A journalist who has spent years studying Donald Trump says the president’s latest flurry of controversial pardons looks eerily like something Jeffrey Epstein warned about long before Trump ever took office.
Michael Wolff, who has written four books about Trump, including an account of his first term, opened up on the podcast, Inside Trump’s Head. This time, Wolff wasn’t talking about campaign drama or White House chaos. He was focused on Trump’s fascination with the one presidential power that doesn’t require negotiation, compromise, or oversight: the pardon.
According to Wolff, Epstein once told him that if Trump ever became president, he would treat the pardon power as if it were a personal toy box. Not a constitutional responsibility, but something he could play with, showing it off just because he could.
“Jeffrey Epstein had a kind of riff about this, because even before Trump became president, he would talk about, ‘If Donald became president and he had the pardon power…’” Wolff said. He explained that Epstein believed Trump would use the authority in a “childlike” way, dazzled by the idea that no one could stop him.
Wolff said Trump himself often spoke about pardons with a kind of giddy awe. “Trump is often gone on and talked about this in a kind of wide eyed incredulity,” he said. “I can pardon anyone. No one can do anything about it. If I pardon them. I have absolute power.”
And Wolff believes that’s exactly what we’re seeing now.
Trump’s string of recent pardons has stunned legal analysts who say the president is pushing the limits of the power in ways that feel more personal than principled. One of the most startling came when Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, who had been convicted of money laundering and hit with more than $4 billion in penalties.
In another move that left even seasoned prosecutors shaking their heads, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence for running a massive drug trafficking network that, according to The New York Times, “flooded” the United States with cocaine.
To Wolff, these decisions are not random one-offs, they’re part of a pattern Epstein flagged years ago, long before anyone imagined Trump wielding this much power.
“Epstein had focused on this and said he’s going to do that,” Wolff said. “He loves having this kind of thing. He loves showing the power that he has, and he said he would do it in a childlike way.”
Epstein and Trump moved in overlapping social circles years ago, and while their relationship soured long before Epstein’s death, Wolff has long argued that Epstein understood certain parts of Trump’s personality in a way few did. The idea of Trump relishing an unrestricted power fits, Wolff says, with the man he’s observed for decades.
Whether or not Epstein “saw this coming,” Wolff’s point is simple, and his tone suggested genuine concern. Trump’s recent behavior, he argues, isn’t just impulsive or quirky. It’s exactly what Epstein warned about, delivered with the kind of wide eyed excitement Wolff has seen countless times up close.
