Contra Trump

君子豹變，小人革面

Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path.

— Tina Brown, Fresh Hell, 18 November 2025

In this chapter of Contra Trump, we offer a comment on the ‘Epstein Files’, the putrid core of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, by Lulu Wang, an old friend of our online work. This is followed by material drawn from the reporting of The Harvard Crimson and an opinion piece by Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Our thanks to Reader #1 for alerting us to Margaret Sullivan’s American Crisis.

The rubric of the chapter — 君子豹變，小人革面 — comes from the I Ching. It means that ‘while the gentlemen can transform, the small man merely loses face’. The title of Lulu Wang’s note is 近墨者黑, jìn mò zhě hēi, ‘proximity to ink stains everything’.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
18 November 2025

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近墨者黑

Lulu Wang

 

Sooner or later, the Epstein scandal had to touch China. The latest dump of emails from America’s most famous pedophile includes correspondence with wanker, sexist, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and former Harvard president Larry Summers. In a string of texts and emails over a period of two years, Larry asked his pal and “wingman” Jeffrey for advice on the pursuit of a woman. The final email was sent one day before Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019.

The woman Summers was trying to seduce was Keyu Jin 金刻羽. Summers and Epstein called her “Peril.” As in yellow.

Jin is a highly credentialed economist, Davos speaker, author, and tenured professor at the London School of Economics. Her father is Jin Liqun 金立群, president of the China-founded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and real member of China’s financial elite. Keyu knows her way around Beijing, she’s been to a banquet or two. She’s seen power first hand, and people using power to get sex and money and sex and money to get power.

Here comes schlubby old Larry— schlubby old married Larry—thinking he can get lucky, because she had asked him for advice, and she is very easy on the eye. Schlubby old Larry, accustomed to swinging his big schlubby dick around Harvard with no consequences, met his match. She must have seen him coming a mile off. She has seen dozens and dozens of entitled schlubs like Larry. She’s seen the Party schlubs in Beijing, the finance bros in Shanghai and London and New York, and every aging man with yellow fever in the Swiss Alps in January has tried to talk to her.

Larry thought he’d exchange mentorship for sex. He thought he’d use her. Instead she got what she wanted and will probably walk away justifiably unscathed. He got a lifetime association with a notorious pedophile, and as of now, limited horizons.

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As a leading figure in the oligarchic class dubbed ‘Masters of the Universe’ by Tom Wolfe in his Bonfire of the Vanities, Lawrence H. Summers demonstrates in real time that, like the other members of America’s nomenklatura, he has staying power. Even as he was ‘stepping back’ in the wake of his epistolatory crisis over the Epstein emails, he was regrouping.

Less than one week after seven years of correspondence between Summers and the disgraced financier Jeffrey E. Epstein were released to the public, he issued a statement offering that he would work “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” The lame mea culpa read like one of those boilerplate self-criticisms that were dominant form of fiction during China’s Maoist heyday. Writing to The Harvard Crimson, the Harvard student newspaper that only just published a detailed account of their former president’s pursuit of his “mentee” Keyu Jin, Summers claimed:

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” (Communication that continued up to the day before Epstein’s arrest.) “While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort.”

In a message sent to Epstein in November 2018, The Crimson reported, “Epstein described himself as Summers’ ‘wing man,’ before continuing to advise Summers on the relationship for months. In June 2019, the two men joked about the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman.”

At the time of these revelations Summers enjoyed Harvard’s highest faculty distinction as a University Professor as well as serving as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, being a paid columnist for Bloomberg, a frequent contributor to The New York Times. He quickly resigned from his fellowship at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that works on the battle plan for the Democratic Party to retake the presidency in 2029. His role on the board of OpenAI remained uncertain, as did his teaching undertakings at Harvard, which included two large undergraduate classes.

— GRB. See also Summers To Step Back from Public Commitments Amid Epstein Scandal, The Harvard Crimson, 18 November 2025

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Gilligan’s Island Redux

Will Bunch

It’s no coincidence that Trump is accelerating the pace of dictatorship, not because he’s at the peak of power, but because he knows he’s running out of time. Thus, the wag-the-dog war drums off Venezuela are pounding louder, and the muck of naked corruption — from Swiss gold bars to real estate deals with the murderous Saudi prince — is getting filthier. All of it haunted by the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. …

The ex-skipper of Harvard, and the professor(s). A billionaire (from Silicon Valley), but not many wives — and featuring guest appearances by the MAGA publisher of Breitbart News, a former Israeli prime minister, a past president…and a future one.

