The Real 'Secret' Behind Trump's Alleged Epstein Letter

The 'Enigma' Behind Trump and Epstein's Friendship and the Alien Nature of the Elite Worldview

I know I said before I was going to prioritize other Thiel- and GSF-related writing projects, but sometimes things present themselves that are simply too good and too interesting to let pass without comment. The Wall Street Journal’s recent claims about Trump’s alleged 2003 birthday card to Epstein and the ensuing fallout are one such recent example that I simply can’t let go. It’s far too weird and fascinating, and not for the reasons the vast majority of commentators believe it is.

To be clear, I am not an Epstein conspiracy aficionado. I think I have a pretty good grasp of the general story, enough that I have developed some general opinions about the matter that I am relatively confident in, but I am by no means someone who has studied Epstein lore in depth. While interesting, I find that bringing up Epstein, unless it is unavoidable, is generally an unwise move (much like certain other ‘third rail’ topics that will remain unnamed) unless I am willing to let the discussion become completely derailed by the conspiratard shitstorm which almost always ensues.

For the record, personally I believe Epstein probably did actually kill himself, though this is not something I’m terribly confident in. I am somewhat more confident in the claim that Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence,’ most likely to the Israelis. Based on what we know about Epstein and how the case has been treated by various administrations, including Trump’s, since it broke, this seems to be very likely.

Regardless, the Trump administration’s treatment of the Epstein case has been something of a laugh riot from the beginning, from the infamous binders down to Trump’s recent disavowal of his own base for falling for a Democrat ‘hoax’ concocted by, uhhhhh…Obama!

Even funnier have been the attempts of Trump’s gaggle of aligned influencers to keep up with Trump’s ever-changing edicts on the matter. The abrupt and shameless mental gymnastics, complete 180s, and ‘hold me back’ threats to resign have been hilarious to watch. Still, funny as it all has been, it’s simply par for the course when it comes to Trump’s influencers. A group of people who genuinely believe in nothing and, by most traditional standards, are beneath contempt. Merely another example of ‘guys being dudes’ and ‘bears shitting in the woods,’ etc.

The far more interesting part of all this is, in my opinion, the contents of the letter itself, as reported by the WSJ.

Now, I realize Trump has explicitly denied that he wrote the letter and appears to be implying that it is some kind of fabrication. As they say, ‘big if true.’ If the letter is indeed somehow fabricated, then Trump will undoubtedly be able to easily win a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the Journal, and likely in somewhat short order. I don’t think this will happen, though, and expect Trump’s lawsuit to eventually be withdrawn or dismissed.

I don’t think the letter is a fabrication. I think it’s almost certainly real. There are a couple of reasons to think this, a few of which I will list:

1. If you know anything about this kind of thing, you know that these stories undergo a significant amount of fact-checking. They also involve in-depth review from in-house lawyers. This is doubly true in cases where the stakes are high, and it doesn’t get any higher than this. Thus, I think it is very unlikely the Journal (of all places) would run a story they weren’t 100 percent confident in in order to try and ‘own’ Trump (or something?) in 2025 (when it doesn’t matter at all) while opening themselves up for a potentially paper-destroying libel suit in response. The story was run because they had extreme confidence in it.

2. Trump and his surrogates claims that ‘it doesn’t sound like him’ and ‘he doesn’t do drawings’ are false. The latter claim is obviously false, as Trump’s doodles have actually been auctioned off, images of which have been widely circulated online. While the former claim ‘seems true,’ it only does if your primary experience of Trump is via his tweets, rally speeches and debate performances. In all of these cases, Trump is ‘putting on a show’ frequently in a very self-conscious way (Trump is nothing if not a showman). This does not mean that Trump somehow doesn’t have an inner life, however. As I think you can see a bit more evidently in some of his much older interviews.

3. Trump and Epstein were, in fact, friends, as both of them stated on the record at various times. By ‘friends’ I mean specifically far more than mere acquaintances, possibly even ‘close friends,’ though it’s hard to know for sure (Epstein himself claimed they were ‘best friends’ for 10 years.) This isn’t exactly that weird of a fact; it also doesn’t somehow prove Trump was a ‘pedo’ (or whatever). Epstein famously knew a lot of people, a lot of very rich and powerful people, and traveled freely through elite circles.

Rather, the genuinely interesting thing about the letter from Trump to Epstein is the very unique and rare insight it offers us into both Trump and Epstein’s inner lives. This is an extremely unusual and valuable thing, as it reveals much about the inherently alien and dangerous nature of what we can call the ‘elite’ worldview in modern America.

Let’s look at what was allegedly in the letter itself:

Aside from the bizarre, Lynchian quality of the entire dialogue, it is fascinating for what it implicitly tells us about both Trump and Epstein. Much of which is also reflected in the very small snippets we have of Epstein from other sources.

I think it’s a mistake to solely read the dialogue as some kind of confession of guilt regarding sex with minors. Even if this were true, which I suppose is certainly possible, I don’t think this is the genuinely important aspect of the conversation. Rather, the true load-bearing structure here, I think, is simply the mutual alienation and contempt both men felt toward society more generally. Toward the unenlightened, toward those who don’t know ‘the secret.’

Both Trump and Epstein are and were unique people, not only due to their massive wealth and personal charisma (traits they both shared) but also due to a particular attitude they both had toward life, and it is this attitude that, at least I would argue, constitutes the actual ‘secret’ they shared together.

While Epstein was the more obviously intellectual and reflective of the two (both traits that made him both extremely successful financially and also an extraordinarily apt human predator), Trump, though superficially oafish, is actually quite astute in his own way and can frequently be both surprisingly philosophical and perceptive.

