The Predator Mirror: Trump, Weinstein, and What Epstein Left Behind

Christine Merser, July 28, 2025

It would be easier if they were different. If Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump were opposites. One a monster behind closed doors, the other just a vulgar relic of a different era. One punished, the other protected. One in prison, the other, shockingly back in the White House. It would be easier if we could compartmentalize them.

But they’re not different. They are two faces of the same sickness.

Harvey Weinstein used his power in Hollywood to force, coerce, and manipulate women into silence and submission. He hid behind assistants, lawyers, PR teams, and the currency of opportunity. He weaponized ambition. He leveraged vulnerability. And for decades, he got away with it.

Donald Trump operated in parallel. The environments changed. Pageants, boardrooms, golf clubs, cable news sets. But the pattern didn’t. He bragged about sexual access as a function of fame. Publicly. He isn’t as smart as Weinstein, and he has a loose tongue, but other than that, they are the same. He ranked women publicly. He walked in on underage contestants changing. He was accused of assault by more than two dozen women. And he deflected it all with a cocktail of mockery, legal threats, and a smirk that said they’ll never touch me. And, overall, they haven’t.

Weinstein used fear. Trump used spectacle. But at the core, both men believed the same thing. Power is permission.

And both were built and shielded by the same system. One that devalues women, fetishizes control, and forgives the abuser as long as he still turns a profit, wins awards, or wins an election.

But here’s the difference. Weinstein fell. Trump rose.

And now that he’s back in the presidency. Not figuratively. Not spiritually. Literally. There’s something new about him. Not humility. Not reflection. Not a softened tone. A growing tension. Paranoia. The crackle of fear just beneath the dominance.

Trump saw what happened to Weinstein.

And he knows what Epstein left behind. They showed him in May.

Weinstein was the predator brought down by testimony and paper trails. Epstein was the predator who kept other people’s paper trails. And Trump is in them.

“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, many of them on the younger side.” — Donald Trump, 2002, on Jeffrey Epstein

That’s not a joke. That’s not locker-room banter. That’s a tell. And now, with Epstein dead, whether by murder or suicide, and more names emerging, Trump can’t control the narrative the way he used to. He can’t sue the truth out of existence. He can’t insult it into silence. And, it’s confusing him. Scaring him.

And in the first six months of his presidency, he’s made a lot of enemies. Not just Democrats. I refuse to call them Republicans anymore. Let’s call them what they are. MAGA. And he knows they don’t like him now. He reads more than he lets on. He knows JD Vance has been in touch with Rupert Murdoch, and he knows Murdoch has turned on him. That’s the part he can’t stomach. Murdoch isn’t afraid of him anymore. He can’t control the headlines or the shadows. And that is feeding the paranoia. Feeding it fast. And the bigger that paranoia gets, the more mistakes he will make. Because when a man like Trump is cornered, he doesn’t get sharper. He gets sloppy. He reacts.

So he does what he always does. Grabs for dominance. Rewrites laws. Installs loyalists. Puts the Department of Justice in a chokehold. Not because he wants to govern. He never wanted to govern. But because if this stops being about dominance, it becomes about survival. And survival, to a man like Trump, is weakness.

If he has to survive, he loses.

He wins by dictating the rules, not playing defense.

He wins by humiliating, not hiding.

He wins by forcing everyone else to orbit him. Women, courts, truth, even gravity itself.

He wins by telling so many lies, we can’t keep track.

But Weinstein thought he was the sun, too. And when the silence cracked and the stories poured out and the enablers fell away, no amount of money or press clippings could save him. Because when predators lose dominance, they don’t get to survive.

So Trump clings harder.

He’s not afraid of Epstein’s ghost. He’s afraid of what Epstein documented.

He’s afraid of the women who never got to speak.

He’s afraid the receipts are still out there.

And yet, I don’t think Epstein will be the thing that takes him down. I still think it will be the Project 2025 people, which I wrote about last week. The ones who used him to bulldoze the front gates, but who are now perfectly capable of running the house without him. Their new foundation for America is already cemented into the machinery of our government, in departments and rulebooks and staffing pipelines that most Americans don’t even see. It will be hard to undo. So they can let him go now. And when they’re ready, they will. They’ll install Vance. A quieter face easier to manage. Meanwhile, we’ll see more and more people stepping away from Trump’s shadow. Not denouncing him, not yet. Just calling in sick.

And deep down, he knows. If this story ever stops being about power and starts being about truth, he won’t get to write the ending.