Michael Wolff

James Surowiecki In 2017, as you were working on your first book about Donald Trump, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, you recorded many hours of conversations with Jeffrey Epstein. In those exchanges, Epstein talked about his friendship with Trump, which began in the late 1980s and lasted through the early 2000s. He also discussed the workings of the Trump White House, which he apparently had insight into, even though at that point, he hadn’t spoken with Trump in more than a decade. Why did you have these conversations with him?

Michael Wolff Epstein was someone who had been friends with Trump—I think it’s fair to say one of Trump’s closest friends—for a decade at least. And he was always very interesting on the subject of Trump—very insightful, very funny. So in that moment in which I was trying to understand Who is Donald Trump? What is Donald Trump? How did this happen?, I felt Epstein had a very significant piece of the puzzle.

JS Why do you think he and Trump were friends?

MW You have to see Epstein as a social climber. One person led to another person led to another person as he tried to go up this ladder of interest and status. And I think at that point in time, Trump was a significant get for him. I also think that their interests were aligned: how to make money, how to get rich quick, and women, women, women, women, women. I think that was a constant thing. They are playboys in that old-fashioned kind of sense. That’s what they do. That’s what they want. That’s the world that they have decided they can live in, and part of the reason they’re trying to make money is to live in that world. Trump certainly comes out of that moment, became famous for that moment, became a prime exponent of that moment in time.

JS Did talking to Epstein change your view of Trump? How does it help us understand him?

MW What Epstein really made clear is that Trump comes from a kind of demimonde. He has this experience that is not like our experience. The problem with how people try to understand Trump is that they plug him into a whole range of assumptions about what a politician is, who a politician is, what his background is, what his interests are, and they try to see him through a political lens. In truth, none of that is apropos to Trump. He comes from somewhere entirely different. His experience has nothing to do with politics, has nothing to do with respectability, has nothing to do with the political logic of public life. That stuff is just not relevant to understanding Trump.

JS It’s interesting to me that on your podcast you said Epstein was dismissive of Trump as a businessman, claiming that he was basically innumerate and couldn’t read a balance sheet.

MW Completely. On that level, I think Epstein thought Trump was a dope. And Epstein also felt Trump was foolish and, in a way, weak in his need for constant attention and to have a public persona.

JS That connects with something else you said on your podcast, about the fact that Epstein, like everyone who knew Trump back in the day, was trying to make sense of the mystery of Trump’s ascension: How did this guy become president of the United States? How did that happen?

So, in any case, you had these tapes for years and then decided to release them less than one week before Election Day. That stirred lots of controversy and conspiracy theorizing, with Trump supporters criticizing you for trying to pull an October surprise and swing the election, and Democrats attacking you for not releasing the tapes sooner. Over the years, you had actually pitched various media outlets on doing something based on the recordings and were turned down over and over. So why did you finally release them yourself, and why didn’t you do it before then?

MW The reason is that I didn’t think of it until then. The specific event that made it happen was that in late October, there was this woman, a model, who came out and told a story about Epstein and Trump. [The former model, Stacey Williams, has alleged that in 1993, Epstein introduced her to Trump, and that Trump groped her.] At that moment, I thought, Oh my God, I can do this. I have this. We should do this. Should we do this? Yes. Why not?

Now, I think to many people, this would have been obvious: Well, how could you not release all this explosive material? But I had had this explosive material for a long time and had done everything I could think of to get someone to do something with it, and across the board and overwhelmingly, nobody wanted this.

JS This is one of the most interesting aspects of this story, particularly from a journalistic point of view. You had all these recordings of Epstein, which gave you a unique perspective—not just on his relationship with Trump but also on Epstein himself. Epstein is someone who people were—and arguably still are—not just horrified by but fascinated by and desperate to know more about. But when you tried to get different outlets to tell this story, the answer almost always ended up being no.

MW Right. People are really interested in the Epstein story. They cannot get enough of it. All of the mysteries are there—not just the sex but the money and all the famous people he surrounded himself with—and people want answers. So this was a story that would probably be a significant draw. And most outlets that you could think of were pitched this material at one point in time. I would say I had a dozen meetings, maybe a dozen and a half meetings, with various outlets, and everybody was interested—everybody was listening, there were a lot of executives in rooms or on Zoom calls—and then everybody passed.

There was a deal with a studio to do a miniseries on this, with a fair amount of money involved. As I recall, it was going to be a six-part series with one hour-long episode entirely about Epstein and Trump. So I wrote a pilot script, and everybody liked the pilot, and then there were revisions to it, and then it became like, “Well, maybe.” I remember sitting around a table, and had a sense of it being kind of a hot potato, of people essentially saying, “How did we get here? Who thought this was a good idea?”