Both had amassed so much money that it likely no longer really mattered in a practical sense to them except as ‘a way of keeping score,’ as Trump himself once famously noted.

Both appear to have been transparently lonely people with few, or likely no, close friends. The nature of extreme wealth makes such loneliness more likely, as it is hard to find someone who isn’t either trying to get something from you and/or has the kind of comparable life experiences that allow for a true friendship to form.

Ironically, perhaps one of the few individuals either had ever met that would have had the right kind of life experiences and ‘fellow feeling’ required for friendship would have been each other.

Part of this ‘fellow feeling,’ as seems obvious, was a certain camaraderie both shared in each being a kind of contrarian and provocateur. Trump’s history in this regard doesn’t need an explanation, but it should be noted that Epstein also shared a certain confrontational and provocative antagonism toward many he interacted with in high society, in a surprisingly similar way to Trump. From his absurd and gaudy multi-million-dollar homes decorated with pornography and other forms of offense to his tendency toward bizarre provocations like flaunting the much younger women he employed and openly trolling and antagonizing many of those he interacted with in high society.

Both Trump and Epstein had, in a very real sense, peeked over ‘the big everything’ and seen the other side of things. They were individuals who could ‘see through’ others, as they had not only been to the very top of society’s mountain but had also seen its innermost secrets. The ‘secret’ of the ‘big everything’ is that there is no ‘secret,’ per se, no inherent order or meaning. Life is a series of disconnected events, a stream that constantly flows downhill until it empties itself out into the vastness of a dead and unfeeling universe. Heraclitus is thus vindicated: all is fire, the forms themselves were always illusions, nothing more than the wishful thinking of a terrified primate with an overdeveloped brain and too much time on its hands. The vast majority of whom live lives of bleak and brutal desperation or, at best, inside a kind of consumerist dream world. But even the dreams aren’t theirs; rather, they are a collection of prepackaged narratives made for them and clung to in a tenuous, and somewhat pitiful, attempt to impose some kind of coherence on the random and, ultimately, stupid events that end up comprising their lives.

As Trump once noted during a 2003 interview with Larry King while answering a caller’s question about how he manages stress, “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” Trump said, “If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. That’s how I handle stress,” he added.

Or, as he memorably put it another time in his 1990 interview with Playboy, “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die… We’re here, and we live our 60, 70, or 80 years, and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”

Such an outlook is a tempting and, in some ways, natural disposition for any intelligent person with extreme wealth to develop. However, this doesn’t usually manifest in the petty snobbery of the upper middle class, who are still close enough to those below them to feel the need to demonstrate their superiority. Rather, the view of the truly wealthy (a classification that likely now kicks in somewhere around the 100 million dollar mark) tends toward something far more alien and removed from the lives of everyday people. In this sense there is no need for actual snobbery, hence why individuals like Trump and, to a lesser extent, Musk can be viewed as sorts of populist champions, as they don’t share the contempt for the unwashed masses that is pervasive amongst Democrats, comprised, as they are, largely by upper-middle-class PMC striver types.

Still, potential populist appeal aside, the worldview of the ultra-elite is, by its nature, alien. They can make more money in a single day than most people do in an entire lifetime of work. The amount of money they drop on a simple piece of furniture would be considered ‘life changing’ for the majority of the working classes. This fact alone is alienating, something Epstein seemed to somewhat comment on briefly in a piece of one of the very few interviews (or rather, pieces of an interview) that have ever been released to the public.

"I saw lots of people doing lots of hard work, and hard work didn't translate into success either. It wasn't what you knew or how hard you worked.” Epstein noted.

“In fact, the people who were doing construction on Telegraph Avenue at that time, you know, coming in at seven o'clock in the morning and spending 12 hours working, they looked like they still were neither happy nor successful, so it was not, you know, and what I learned, lots of it in fact, turns out to not necessarily be who you are but who you came in contact with,” he concluded.

For such individuals, the idea that they should somehow adhere to the laws and norms of the rest of society seems laughable, if not downright insulting. They exist, for all intents and purposes, in a different universe from the rest of humanity; why, therefore, should they follow their rules? Their petty, lying moralities. Moralities that are derived as much from an envious slave morality as they are from any kind of genuine desire for ‘the good,’ (a concept the truly ‘elite’ know to be, at best, a noble lie)

This is doubly true for someone like, say, Thiel, who goes even further, claiming that even the most basic fact of the human condition, desire itself, is, for all aside from a tiny minority, inauthentic. Merely a kind of pathetic mimicry born of envy, the truth of which the common folk will indulge in any and all kinds of barbaric violence to conceal from themselves.

Only the ‘elite’ can handle the great ‘secret’ of life: the wisdom of Silenus. The task for which they have been selected by fate, a burden that grants them the license to do as they please with whom they please, to not be bound to the earth by the shackles of a contemptible slave morality built upon envy. This is the only true ‘freedom’ which exists, and the real reason why Thiel expressed his belief that freedom and democracy were ultimately not compatible. Because the only true ‘freedom’ is that possessed by the master, who alone is able to bear the awesome weight of its power and responsibility. A ‘freedom’ which, even if they had access to it, would be quickly discarded by the masses.

As Epstein noted: “I realize what I am... on my own island or on my own ranch, I can think the thoughts I want to think. I can do the work I want to do and I'm free to explore as I see fit.”

This is the ‘secret’ Trump shared with Epstein, a ‘secret’ they also share with men like Thiel even if they manifested it in superficially different ways.

It is the secret heresy that has haunted the minds of Western elites since at least the time of de Sade. A terminal disease for which there is only one cure:

Cleansing fire.