CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: Seduced by the Louis XIV Treatment
Paul Krugman’s subhead is: What JD Vance and his entourage in Milan teach us about Epstein’s magnetism. Paul Krugman tells a story here that is, at the start, about JD Vance’s ludicrous forty-car parade through Milan, and the grotesque tackiness of Trump-world “dictator chic”: the comic-opera excess of Vance importing food to Milan and clogging medieval streets so badly that an American athlete almost misses her event. From there he pivots to the way Jeffrey Epstein, long after his conviction as a sex offender, continued to draw in a wide circle. Yet Epstein's payments were small. His favors were trivial. Yet his aura of charisma was large—a shimmering sense that he was a gatekeeper to a special club of the really entitled. A truly remarkable number of people were connected to the post-2008 Epstein, after all. How did he do this? Why did they succumb to this?
<https://paulkrugman.substack.com/cp/187458196>
