PITTSBURGH (TNS) — On a Parisian street corner in the 1780s, you’d be approached by a pamphleteer stoking the political rage that would culminate in the French Revolution. He might offer you a tract blaming the king for high bread prices or a cartoon depicting decadent clergy and nobility.

But among the most popular street literature was pornography featuring Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI. She became the great hate-figure of the revolution, particularly due to vulgar and baseless insinuations about her predatory sexuality.

What made the libel so compelling is that it seemed to confirm, in the most intimate way, all the suspicions the masses had formed about the moral degradation of the French elite, and in particular how they, without consequence, transgressed rules everyone else had to follow. Everyday people were perfectly willing to believe, because it only made sense, that powerful people weren’t just complicit in economic and political perfidy, but sexual perfidy as well.

While this may not have been true of Marie Antoinette herself, it was true of many in the French elite: Just read the Marquis de Sade. Actually, don’t.

These stories are staples of populist and revolutionary movements across the centuries. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who has become the legitimate focus of so much of today’s populist rage, his sadism, and that of the powerful people who participated in it, isn’t just a story: It’s a documented fact.

EXEMPLAR OF EVIL

In the character and exploits of Jeffrey Epstein, we can see distilled examples of everything hateful about America’s rich and powerful in the 21st century.

Epstein was a cheat who built his wealth on deception and being heedless of those he hurt. As he rose in prestige on Wall Street, for instance, he was part of a debt collection firm that morphed into a Ponzi scheme — a $400 million fraud that was, at the time, the most extensive in U.S. history. He managed to escape being charged.

Epstein succeeded by schmoozing and bluster and abusing the system, not by hard work and merit, as most people would understand it. He jumped from high school teacher to finance by sweet-talking the CEO of Bear Stearns, whose children went to his school.

He eventually came to manage — amazingly, with full power of attorney — the multibillion-dollar fortune of Leslie Wexner, whose businesses included Victoria’s Secret and The Limited. He paid himself millions of dollars in fees for the privilege of spending a billionaire’s wealth, an unimaginably brazen scheme he kept up for two decades.

And Epstein (along with accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell) groomed, raped and allegedly trafficked underage girls, with dozens, if not hundreds, of the richest and most powerful men in the world as his clients. It is not a “conspiracy theory” to discern that he was at the very center of a network of political and corporate titans who derive perverse pleasure from sexually humiliating teenage girls.

Just like it doesn’t take a huge leap to conclude they derive a perverse pleasure from humiliating the rest of us, by maintaining and exploiting a system that keeps billions of people walking on eggshells and grasping for rent money, while they get to say and do anything their sick hearts desire.

SURPRISING SAVIOR

Which brings us to Donald Trump. It’s easy to scoff at the idea that he, of all people, would be the one to bring this network to heel, to make the system he exploited more than almost anyone work for the average Joe.

Yet history does show that it’s typically someone from the inside who turns on the system and brings it down. Think of it in the jargon of Mr. Trump’s beloved professional wrestling: He was able to convince millions of Americans he had made a face-turn, from bad guy to good guy, from outlaw to the kind of sheriff who knows how the outlaws work and is willing to use outlaw methods to bust them up.

This is why attempts to use the justice system against Mr. Trump backfired: They appeared to confirm he was on the side of the people because the system needed to neutralize him.

But now, his supporters find themselves having to ask: Why does he hesitate about the most potent exemplar of elite criminality, of the propensity of the powerful to hurt the smaller and weaker just because they can? It raises the paralyzing question, more than anything else he’s done or not done in the past decade: What if he’s still beholden to them? And what if we’ve been played?

COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY

What took the Epstein saga from one anti-elite data point among many to a popular sensation was his death in a Manhattan prison six years ago. Whether he did so by his own hand or whether a cabal silenced him, he will no longer have to testify in court about what he knew. His death left the entire world without closure, and seemed to confirm once and for all that some people never have to face the music.

The Epstein documents, however, live on, and are the last chance for comeuppance. Surely, anyone on the side of the people against a cruel and self-serving elite would release them. Surely, Donald Trump wants the truth to come out?

Unless, as every revolutionary movement comes to suspect at some point, the people’s champion turns out to be their worst betrayer.

(Brandon McGinley is editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)