Trump's Frantic Flop Sweat
Trump blows chunks of chaff
Rational people began their week with a familiar question: Is this real life? Did that really happen?
Did Donald Trump mark the six month point of his presidency by reposting a fake (AI-generated) video of former president Barack Obama being arrested, forced to his knees in front of a grinning Trump, and imprisoned?
Indeed, he did. And it, as the NYT reports, it came as “administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election….”
Trump — the actual president of the United States forgodssakes— continued to escalate, posting an image of a figure in a Guy Fawkes mask accusing Obama of treason, and amplifying Tulsi Gabbard’s batsh*t claims about a plot to invent the “Russia hoax” as a treasonous coup against Trump.
There was, of course, more. As the NYT notes:
“The Obama videos were followed by a photo featuring handcuffed men in suits by the Capitol. Its caption reads “until this happens, nothing will change.” Another post showed fake mug shots of former officials including James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Samantha Power, the former U.S.A.I.D. chief.
“How did Samantha Power make all of that money?” Trump wrote, repeating the baseless claim that Power’s net worth skyrocketed during her tenure.
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Trump’s Distraction Campaign Misfires
All of this comes as Trump is furiously blowing massive chunks of chaff into the air to distract attention from the Epstein story, which just won’t go away.
Trump’s flop-sweat drips in frantic orange streaks of desperation.
In the last few days, Trump has suggested revoking Rose O’Donnell’s citizenship, threatened to block a Washington DC football stadium unless the team goes back to calling itself the “Redskins”; filed a $10 billion libel suit against the Wall Street Journal; and released files on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. Trump’s efforts at deflection became so manic that they appeared to glitch. Via the Wapo:
During a fusillade of posts on the social network he owns, Trump even released a three-minute mash-up of clips that would seem more at place on-screen at a sports bar than in a president’s official feed: a woman snatching an approaching snake from the grass, a car sliding under a truck barreling along a highway, and no fewer than four people doing tricks on motorcycles and jet skis.
We would ask, WTAF? But, you’ve probably already asked that question, and we don’t want to be redundant.
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On one level, this all feels so familiar: Trump is a master of distraction, and he’s repeatedly proven his ability to divert, fudge, and change the subject. You can feel him riffing through the old playbook for the bright shiny object that will finally make everyone STOP asking questions about the Epstein Files.
But, alas, the old conjuring tricks do not (at least for the moment) seem to be working at all. Instead of running after Trump’s serial squirrels of distractions, voters seem to be asking: Why is Trump working so hard to hide what’s in those files? Why he is so anxious to not talk about it?1And have you seen the most recent video of Trump judging teen models?
The latest CBS poll suggests that Trump is losing the battle for public opinion. Badly.
Even worse (from Trump’s POV), the issue is evenly splitting Republicans.
To be sure, Trump still has his MAGA loyalists who will eagerly lick all the spittle they can, but as Abby Livingston notes, there is agita in the cult:
In the span of two weeks, the metastasizing scandal seems to have engulfed every part of the MAGA coalition, with Elon stirring the pot on X (after vowing to form a third party); Trump suing Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Journal and Fox News; and right-adjacent influencers ranging from Theo Von to Shane Gillis who aren’t letting this story die. It also didn’t go unnoticed that Joe Rogan’s much-anticipated interview with Democratic Rep. James Talarico, a potential Cornyn/Paxton Senate challenger, was everywhere this weekend. Many of these voices helped attract politically disengaged voters to the Trump coalition, and insiders worry their current posture might affect Republican turnout in the midterms.
Exit take: How bad is it? This bad: “House grinds to a halt as GOP tries to shut down Epstein votes.” Via Axios:
House Republicans have virtually stopped work on all major legislation leading up to their six-week summer recess to avoid taking votes on forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files….
State of play: The House Rules Committee is not planning to hold votes this week to prepare major legislation for the House floor, meaning any remaining votes will likely be on small, noncontroversial bills.
The House had been scheduled to vote on GOP legislation involving immigration and environmental legislation this week that had to go through the panel first.
But Democrats planned to force yet more votes on amendments aimed at forcing the Justice Department to release all its documents on Epstein.
What they're saying: Members of the Rules Committee in both parties told reporters the standstill is due to Republicans not wanting to vote on the Epstein-related amendments.
Exit take: The drip, drip continues. “An Accuser’s Story Suggests How Trump Might Appear in the Epstein Files - The New York Times.
Breaking this morning: “Justice Dept. seeks meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell amid Epstein outrage”- The Washington Post.
Bonus take: Cynics might suspect that pardons may be dangled.
