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The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
I think that most people who care about the Epstein matter, me included, care mainly because of the political implications, not out of empathy for the girls. I abstractly empathize with the girls, but I don't know them, so their woes don't really emotionally affect me any more than it emotionally affects me if I hear that, say, 3000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh. Which is to say, very little. Same with the Rotherham scandal. I abstractly care about the victims, but I don't really feel much emotion about it.
The point of the Epstein business is that I want to see rich, powerful people who seem like predators brought down from their high places, thrown into the mud, and trampled on. That's why I care more about the Epstein matter than about the Rotherham scandal. Because it seems to afford more opportunity to damage rich, powerful scumbags. Now that's something I do feel emotion about. Glee and a zestful desire to see mighty amoral people brought low. It's a very primal, atavistic, selfish emotion, to be clear, not some clean moral imperative that looks pretty on paper. No, it's like the glee that a villager feels when he sees that a lion that has been prowling around the outside of the village for days get shot through the heart with an arrow. I don't feel the glee because yesterday the lion ate some guy on the other side of the village whom I didn't know. I didn't know that guy so I felt little emotion when I heard that he got eaten. But that lion felt like a looming threat to me, prowling out there, powerful, enjoying his lion life in a very annoying way, enjoying it so much, sitting around licking his fangs out there with not a care in the world while I spend the day working, that lion clearly not giving a single shit about my desire to not get eaten or the fact that I have to work for a living. So when the lion went down, I celebrated in the same sort of ecstasy that communists might feel when they see that the rich people are fleeing the city. Will the rich people fleeing the city actually make my life better in the long run? Probably not, intellectually one understands that if the populists come to power they'll probably just make things much worse. But in the moment, one feels an atavistic glee.
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