I also gave considerable thought to writing a book about Epstein. And even with that, I was absolutely discouraged. Even from publishers who probably would have done what I wanted them to do, I heard, “Please don’t do this. This is not going to be good for you.” And so I came to feel, Why would I do the most difficult thing to do? You would take that risk up to some point but not beyond that. And Epstein as a subject proved to be beyond that point.

JS Why do you think no one really wanted to go forward with this?

MW A lot of these outlets had portrayed Epstein as a kind of representative figure of pure evil. Once you’ve created that image, it’s hard to flip and to say, “No, no, no, no. We’ve convinced you this monster is the ne plus ultra of monsters, and now we have to convince you that, well, there might be something interesting about him and something that he has to say.” That’s a hard sell.

Outlets have been very willing to do stories that saw this through the point of view of Epstein’s victims. I didn’t really have information from that side of the story. I had information from the other side, and that’s what kind of stymied everyone, because it forced you to look at Epstein as a whole person, or at least more of a whole person than just this horrid miscreant.

That was always compelling to people at first, and almost everybody who saw this material was excited by it. But then there were always the second thoughts: “Yes, this is compelling, but how do we do this? Do you really want to do this? Do you want to be exposed? Do we want to be exposed?” Remember, this was when The New York Times editorial board was writing that “anyone who has shaken hands with Mr. Epstein in recent decades should be scrutinized.”

And then doing anything about Trump when he was president was a problem, because people were worried about Trump’s vengeance—or, at any rate, his lawsuits. And if Epstein is now going to be put in the position of being a witness against Trump, how do we make him a reliable witness? Do we want to make him a reliable witness? What does it mean if we’re suddenly saying, “Oh, this guy is worth listening to?” I think all of these questions went through everybody’s mind.

JS Even with all this, you did write one piece about Epstein, a story about Epstein as the walls were closing in around him. It appeared in your book Too Famous, a collection of older, mostly previously published pieces. How did that happen?

MW So that’s an interesting story. I usually don’t write things just because. I write them because someone is going to publish them. But I wrote that piece because I knew it was going to be good. And then there was a magazine that wanted to publish it. And at that point I thought, I’m going to get creamed for this. I thought it was going to rise to the level of me being censured by The New York Times just for having listened to Epstein. And at first I said, “I’m going to do it anyway.” But my wife was saying, “Don’t do it,” and my agent said, “Don’t do this,” and I thought, Do I need this? I decided I wasn’t going to do it in this magazine, even though they wanted to do it. So that wasn’t media executives punting. That was me punting.

Still, I had this thing, and it was written, and it was good, and I wanted it to be published. I just didn’t want to be the focus of all kinds of opprobrium because of it. So I said, “I’ll put it in a book where no one will read it.”

JS No one reads a book. And it was the last chapter, so no one was going to read it.

MW That was exactly my thinking. And because it was a book, it has no independent online life. Therefore, I would be safe. And I was. No one paid any attention—for which I was grateful.

JS That seems connected to what happened when you finally did release the tapes and did talk about Epstein’s relationship with Trump, which is that on the one hand, it got lots of attention online, but on the other hand . . .

MW On the other hand, nothing.

JS Right. Nothing.

MW It got audience attention but not institutional attention. Most major media outlets didn’t touch it.

JS How do you explain that?

MW It’s the same thing. It’s Jeffrey Epstein. So editors and journalists are saying to themselves, “If we do this, then we have to credit Epstein as saying something that might be credible. Do we really want to set up Epstein against someone who might be the president again?” I don’t think anybody is explicitly saying yes or no to that. It’s just, “This is so complicated.” And then, because this was just before the election, outlets had this out they could take: “Okay, well, we don’t have enough time to . . .”

JS To vet this.

MW Yes, to vet this—as though vetting is a thing that they actually do. But in the face of Jeffrey Epstein, we—the media bishops—take on a whole different attitude to what we do and what we can do and what our function is.

JS Beyond the media, it is interesting, though maybe not surprising, that these new revelations seem to have made no impression on Trump supporters. Many of them—certainly online—are obsessed with Epstein, and the supposed Epstein client list, which they see as exposing the corruption of liberal elites [because people like Bill Clinton spent time with Epstein]. But having Epstein on tape talking about Trump, saying that he was Trump’s closest friend for a decade, or talking about how Trump liked to sleep with his friends’ wives, made no difference at all to them.

MW Well, that’s a broader issue: Nothing makes any difference to anyone apparently.

JS Do you have any sense of how Trump feels about it?

