President Donald Trump is returning to an old tactic as he tries to move his base past the uproar over his administration’s refusal to name Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
As the president faces a sustained rebellion among some of his most loyal MAGA influencers, and watches younger Americans who make up their audiences turn away, he appears desperate to find a new narrative on which his voters can fixate.
Right-wing podcasters are far from the only ones talking about the issue. It has expanded through the so-called “manosphere” and continues to dominate discussions on X, Reddit and other platforms including YouTube, where a wide range of political commentators are joining the fray. Reports indicate the issue has fractured the president’s top advisers.
The result: Trump is swinging at every potential issue that comes his way as he searches for a piece of red meat to throw at the hungry wolves.
Over the weekend came the president’s first and second attempts. A vow to revoke the citizenship of Rosie O’Donnell (clearly a pressing matter, and also, not legal) followed by a strangely-worded plea to his followers: just drop it, guys!
Then a third, on Sunday: crashing the on-stage celebration of Chelsea as the club emerged victorious over PSG at the Club World Cup.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals’?” asked a very normal-sounding Trump on Truth Social over the weekend. “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein,” he continued.
On Tuesday, the administration was hit with another bit of bad news.
Inflation ticked up to its highest level in months in June as the president continued to threaten tariffs on the country’s closest trading partners, and despite Trump’s insistences to the contrary.
For months, the president has raged at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, demanding that he cut interest rates. Powell has refused, citing inflation risks; this clearly undermines Trump’s insistence.
Now, with Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs set to go into effect in just over two weeks, there will be even more questions aimed at the White House on the issue of how much higher prices will be for the average American consumer.
Those immediate price hikes, should they continue or even accelerate, could severely undercut Republican members of Congress as they campaign for re-election into the beginning of next year on the passage of Trump’s spending legislation which included the extension of the 2017 tax cuts.
And so Trump needed a distraction. On Tuesday, that meant swinging at a familiar target: Adam Schiff, the junior Democratic senator from California.
In a Truth Social post, he falsely accused Schiff of mortgage fraud for claiming a home in Maryland as his primary residence. But the practice is common for members of Congress, who spend months at a time working out of the Capitol and in decades past used to move their whole families to the D.C., Maryland or northern Virginia regions for ease of access to their jobs.
Political pressure now forces many to maintain residences near the Capitol and back in their home states. This is of course hardly a burden for many members of Congress but can be difficult for younger members with more limited financial means.
Legal analysts who looked at the residences have said that Trump’s claims of clear illegality are false. And that’s to say nothing of the can of worms the president could have opened with the following line: “he must LIVE in CALIFORNIA because he was a Congressman from CALIFORNIA.”
That could certainly be an awkward line of attack were it to be repurposed against Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama senator (and apparent Florida resident) who is now running for governor in the former state and already taking fire from Democrats on the issue of his residency.
Schiff told Inside Washington on Tuesday that the post was “just the latest example of political retaliation by Donald Trump against one of his perceived enemies”.
But the president, right now, seems solely focused on moving his base past the one issue that has now divided it to a greater extent than anything since perhaps January 6. Ironically, that’s the same kind of tunnel vision that led his vice president, JD Vance, to fan these flames to start with.
It remains to see if he’ll be successful, or if the administration can come up with something to satisfy his critics — who aren’t growing any quieter.
But the White House’s current strategy reeks of desperation.
