The Man Who Stayed Silent - and Who Said He Could Destroy Trump

There are moments when the past snaps back into the glaring light of the present, as if it had only been waiting to regain power over the present, the abyss of a man who had long since condemned himself before the world. Yet among all these ghosts from a decayed life, one red thread runs through it, glowing like a warning siren: it is the name Donald Trump.

Epstein’s friendship with Trump officially ended in the 2000s, but for Epstein it was never over. He continued to watch him, commented on his every move, bragged about knowledge no one could verify, and portrayed himself as the only person who truly understood how this man operated. “The dog that hasn’t barked,” he wrote to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011, referring to Trump, a hint at a silence that irritated and even pressured him. In this email Epstein claimed that Virginia Giuffre had “spent hours at my house with him,” and yet Trump’s name had “never been mentioned.” Giuffre later firmly contradicted this: Trump had never touched her, not even flirted with her. But for Epstein, truth was only raw material that could be kneaded at will.

In an unusual move, Trump ignored every single question about Jeffrey Epstein after the signing of the bill, and panicked White House staff began pushing the journalists out of the room. It had never been as obvious as it is now. Trump is backed against the wall. And what is visible now is only the prologue.

The documents show a man who believed he could meet Trump at any time he wanted, and who paraded that belief around. In 2012 Epstein wrote to his lawyer that they should look into Trump’s finances, the mortgage on Mar-a-Lago, the ominous 30 million dollars that Epstein claimed Trump had received. Shortly afterward he offered a reporter from The New York Times Magazine photos he may not have possessed at all: “Do you want pictures of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?” The reporter never received any. But in Epstein’s mind, the mere suggestion was enough to make him feel important again.

The closer Trump moved toward the White House, the more Epstein transformed himself into a chronicler of his supposed weaknesses. He wrote that Trump was “borderline insane,” spoke of a “facade” made of fabricated wealth, and mocked the president like a neighbor one had never liked, over casinos, airlines, bankruptcies. The dynamic is clear: Epstein was searching for leverage. Perhaps he was even searching for redemption.

In the emails there is also the bizarre plan that Epstein himself should go public as a counter-narrative to an exposé about his own crimes. The author Wolff advised him to build an anti-Trump narrative to divert attention. Epstein hesitated, but he liked the idea. It would be, Wolff wrote, “political protection” he urgently needed. And perhaps Epstein believed he could even upgrade himself morally with it, a thought that only made sense within the logic of a man who had long lost any grounding.

The deeper one dives into the past, the clearer it becomes that much of it was pure bragging. Yet some sentences stand out. In December 2018, shortly before the reexamination of his old deal from Florida gathered momentum again, an acquaintance wrote that the investigations were in truth an attempt “to take down Trump.” Epstein replied: “It’s crazy … because I am the one able to take him down.” A few months later Epstein was arrested at the airport in New Jersey.

In another message he claimed that Trump had “of course known about the girls” and had asked Ghislaine “to stop.” Trump vehemently denies this and says to this day that he cut ties with Epstein after Epstein had taken Giuffre away from Mar-a-Lago. But the emails do not speak about facts, they speak about imaginations, about Epstein’s conviction that he possessed knowledge that made him untouchable.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this avalanche is: not a single reply from Trump or his circle appears anywhere. All we see are Epstein’s emails, his projections, his arrogance, his delusions of grandeur. A man who believed he had access to all doors even though he no longer had any. A man who constantly spoke about understanding Trump, even about being able to destroy Trump, and who wandered only through his own hall of mirrors. And a country that now, in the fall of 2025, is once again confronted with the question of how close these two men really were, and what truths still lie under the carpets of Mar-a-Lago.

What remains is the sentence Epstein wrote when panic was already gripping his neck: “I am the one able to take him down.” He truly believed it. And perhaps this is the deepest insight these files offer, into the overestimation of a man who thought power was something one could control through insinuations. Yet in the end nothing remained of his power except emails that expose him. And a silence louder than anything he ever wrote.