This metaphorical Epstein Island — people sending, or featured in, the emails of the late disgraced financier and sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein, released last week by a House committee — is kind of like TV’s Gilligan’s Island…if everyone had a truckload more money than Thurston Howell III, and was also a lot dumber. …

I don’t know if the emails, so far, are enough to take down Trump but the president should be even more worried — and he probably is — about the much deeper rot that’s already been laid bare about the entire decrepit class of men (because they’re almost all men) who rule the world with atrocious grammar amid a non-stop booty call. They reveal the evil banality of the world’s most rich and famous whose vast pursuit of money or teenaged blondes or whatever, knew no bounds, or at long last any sense of decency. …

The Nation’s Jeet Heer nailed it when he wrote after the email dump that the Epstein scandal “has always been a scandal about the ruling class as a whole, not one individual or political party,” adding that: “Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together.” …

Some of the most telling exchanges are not the more than 1,000 emails from Epstein, his convicted partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell, or their pals that mention Trump (who, wisely for him, never learned to use email), but involve Epstein’s misogyny-soaked friendship with Larry Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary and Harvard president.

Summers had lost that plum Ivy League post in 2006, in good measure because of a speech in which he’d questioned the intellect of top women scientists. During the 2010s, when the Obama administration or cable TV wasn’t still treating him as an economic seer, the married Summers turned to this convicted sex trafficker for advice on how to hit on a younger, attractive protégée, or just to commiserate.

“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote Epstein in 2017 , referring to this episode at the school. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT. …

You may remember that 2017, the first year of Trump’s first presidency, is when the #MeToo movement against male sexual harassment and misconduct exploded. That email from Summers is one of the very few that even alludes to the social upheavals of the tumultuous 2010s that also included Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, and other movements targeting privilege and inequity. Most of this prattle is instead just rich dudes talking about how to get themselves richer…or just how to get off.

Still, as Heer captures in his analysis for The Nation, the thought-to-be-secret communications of the elites increasingly involved enhanced security for the 1 Percent and ways to silence protests as that decade devolved, including scheming with the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, about launching a cyber-security startup. The world’s shrewdest investors knew the pitchfork bubble was coming before you did.

— Will Bunch, Epstein’s emails are the end of America as they ruined it, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 16 November 2025

[Note: See also Margaret Sullivan, Two opposing media takes on Epstein’s ‘lost world’, American Crisis, 17 November 2025; and, Ivy Yang, The Real “Peril”, Calling the Shots, 18 November 2025.]

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As Summers Sought Clandestine Relationship With Woman He Called a Mentee, Epstein Was His ‘Wing Man’

When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he turned to a longtime associate for guidance: convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.

Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava

17 November 2025

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers processes into the University’s 2018 Commencement ceremony. The former Treasury secretary remained in contact with convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein until the day before Epstein’s arrest in 2019. By Amy Y. Li

When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he sought guidance from a longtime associate: convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.

In a sequence of texts and emails between November 2018 and July 5, 2019, Summers turned to Epstein for advice on his pursuit of the woman. Epstein was quick to chime in with assurance and suggestions, describing himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man.”

The messages became public after House Republicans released more than 20,000 files from the Epstein estate on Wednesday. Summers’ correspondence with Epstein, a financier who pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, ends just one day before Epstein was arrested on new sex trafficking charges.

Together, the messages show Summers — who served as Treasury Secretary under former United States President Bill Clinton — placing an extraordinary degree of trust in Epstein, asking him for help in navigating a relationship that blurred the boundaries of his professional and personal lives.

Summers, who has been married since 2005, told Epstein he thought the woman was reluctant to leave him because she valued his professional connections. Epstein told him in one June 2019 text, “She is doomed to be with you.”

“Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor,” Summers wrote in November 2018. “I think I’m right now in the seen very warmly in rear view mirror category.”

“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein, explaining why he believed she continued to engage with him despite tensions.

A spokesperson for Summers said that the woman described in the exchanges was never Summers’ student, but declined to comment further for this article.

In at least some of his exchanges with Epstein on the relationship, Summers appears to refer to macroeconomist Keyu Jin ’04, a tenured professor at the London School of Economics at the time, who is mentioned in a series of late 2018 messages between the two men.

In one, Summers forwarded Epstein an email from Jin asking for feedback on a paper. Summers mused to Epstein that it was “probably appropriate” to hold off on responding.

“She’s already begining to sound needy 🙂 nice,” Epstein replied.

Jin, who earned her bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. at Harvard between 2000 and 2009, declined to comment on the months of messages between Summers and Epstein. In the messages released by the House, she does not refer to a romantic relationship with Summers. It is not clear whether she was aware that Summers shared her emails or discussed her with Epstein.

