secret communications of the elites increasingly involved enhanced security for the 1 Percent and ways to silence protests as that decade devolved, including scheming with the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, about launching a cybersecurity start-up. The world’s shrewdest investors knew the pitchfork bubble was coming before you did.

In the six years since Epstein was found dead, however, it has been the political backlash his email correspondents, like the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, have heavily funded that has advanced while warding off the revolution. This was the ultimate goal of this sordid chat group: to desperately cling to their dying hierarchies around patriarchy and white supremacy, and to portray the #MeToo movement as going too far, when it’s obvious it didn’t go nearly far enough. It was during those fraught years that they stumbled into the perfect avatar in the unlikely Trump presidency.

Now, it’s a headline that Trump “knew about the girls,” but, of course, he knew about the girls. They all knew about the girls, and every Thiel and Summers and the con artist formerly known as Prince Andrew knew they’d bought more security with a U.S. president who shared their “wonderful secret.”

It starts to make sense that Team Trump even deployed the White House Situation Room to fight a congressional vote for a wider release of the Epstein files, as if these secrets were a nuclear bomb headed for Chicago. To be sure, this all-out war against disclosure — along with Trump’s bizarre order for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate only Democrats mentioned in the letters — might be to hide that Trump did more with Epstein’s bevy of young girls than just “know about” them.

But on some level, Trump’s White House must also realize that the Epstein file is the Jenga piece that brings the whole thing crashing down — the end of America, or, more to the point, the version of America getting financially drained, sexually abused, and basically ruined by all the people getting emails from jeevacation@gmail.com.

The timing couldn’t be better, or worse, for this midnight of the elites. The overblown stock market fueled by an AI hallucination is set to burst any moment, and new hiring is already grinding to a halt — just as the price of everything from steak to coffee goes through the roof, and health insurance is doubling or tripling for millions of Americans. When this perfect storm strikes, an electoral bloodbath in the 2026 midterms is the best outcome Trump can hope for, on a list of dire possibilities.

It’s no coincidence Trump is accelerating the pace of dictatorship, not because he’s at the peak of power, but because he knows he’s running out of time. Thus, the wag-the-dog war drums off Venezuela are pounding louder, and the muck of naked corruption — from Swiss gold bars to real estate deals with the murderous Saudi prince — is getting filthier. All of it haunted by the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

There’s one other thing about the Epstein files I feel compelled to mention. I’m also in them — well, sort of. On Feb. 12, 2019, for reasons we’ll never know, Epstein emailed his ethically conflicted journalist pal Michael Wolff a column I’d just written, with the words “please note.”

The piece was tied to the recent arrest of another close friend, the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for soliciting sex in strip mall massage parlors near Palm Beach, and the moral decay of Kraft and his Florida neighbors, Trump and Epstein. It came at a moment when Epstein and Wolff were talking about ways to use his inside knowledge about Trump as leverage when the walls of federal prosecution were closing in. Nine months later, Epstein was dead — weird coincidence.

In that column, I wrote, “Kraft’s embarrassing charges come at one of those rarest of moments — when everyday people are suddenly realizing who doesn’t have power in America, who does, and that something can be done about this.” If Epstein did, in fact, read the piece, he knew what was coming. Now Trump knows it, too — and America will never be the same. FEEL FREE TO REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.

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