Marc Fisher The Washington Post

Amazon and Saudi Arabia looked like perfect partners. Both had ambitions to become even more prominent players in the global economy. The world's biggest store and the world's second-biggest oil producer moved aggressively in the past few years toward a $1 billion deal to build Amazon data centers in the desert kingdom.

At the beginning, middle and end of his career, Jeffrey Epstein faced a reckoning with his misdeeds. At every stage, he managed to avoid the efforts of prosecutors and victims to confront him with his financial chicanery and sexual abuses. On Saturday, he apparently chose to end his life rather than face what he had done.

He could be quick, abrupt, precise - a familiar version of Robert Mueller III, the Marine and FBI director who had established himself in a lifetime of service as a paragon of Washington nonpartisanship. Again and again, he dispatched questions from Democrats and Republicans alike: "True." "Accurate." "Correct."

In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to "show his records" to prove that he hadn't been a "terrible student," the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump's academic records and help bury them.

When the National Enquirer published explicit text messages between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the woman he was having an affair with, the world's richest man made clear he wanted to find out how the tabloid got hold of his private communications.

From somewhere in the vast and mysterious deep state, a dissident agent rises up to give the people cryptic clues about how their heroic president will push back the forces of evil and make America great again. The renegade informant is known only as "Q," and if he actually exists, it's not in a movie, but somewhere in the Washington, D.C., bureauc...

As a young man on the make in Manhattan, as a political candidate and as president, Donald Trump has relied for half a century on a basic rule of behavior: To win, one must never apologize.

Even in the 1980s, when greed was good and the young Donald Trump cultivated a lifestyle of gold-plated excess, the notion of a real estate developer - a landlord, for goodness' sake - becoming a celebrity and bringing famous people into his orbit seemed a bit far-fetched.

Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos inhabit very different worlds. The president is a staunch bricks-and-mortar man who made his fortune building towers and dealing with blue-collar workers.

The genius in the White House has always believed that what makes him special is his ability to get things done without going through the steps others must take.

Throughout Donald Trump's business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded.

One is a daily carnival watched over by the counterterrorism squad, bulky toughs in plainclothes and a cast of sign-waving protesters bellowing at one another.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, already under siege for vulgar comments about forcing women into sex, also had crude, sexually explicit conversations in a series of radio interviews over the past 23 years, even noting how "voluptuous" his daughter was.

As he has prepared to be named the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump has not read any biographies of presidents. He said he would like to someday.

Amazon and Saudi Arabia looked like perfect partners. Both had ambitions to become even more prominent players in the global economy. The world's biggest store and the world's second-biggest oil producer moved aggressively in the past few years toward a $1 billion deal to build Amazon data centers in the desert kingdom.

At the beginning, middle and end of his career, Jeffrey Epstein faced a reckoning with his misdeeds. At every stage, he managed to avoid the efforts of prosecutors and victims to confront him with his financial chicanery and sexual abuses. On Saturday, he apparently chose to end his life rather than face what he had done.

He could be quick, abrupt, precise - a familiar version of Robert Mueller III, the Marine and FBI director who had established himself in a lifetime of service as a paragon of Washington nonpartisanship. Again and again, he dispatched questions from Democrats and Republicans alike: "True." "Accurate." "Correct."

In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to "show his records" to prove that he hadn't been a "terrible student," the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump's academic records and help bury them.

When the National Enquirer published explicit text messages between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the woman he was having an affair with, the world's richest man made clear he wanted to find out how the tabloid got hold of his private communications.

From somewhere in the vast and mysterious deep state, a dissident agent rises up to give the people cryptic clues about how their heroic president will push back the forces of evil and make America great again. The renegade informant is known only as "Q," and if he actually exists, it's not in a movie, but somewhere in the Washington, D.C., bureauc...

As a young man on the make in Manhattan, as a political candidate and as president, Donald Trump has relied for half a century on a basic rule of behavior: To win, one must never apologize.

Even in the 1980s, when greed was good and the young Donald Trump cultivated a lifestyle of gold-plated excess, the notion of a real estate developer - a landlord, for goodness' sake - becoming a celebrity and bringing famous people into his orbit seemed a bit far-fetched.

Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos inhabit very different worlds. The president is a staunch bricks-and-mortar man who made his fortune building towers and dealing with blue-collar workers.

The genius in the White House has always believed that what makes him special is his ability to get things done without going through the steps others must take.

Throughout Donald Trump's business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded.

One is a daily carnival watched over by the counterterrorism squad, bulky toughs in plainclothes and a cast of sign-waving protesters bellowing at one another.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, already under siege for vulgar comments about forcing women into sex, also had crude, sexually explicit conversations in a series of radio interviews over the past 23 years, even noting how "voluptuous" his daughter was.

As he has prepared to be named the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump has not read any biographies of presidents. He said he would like to someday.