In news that will surely go unreported by the earnest hysterics of the legacy media, unredacted, unofficial, and wholly unreliable Epstein file documents shared only with me show that the nature of the late pedophile’s friendship with President Donald J. Trump, and vice versa, has been grievously misunderstood. This misunderstanding has dealt a damaging blow to the good reputations of both men which can never be restored.
Trump and Epstein, it turns out, were drawn together by their shared love of literature—especially literary theory. The two men met, it turns out, at an NYU-sponsored symposium on the work of Michel Foucault in the mid-1980s, about the time Trump bought Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach estate. Noam Chomsky was at the symposium, too, and it was at this event that Epstein and the esteemed linguist—later to fly on the Lolita Express—also met.
It was at the same symposium that Trump engaged Elaine Showalter in conversation, recently misinterpreted by the dirty-minded scribes of the mainstream media. Trump was not “recruiting” Showalter, as some have reported. Trump did approach Showalter, but only to discuss the structures of patriarchal discourse and her contributions to the field of gynocriticism. Trump also tried to explore the subject in greater detail with queer theorist Judith Butler but, as Chomsky later told Epstein, Butler “just blew him off.”
Even the purchase of Mar-a-Lago has been wildly misreported, based on recently released Epstein file documents. Trump bought the 62,000-square foot mansion, Epstein told Michael Wolff, because his Trump Tower apartment could no longer house his personal library. “I like a lot of books,” Trump told Fortune in 2017. “I like reading books. I don’t have time to read very much now in terms of the books, but I like reading them.”
While Trump has not disclosed the details of his reading habits, beyond his devotion to his two favorite books, the Bible and The Art of the Deal, he has called Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front “one of the greatest books of all time” and says he has reread it.
Epstein, as the Drift reports, has expressed his admiration for James Joyce’s Ulysses and Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones. Deepak Chopra once sent Epstein verses by T.S. Eliot, but his response is unknown. Epstein did tell Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit that he found Gavin Browd’s translation of Michel Houellebacq’s The Possibility of an Island to be “awful.”
That Epstein was a fan of Anne Desclos’s Story of O will confirm the worst suspicions of his mainstream media detractors—if they ever find out about it. The same might be said of Epstein having recommended Portnoy’s Complaint to the former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, who in February resigned her position at Goldman Sachs over her relationship with “Uncle Jeffrey,” as she called the convicted sex offender.
It now seems beyond dispute that the overwhelming passion of both Epstein and Trump, while unapologetically heteronormative, has always been literary. Even the name of Epstein’s Boeing 727 has been grievously misinterpreted. The Lolita Express was a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov and nothing more. Anyone who disagrees at this point needs to get their mind out of the gutter—and we mean you, Maggie Haberman.
What would I do without my New York Times? How, otherwise, would I have known that Michael Wolff, author of all those books on Trump, has become—what with his “luxe cardigans”—a “lifestyle influencer”?
And not just Wolff but his wife as well, former Vanity Fair staffer Victoria Wolff, who now supervises his wildly successful social media efforts from their “19th-century Hamptons home straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie.” (Nancy Meyers, I have now learned, is a movie director celebrated for the attention she lavishes on the kitchens and other interiors in her movies, giving rise to what Architectural Digest calls the “Nancy Meyers aesthetic.”)
Until now, I’d just thought of Wolff as that slightly disreputable—and mildly repulsive—scandalmonger on all those cable TV shows. To Wolff’s credit, such as it is, he claims he is “not a journalist,” maybe because he knows that, if he did, all the conscientious newspersons who preen themselves on their professional ethics would gag hard enough to throw the earth off its orbital axis.
“I investigate nothing,” Wolff in full Gonzo mode once told something called the Vassar Political Review, in comments reprinted in the Hill. “All I do is look and write what I see and what I hear, and my job—which has nothing to do with truth—is to take what I see and hear and write that in a way that readers can come [as close] as possible—as close as I came—to the experience of doing this.” Say what?
Even Hunter Thompson at his most self-indulgent never seems to have done what Wolff has done, at least not since his Hell’s Angels days. So eager was Wolff to get scoops that, as The Atlantic reports, he functioned “less as a reporter” in his dealings with Epstein “than as a media advisor.”
“I think you should let [Trump] hang himself,” Wolff emailed Epstein back in 2015. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” There’s more where that came from, and if you have the stomach for it, be my guest. It’s all a matter of public record.
As far as I’m concerned, all these people deserve (or deserved) each other, but maybe that’s just me. From now on, though, I’ll never wear another luxe cardigan, long as I live.
Spring training is well underway, and Opening Day will be here before you know it. To prepare myself, I’m reading Stranger to the Game, Bob Gibson’s autobiography. After Gibson comes back from an injury that sidelines him for two months and wins, his Cardinals teammate Curt Flood says, “So what? Anybody can pitch when the other team doesn’t score many runs.”
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