Trumpocalyptic
The Tangled Webs They Weave
How to Become Rich and Famous in America: A Field Manual
The American Dream has always been a hallucinogen, but Jeffrey Epstein proved it could be weaponized. His life wasn’t a résumé — it was a fever chart of what happens when charm, money, and institutional rot collide at high speed. If you squint hard enough, you can almost mistake it for a self‑help manual. A deranged one, sure, but still a manual.
He began in Brooklyn, a place that produces two things in equal measure: strivers and trouble. Epstein chose the third path — the loophole. While the rest of the country was busy collecting diplomas like Pokémon cards, he simply opted out. No degree, no problem. He walked straight into the Dalton School, a Manhattan temple of privilege, hired under the watch of Donald Barr, a headmaster with a taste for eccentric staffing decisions. Barr would later be remembered mostly as the father of William Barr, the Attorney General who would one day preside over the federal lockup where Epstein’s story took its final nosedive. History has a sick sense of humor.
At Dalton, Epstein discovered the secret ingredient of American success: proximity to rich people. He taught math, but the real curriculum was social climbing. One student’s father worked at Bear Stearns, and suddenly Epstein was catapulted from chalk dust to Wall Street, a transition so improbable it should have required a helmet and a waiver. But this is America — if you look confident enough, people assume you know what you’re doing.
On Wall Street, Epstein perfected the art of professional vagueness. He became a “financial problem solver,” which is the kind of job title you invent when you want to sound important without ever explaining anything. It worked. He founded a firm that allegedly served only billionaires, a brilliant strategy because billionaires don’t answer questions and journalists can’t subpoena vibes.
Then came Leslie Wexner, the retail tycoon who handed Epstein power of attorney, a mansion, and a golden ticket into the uppermost stratosphere of American influence. From there, Epstein built a social circle that looked like the guest list for a G20 afterparty: politicians, academics, royalty, tech moguls, and anyone else who could be lured by free food and plausible deniability.
His life became a fog of private jets, offshore accounts, shell companies, and a private island — the kind of setup that screams “nothing to see here” while simultaneously setting off every alarm bell in the civilized world. And when the law finally caught up with him in 2008, he negotiated a plea deal so generous it could have been written in crayon by a toddler who misunderstood the assignment. It protected him and unnamed “associates,” a term that in Washington means “people you will never meet but whose names you already know.”
But even the most carefully engineered house of cards eventually meets a stiff breeze. In 2019, Epstein found himself in federal custody, under the watchful eye of the Justice Department — led, in a twist so on‑the‑nose it feels like satire, by William Barr, son of the headmaster who had once green‑lit Epstein’s improbable teaching job. The universe rarely ties its narrative threads this neatly, but when it does, you can almost hear the cosmic typewriter clacking.
And then came the cameras. Or rather, the cameras that didn’t come. Or didn’t work. Or worked until they didn’t. Or recorded something until they recorded nothing. The guards fell asleep, the logs glitched, and the whole thing played out like a bureaucratic slapstick routine performed in slow motion. If there is a final lesson in Epstein’s deranged success manual, it’s this: if you ever end up incarcerated, make damn sure the surveillance equipment isn’t held together with duct tape and wishful thinking.
In the end, Epstein didn’t become a symbol of wealth or genius or even scandal. He became a monument to the soft underbelly of American power — the part where institutions buckle, elites circle the wagons, and the truth gets lost somewhere between the malfunctioning cameras and the official statements.
His life isn’t a roadmap to follow. It’s a warning flare fired into the night sky, illuminating the uncomfortable fact that in America, the line between success and catastrophe is often drawn by whoever’s holding the keys to the back door
Oren Orientos
We do not claim that this is a true story. It does, however, plausibly connect the players and the conditions. There are too many lies and liars involved for us to ever be confident of what actually happened … and is happening. I am relatively confident that Mr or Ms Orientos is a non-American observer both appalled and concerned by the happenings in America and to its Citizens.
It sounds absolutely right to me.