The president is attempting to keep calm in front of the cameras, but behind the scenes he’s fuming.
Donald Trump is reportedly getting more and more fed up with his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein drama that has consumed headlines for weeks.
Trump is frustrated that the scandal has overshadowed his agenda and dominated the news, two people familiar with his thinking told The Washington Post in a Sunday report.
Nearly a dozen sources close to the situation spoke to the Post about the issue, painting a picture of an administration adrift, lacking a clear strategy and blindsided by the intensity of the backlash—particularly from Trump’s own base. Many officials had reportedly hoped that Americans would move on from the unreleased Epstein files, underestimating the sustained outrage.
I think that in a lot of ways, it’s less about the Epstein files, and more about how deeply complicit in the elite culture that he claimed to be in opposition against.
Epstein is just an acceptable outlet among his base to air their uncertainty and unease they’re feeling. Because his ties with Epstein have been well publicized and well known about for a while, but from a right wing populist perspective, that was kind of written off and discredited because it didn’t fit the feeling, the “vibe”, that he was upsetting and visibly angering elites and thus he must be acting against their interests in some meaningful way, now though, it’s very clear he’s cosying up to the tech elite and taking huge obvious bribes from other elite groups and actually gutting social programs they use everyday, rather than that just being a threat made by the “woke” media they don’t trust.
So suddenly the Epstein being associated with him is believable to right wing populists because of how visibly elite aligned he’s being from their perspective.