Of all the sleazy sideshow acts in our long-running carnival of fools and scoundrels, this business of Jeffrey Epstein is something I’d pay to see play out in all its lurid horror.

Epstein, a multi-millionaire financier, friend to the likes of Donald Trump. Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz is, I think we can agree, one colossal creep. He’s another example of dead-on perfect casting for the #MeToo era, besides playing like an over-the-top villain from that Showtime series, “Billions.”

What we know for certain is that the guy “frolicked” with girls “on the younger side”, to quote his buddy and repeat companion, Donnie Trump. And by “younger” we mean … well below legal age for naked rub downs and whatever else we can imagine, for which he compensated the children involved “hundreds of dollars”. In 1% jargon “hundreds of dollars” is also known as cash you don’t even stoop to pick off the pavement.

Last fall The Miami Herald sniffed out the rancid sweetheart con — orchestrated by Trump’s current Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta when he was doing the people’s business in south Florida. If you missed it, despite a stark and corroborated list of felonies involving said sex trafficking of minors, Acosta cut Epstein a 13-month work release sentence … without notifying the kids who he had molested. And … and! … clamped off any investigation into any pals of Epstein’s who might be involved.

Only “the best people”. (Rather than “calling” for Acosta’s resignation, Nancy Pelosi should drag him before Congress for public testimony.)

The Herald’s work on the case — fed by outraged sources in the Florida judicial system — failed to make any new waves under the state’s Trump-friendly new Governor, Ron DeSantis. But prosecutors in New York, where Epstein has one of his five homes, (a $70 million mansion just off Central Park), apparently failed to get their check in the mail from whoever bought off Acosta. (Okay, that’s not proven … yet.)

Along with thousands of pages in Florida’s files, which includes the feverish back and forth between Epstein’s lawyers and Acosta’s “prosecutors” to minimize any penalties, suspicion is running high that New York’s new information/evidence is so substantial, with so many new targets that bought-off MAGA hacks cannot dismiss it as “old news.”

This of course is where it could get (very) dicey for Bubba and Dershowitz and god knows who else. (Hell, there are even social connections — at least — to Britain’s royals. Imagine the dilemma for the royals-obsessed morning talk shows!.) Epstein’s alleged madam and procurer is the daughter of the British tycoon Rudy Perpich once wanted to cook a deal with right here in Minnesota.

So yeah, it’s a hot, juicy, perverted, disgusting mess. Very much in keeping with everything else about the Trump era. Plus, as they say on the infomercials, “there’s more!”. Bill Clinton! And, you gotta guess, other rich, pervy big shots.

Clinton’s office has issued a statement saying every time he consorted with Epstein he was accompanied by either staff or his security detail. Still, “frolicking” with underage girls on Epstein’s private jet or private island? Unfortunately it doesn’t strain credulity.

Here though is the thing I’d like to argue in the context of messaging for Campaign 2020. Anyone trying to exploit bona fide populist outrage could do worse than craft a campaign strategy on the nearly universal awareness and disgust with how routinely the 1%, (hell, make it the 5% just to round things out), slide off the back of felony justice in this grand democratic experiment of ours.

Democrats, Republicans, tinfoil hat Hannity dupes … all of them and everyone know this for a stone cold fact. The farce of “no one is above the law” is slapped across our faces every day.

Hell, Trump super-pal/NFL owner Robert Kraft of “happy ending” massage therapy in south Florida has so thoroughly gamed out the legal system down there, the only people facing serious punishment in his sleaze-and-squeeze are … the women who were trafficked in from Asia to yank on pudgy dirtballs rolling up in their Bentleys. They are the ones facing charges and crippling financial penalties.

Trump’s flagrantly bogus “drain the swamp” battle cry appealed to this deeply ingrained cynicism toward everything about D.C. politics. It was an obvious sham. But the essence of it had bi-partisan appeal. The trick to tapping the near universal disgust with how the rich and connected can game any system in which they play is in laying out the argument out in non-ideological terms.

Reality of course says that if you make an issue out of a “war” on every lizard in a Brioni suit gaming the system — be it the legal system, the tax system, the health insurance system, etc. — you’re eventually talking about new regulation, or at the very least, aggressive regulation/enforcement of laws already on the books.

And we know how the 1% – 5% feel about anything that sticks a wrench in their god-given right to exceptionalism.