Trump cranks up distraction machine but focus refuses to budge from Epstein

Donald Trump displayed the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sitting in the Oval Office, he was asked by a reporter about the justice department’s hunt for evidence about the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “I don’t really follow that too much,” he said. “It’s sort of a witch-hunt.”

And then the pivot: “The witch-hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.” Trump was claiming a plot by Barack Obama to rig the 2016 election, accusing his predecessor of “treason”. For good measure he warned: “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people.”

Why this and why now? It is not much of a mystery. Trump, who once claimed that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, has shot himself in the foot. His support base is in open revolt over his failure to release files relating to the convicted sex offender Epstein and a rumoured list of his elite clients.

The president’s solution is to reach for a very familiar playbook: distract, distract, distract.

It worked for him during his biggest crisis in the 2016 election campaign. On the same day that an Access Hollywood tape emerged in which Trump was recorded making lewd comments about women, his campaign seized on the WikiLeaks release of thousands of emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Trump survived and went on to win the election.

Since then, whenever he lands in trouble, his fans have been eager to help him turn the page. But the Epstein saga cuts into Trump’s core political identity as the slayer of the deep state. He is once again throwing out numerous shiny objects but they are losing their shine.

Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, observes: “It is the distraction machine that has worked in the past breaking down – trying the old favourites and not getting much traction. What’s happened is like massive whiplash, which happens when you’re in some sort of moving vehicle and it’s going forward, often at a pretty high speed, and you suddenly crash into something and your neck jerks back often with very dire consequences.”

The distraction machine has been working overtime. On 12 July Trump said he was considering revoking the New York-born actor Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, writing on his Truth Social platform: “She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

On 16 July Trump posted that Coca-Cola had agreed to use real cane sugar in its flagship product in the US, which has been sweetened with high fructose corn syrup since the 1980s. The soft drinks company later confirmed the new product when it announced its second-quarter financial results.

On 17 July, the White House offered a rare insight into the 79-year-old president’s health. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that his bruised hand was a result of “frequent handshaking” and his swollen legs caused by chronic venous insufficiency, though none of it was cause for concern.

Then came a wild weekend on social media. Trump posted bizarre clips that showed a woman snatching a snake from the grass, a car sliding under a truck barrelling along a highway and people doing tricks on motorcycles and jet skis.

More darkly, he made the baseless claim that Obama officials fabricated intelligence reports to assert that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

He followed up with a fake AI-generated video that depicts Obama being forced to kneel by FBI agents, who handcuff him next to a beaming Trump in the Oval Office, then wearing an orange jumpsuit and pacing in a prison cell, accompanied by the soundtrack of the Village People’s YMCA.

Trump also posted a photo featuring fake mug shots of former officials including James Comey, the former FBI director, and Samantha Power, the ex-head of USAID. “How did Samantha Power make all of that money?” he wrote.

And pivoting to sport, Trump threatened to block a deal for the Washington Commanders’ new stadium if the American football team does not revert to its original name, the racially offensive Washington Redskins.

On Monday there was another twist. The Trump administration released more than 6,000 documents related to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, totalling nearly a quarter of a million pages.

The move appeared to backfire, however, merely serving as a reminder of Trump’s ability to release any files he chooses. Bernice King, the civil rights leader’s daughter, shot back on X: “Now, do the Epstein files.”

And Josh Johnson, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, observed: “That’s how bad things are for Trump. His back is against the wall so hard he’s releasing more Black history.”

But Trump seems to have settled on Obama and “Russiagate” as his main deflector shield. It drills into Maga bedrock, combining a racist backlash against Obama and conspiracy theories about the deep state. He is struggling to make it land, however. In Tuesday’s Oval Office exchange, he claimed that there was “irrefutable proof that Obama was ‘sedacious’” – a word that does not exist.

On Wednesday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director national intelligence, made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room to make baseless claims that Obama and his treasonous advisers plotted nothing short of a coup. But again, the White House was upstaged by a media report that Trump was told in May that his name is in the Epstein files.

For once Trump’s nothing-to-see-here-but-look-over-there! tactics are failing him. Reed Galen, president of The Union, a pro-democracy coalition, says: “He’s playing the hits at this point. He’s typically been very effective at it.

“This just happens to be a different situation because it’s so foundational to the movement’s belief system. The whole point was that he was supposed to take down the deep state. This is an indication that he won’t do it or never had any intention of doing it and that’s really upsetting to them.”

Meanwhile Trump has tried to downplay the scandal as “pretty boring stuff” and by reaching for one of his favourite words: “hoax”. Most tellingly, he has tried to dismiss Epstein as old news, complaining: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy has been talked about for years.”

Yet still he is caught in checkmate. The president, whose entire act is based around nostalgia (Alcatraz, coal, plastic straws, the Redskins), has never been shy of rewinding to old grievances over the 2016 and 2020 elections when politically expedient. Only now is he discovering that conspiracy theories grow and metastasize but they never die.