There’s no doubt Jeffrey Epstein thought he was a very, very smart guy. “He always thought he was the smartest person in the room,” said one associate. Another said Epstein “thought he was smarter than the next guy.” When in 2008 Epstein pleaded guilty to procurement of a minor for prostitution, his defense asked for leniency based on his “unique intellect.”

Someone with such high self-regard can become deeply disturbed if a friend or associate, or a former friend or associate, achieves more, makes more money, and rises higher up society’s ladder than the person who feels he is the smartest guy in the room. Reading through Epstein’s emails released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, one gets the impression that Epstein was troubled by the success of his former friend Donald Trump, as he watched Trump take a wildly improbable path from successful developer to television star to president of the United States. At the same time, of course, Epstein was pleading guilty to sex crimes, struggling to recover, and then finding himself charged with even more serious sex crimes. Suicide in a jail cell was in his future while Trump was in the White House.

“President Trump’s long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein came to an apparent end in the mid-2000s,” wrote The New York Times. “But Mr. Epstein remained intently focused on Mr. Trump for years afterward, seeking to exploit the remnants of their relationship up until his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019.” As Trump rose, the Times said, Epstein tried to regain status by “casting himself as the ultimate Trump translator.” But the smartest guy in the room was fuming over the success of someone he felt was so clearly inferior to himself.

“Your world does not understand how dumb [Trump] really is,” Epstein wrote to former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers in May 2017, Trump’s fourth month in office. When, in July 2017, former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler wrote, “Trump is truly stupid,” Epstein replied with a one-word answer: “Duh.”

In an exchange with Times reporter Landon Thomas, Epstein wrote that Trump was “evil beyond belief,” and that he, Epstein, had tried to warn the world about his former friend. “I told everyone from day one,” Epstein wrote.

“I know how dirty Donald is,” Epstein wrote to Ruemmler in August 2018. “My guess is that non-lawyers, NY biz people have no idea.” Then Epstein boasted to an unknown recipient in December 2018: “I am the one able to take him down.” Meanwhile, Epstein exchanged long emails with adviser Michael Wolff in which Wolff offered Epstein counsel on trying to damage Trump, blackmail Trump and possibly run him out of office.

It would be an understatement to note that Trump was living rent-free in Epstein’s head. “The emails suggest that Trump remained a fixation for Epstein,” CNN wrote, “as he’s frequently mentioned numerous times over a span of nearly a decade — including long after their friendship ended.”

By the way, remember when Elon Musk, breaking with Trump, breathlessly announced that Trump was “in the Epstein files”? Of course Trump is in the Epstein files; he’s all over this set of Epstein files because he was so deeply in Epstein’s head. Trump will be in other Epstein files, too, because Epstein apparently could not stop thinking and talking about him.

Finally, one problem with reading the Epstein emails today is that Epstein was, in the words of one recent assessment in The Atlantic, a “notorious liar.” It is reasonable to take Epstein’s statements of opinion at face value — he appeared to really think Trump was dumb — but not his statements of fact.

So when Epstein says that victim Virginia Giuffre “spent hours at my house with [Trump],” there’s no compelling reason to believe him. Giuffre, now dead, wrote a book that said no such thing about Trump, and she also testified under oath that Trump “didn’t partake in any sex with us … [and] never flirted with me.” Giuffre said she never saw Trump and Epstein together. She was asked, “Did you ever see Donald Trump at Jeffrey’s home?” and answered, “Not that I remember.” In addition, she said she did not remember seeing Trump at Epstein’s island, or his house in New Mexico, or his house in New York.

So what to make of it? First, even though he was a friend of Epstein’s for several years up to around 2004, there is still no evidence linking Donald Trump to any wrongdoing. And second, Trump is nevertheless everywhere in the Epstein files because Jeffrey Epstein was out of his mind with resentment toward a former friend who not only succeeded in business but became president of the United States, even as Epstein raced toward ruin.