Throughout the seven months of correspondence reviewed by The Crimson, Summers and Epstein referred to the woman Summers was pursuing in some messages by the code name “peril” but never used her name in messages directly describing the relationship. On at least two occasions, the two men discussed Jin’s emails to Summers, which he forwarded to Epstein. In later messages, the two men appeared to joke about the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman, apparently Jin.

Summers’ long relationship with Epstein has been well documented, but the depth of their conversations, including over intimate matters, became public only this week. He traveled on Epstein’s private airplane on at least four occasions, including at least three times while serving as president of Harvard. Summers also met more than a dozen times with him and solicited donations from the disgraced financier for his wife, Harvard English professor emerita Elisa New. The messages released Wednesday show Summers organizing visits to Harvard on Epstein’s behalf and discussing contributions for New’s work.

“I have great regrets in my life,” Summers wrote in a Wednesday statement to The Crimson. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”

The exchanges concerning Jin’s messages and Summers’ relationship began shortly before a November 2018 investigation from the Miami Herald surfaced accusations from 80 girls and women that Epstein had abused them between 2001 and 2006, drawing on court records and interviews. Summers continued to correspond with Epstein about his relationship even after the Department of Justice opened an investigation in February 2019 into Epstein’s 2008 plea deal.

Wednesday’s documents also revealed messages where Summers, whose speculation that innate differences between men and women could drive women’s underrepresentation in science contributed to the end of his Harvard presidency in 2006, joked about women’s intelligence and what he described as excessive penalties for men who “hit on” women in the workplace.

In an October 2017 email to Epstein, Summers retread the same terrain that had proven treacherous for him in the past, writing that he “observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population….”

Summers has continued to teach at Harvard since, interrupted by brief stints in Washington, and currently holds Harvard’s highest faculty distinction as a University Professor. This semester, he is teaching two large undergraduate courses and one graduate class.

The first interactions between Summers and Epstein on his relationship with the woman — apparently Jin — appear in late November and early December 2018, when she and Summers seem to have met during an academic conference. For two days, Summers sent Epstein updates on his interactions with her.

On Dec. 1, Summers wrote that the woman had been “interested in my commentary on her outfits” and said he had “referenced your having figured us out” — suggesting Summers told her that Epstein was aware of their relationship.

Summers described his feelings as conflicted in the messages to Epstein, writing in remarkably candid terms.

“When I’m reflective I think I’m dodging a bullet,” he wrote. “Think right thing is to cut off contact. Suspect she will miss it. Problem is I will too.”

The next morning, Summers struck a different tone: “Game day at conference she was extremely good Smart Assertive and clear Gorgeous. I’m fucked.”

In messages from later that month, Summers and Epstein discussed Summers’ relationship with Jin’s father, a former high-ranked Chinese Communist Party official and the founding president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, who Summers had long been close with.

When Jin emailed Summers on Dec. 22 to thank him for his support of her and her father — minutes after she sent Summers an outline of an academic paper — Summers forwarded the exchange to Epstein, explaining that he had recently “sent a comment in mtg w her father flattering her father and saying other China officials had flattered him as well.”

Summers continued to detail his interactions with the woman — who appears to be Jin but is not named in the Epstein emails after December 2018 — throughout March 2019, now expressing frustration that she was canceling or shortening plans and appeared to be interested in another man.

“I think she is tired of this alas. Sustaining w secrecy hard,” he wrote.

The final tranche of messages, beginning in mid-June, shows the relationship still unresolved and Summers again turning to Epstein for guidance on how to pursue it. Summers asked Epstein whether it was “meaningful” to discuss the probability of “my getting horizontal w peril,” drawing parallels to forecasting Trump’s reelection.

“U r better at understanding Chinese women than at probability theory,” Summers told Epstein. The two men bantered about probability and mathematics, but repeatedly steered the conversation back to Summers’ relationship.

Epstein joked that “the probability of you in bed again with peril” was “0,” before reversing course and assuring Summers that “she is never ever going to find another Larry summers. Probability ZERO.”

Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”

Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”

The final messages, dated July 5, 2019, show Summers still in regular contact with Epstein. That morning, Summers wrote he was in Cape Cod with his family — “Bit of an Ibsen play,” he joked — and the two men exchanged a brief flurry of literary one-liners.

The thread ends at 1:27 p.m.

Epstein was arrested the next day.

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Source:

• Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava, As Summers Sought Clandestine Relationship With Woman He Called a Mentee, Epstein Was His ‘Wing Man’, The Harvard Crimson, 17 November 2025

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