MW My information is that he doesn’t know about this. Within Trump World, they’re aware of what’s happening online, but what matters to them is: “How many calls did we get from the mainstream press about this? Did The New York Times call about this?” If that doesn’t happen, then they don’t have to bring this to his attention.

JS And since, in this case, the mainstream media didn’t really do much with the story, the campaign could just issue a pro forma statement denouncing you and the tapes.

MW And then it’s done.

JS Were you surprised that the tapes didn’t make more of a splash, or was it pretty much what you had expected, given your previous experience?

MW It was absolutely what I expected.

JS You’ve written three books about Trump, so I wanted to get your thoughts on what’s happening with him now. Do you have a sense of how he feels? Having won again, is he bored at the prospect of having to deal with the hassle of policy and politics for another four years, or does he feel, I get to be king for four years?

MW He’s gotten everything that he’s wanted. He succeeded on all fronts. There is nothing else for him to achieve. What do you do with that? I think, in general, it’s now about what makes him happy, what entertains him. During the campaign, I asked one of his people, “What happens if he actually wins?” This person said, “Well, it’s possible he could deport everybody in America, but it’s also possible he could spend four years playing golf.”

JS Do you think Trump has any policy ambitions?

MW No. Policy is ultimately about details, and Trump does not have the attention span for it. He likes a headline. I think that if he can get a tax bill, that will make him happy. And he will want to do immigration stuff until that makes him unhappy, which will happen relatively soon, when the press is bad. But Trump’s entire focus is on the last news cycle. If you’re in Trump’s world, you are punished or rewarded for the last news cycle. There’s really no other measure of what’s going on there.

JS One of the striking things about the current situation is that he has all these very ambitious guys around him who are superconfident in their own genius: Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and even JD Vance. It’s easy to envision all of those egos clashing with each other, and perhaps even clashing with Trump’s, as they try to win his favor. How do you see them? Are they essentially courtiers?

MW You only exist with respect to Trump if you’re a courtier. Abject flattery, and saying what he wants to hear, is the only way to exist with him. There is no other way. Even if you’re Elon Musk—the richest man in the world, which carries quite a bit of clout with Trump—Trump is not going to turn to Elon for genuine advice. I don’t even think he knows how to ask for advice. He knows how to conduct a conversation that’s basically designed to confirm whatever he wants said. Whatever point of view he wants, the person he’s talking to will confirm it, or else he just dismisses it. He doesn’t listen. Now, these particular guys are under the impression that they are smart enough to somehow bend this to their advantage. Good luck with that.

Having said that, these guys are not stupid. Musk, especially, is not stupid. So you realize, if you’re Musk, that there are a whole range of things that Trump is not interested in. That’s where you can have an effect and an impact, because Trump doesn’t care. That was what Jared Kushner did, and he may have been the only person to be successful in Trump’s first administration. His approach was to look for the areas that Trump doesn’t want to hear about. That happened to include the Middle East.

JS What about Trump’s appointments? He started off somewhat conventionally, nominating Mike Waltz as his national security adviser, Lee Zeldin to run the EPA, Marco Rubio for secretary of state. But then he quickly went full Trump, nominating Matt Gaetz for attorney general [who has since withdrawn his name from contention], Tulsi Gabbard for intel chief, and RFK Jr. to run Health and Human Services. Did you expect this?

MW I think it’s unclear what he’s actually done here. Right now, all you can say about what he’s done is that he’s gotten headlines. And again, that’s how he thinks: Who’s going to get me a headline? I’m invulnerable right now, I can do anything, I only think in terms of today anyhow, so what’s the headline? Who gets a reward? This is not really related to policy; it’s not really even related to confirmation. It may not really be related to reality.

JS Do you anticipate this term playing out any differently from the first one?

MW No. He’s a simple machine. He just does the same thing that he’s always done. He just does it again. If it worked before, keep doing it.

JS Do you think he cares about the future of the Republican Party, or about what happens in 2026, or about what might happen to JD Vance in 2028?

MW No. But there is a question—and I don’t know how he deals with this, because he doesn’t have to deal with it right now—of what happens to him when he can no longer be president and he is no longer the center of attention. I don’t know. He’ll be eighty-two then. And remember, he has nothing to go back to. He doesn’t have a real marriage; he doesn’t have a real family. He lives in a country club. So what does he do? Golf. Golf is not inconsiderable in his life. That’s his moment of companionship; that’s his activity that fills the hours. But beyond that, I don’t know.

JS Do you think he’s worried at all that the criminal cases will be revived after he leaves office?

MW No. I don’t think that would even be practical at that point.

JS So you think all of that is just done?

MW I think it’s done. I think he won.