Nota Bene:
Paul Fahri: Trump’s Campaign to Crush the Media - The Atlantic [Gift link]
In his first six months in office, he has been on a winning streak in his campaign to punish and diminish the press. His dispute with the Journal, after all, hijacked the news cycle from another Trump “victory”: eliminating federal support for public broadcasting. Early Friday morning, Congress voted to cancel $1.1 billion in subsidies for NPR, PBS, and their affiliated stations, marking the first time Congress has cut off public broadcasters since its funding began nearly 60 years ago. Trump had pushed for the defunding, repeatedly asserting that NPR and PBS offered “biased and partisan news coverage.” Republicans in Congress apparently agreed.
“The independent press in the United States is facing what media outlets in too many other countries with aspiring autocrats have confronted,” the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told me on Thursday. He compared Trump’s “repressive measures” to those of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán: “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting.
Jess Bidgood, NYT: Old complaints, new actions
Over the past six months, Trump has undertaken a muscular and precise attack on the media’s pressure points. He has sought to dismantle Voice of America, the federally funded news agency that provides coverage to countries with limited press freedom, and persuaded his allies in Congress to cut funding for public broadcasting after decades of similar efforts sputtered out.
The tactics go well beyond cutting government funding, with the administration seeking to find — and use — every lever it has, just as it has in its attacks on certain universities. It has flexed its power over seemingly parochial matters — like when some reporters at legacy media organizations including The New York Times lost their desks at the Pentagon to friendly right-wing media outlets, or by removing The Journal from the press pool on a coming trip to Scotland — and over bigger ones, too.
When Trump took office, his handpicked chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, quickly revived complaints about 2024 election coverage by ABC, CBS and NBC that had been dismissed by the outgoing chair, and he said the outcome of a “news distortion” complaint about CBS could affect his agency’s review of a merger proposed between Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and Skydance. Those moves, my colleague Jim Rutenberg observed early this year, recall Richard Nixon’s crackdown on the press after he won re-election — and they may succeed where Nixon failed, just as Trump failed in his first term.
“He is using the levers of government much more effectively as he has in other ways during this administration,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a lawyer who specializes in media regulations and is the senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. “He has learned that he can enlist the Justice Department and an extremely compliant F.C.C. chair to increase the leverage. And that is a big change.”
Restoring the GOP Legacy?
In today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, I’m joined by former Montana Governor and RNC chair Marc Racicot to discuss his shadow RNC group, “Our Republican Legacy,” a new initiative aimed at restoring the GOP’s foundational principles of character, constitutionalism, and limited government. (You can find out more about the group here.)
Racicot offers a candid assessment of the current political landscape, acknowledging the uphill battle while defending the idea that the Republican Party can and must return to its roots. I ask some skeptical questions.
Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed.
Tuesday dogs
Auggie in the morning.
Via Will Sommer’s excellent newsletter:
[No] less a conspiracy theorist than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) expressed disappointment on Monday, suggesting that while she welcomed Obama’s arrest, she wanted the Epstein network arrested too.
“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” Greene said. “They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”
The right’s disappointment in Trump’s handling of the Epstein files has gotten so bad that any other move the administration makes on “transparency” has been seen as a distraction. On Monday afternoon, for example, Gabbard declassified hundreds of thousands of files related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
On X, the response was almost unanimous: Why, posters wanted to know, was Gabbard trying to distract from Epstein?
Had to laugh at the notion of "restoring the GOP legacy" - MAGA is the legacy. 40+ years of rhetoric promoting christian (and white) nationalism leads straight to MAGAland. For example, from the 1992 GOP convention -"We are America,” Rich Bond, the head of the RNC, proclaimed on NBC. “These other people are not America.”
Re the AI Obama fakes ... anything to change the subject. There is no limit to what they will throw at the wall to see if anything at all sticks.
So let's talk about Epstein. More Epstein. All Epstein. Keep the foot firmly on the gas pedal.
There was an interesting take last night on cable news by Steve Scaramucci, who predicted that the whole Epstein saga would blow over in White House coverage within about three weeks. On one hand I can see that happening, as the current President seems to get away with everything, most people have an incredibly short span of attention, and they get bored with hearing the same topic over and over. I often wonder if the American public would have enough patience now to sit through a Watergate saga for a year and a half until it reached its necessary conclusion. I'm not convinced we have it in us collectively anymore to let such a significant process run its course.
On the other hand, this scandal feels different. Each day a little more the whiff of coverup seems to grow into a stench, and anything related to child abuse and pedophilia is an electrified third rail, regardless of which political party is under scrutiny. People rightly want to know not only if their chief executive is a pervert, but also if he might have been a co-conspirator or worse with a known sexual abuser of underage and/or unwilling females. He already is on tape talking about grabbing women by their genitalia. He is a convicted sex offender. As a rule people do not change their character when there are no consequences. Do not tell us that where there clearly has been smoke, there can be no fire.