Trump finds an issue he can’t brute-force his way out of

There have not been many points at which Donald Trump’s view of the world and his base’s view of the world are out of alignment. This is mostly because each view is rooted in the same core sensibility: Someone is out to get them — elites or immigrants or elite immigrants or whoever — and they must go on the offense against their opponents. It’s easy to slot pretty much any issue into that framework, and Trump has proven exceptionally adept at doing so.

When conflicts do arise, they are usually resolved quickly with either Trump or (far more often) his base simply shifting their baseline as necessary to bring the two perspectives back into alignment. This is pretty easy because there are few issues on which views are so strongly held that one side or the other can’t simply shrug and move to something else.

When Trump has in the past insisted that up is down, his base has often simply agreed to adjust their priors. On rarer occasion, it has worked the other way. Trump’s first administration did a legitimately good job facilitating the development of vaccines to address the coronavirus, for example, but when Trump’s hostility to his science advisors metastasized into opposition to science and vaccines broadly, Trump meekly stopped trying to celebrate his accomplishment. His base was still celebrating and voting for him, so let the woke history books worry about memorializing the time he oversaw a scientific success.

Then came Jeffrey Epstein.

On the subject of the deceased sexual predator, Trump and his base are firmly entrenched in very different positions. To his base, Epstein represents the most direct evidence that rich elites engage in deviant immoral behavior — a fragment of the QAnon worldview made manifest. To Trump, though, Epstein is a guy who he used to be good friends with and who he used to hang out with and who … well, let’s just change the subject, shall we? That’s old news, everyone! Why don’t we talk about what Barack Obama did* instead!

This tactic has worked in the past. If there is something that Trump doesn’t want to talk about, something that reflects on him poorly and which threatens to create one of those rifts between him and his base, he and his allies have generally done a good job not talking about it. Even on Epstein, his most powerful ally in the media, Fox News, has been dutifully talking not about Epstein but instead about Barack Obama and that wily Joe Biden, the president who cunningly sought to destroy Donald Trump while simultaneously being so inept that all of his presidential actions should be considered suspect.

Again, this has worked in the past. Fox News buried discussion of Trump’s liaison with Stormy Daniels and of the details of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work, with Fox viewers subsequently viewing themselves as particularly well informed even as they demonstrated that they were not.

This time, though, it’s not working as well. In Washington Post-SSRS polling published this morning, we see that, while Republicans report spending less time tracking Epstein news than independents or Democrats (whose appetite for Epstein stories is Miyazakian). But a majority are still tracking the story.

And, while Republicans are generous in their assessment of how Trump’s handling the situation, there are clear tells that they are not thrilled about the whole situation. The Post poll shows that Republicans (and MAGA Republicans) are more likely to approve of Trump’s handling of the situation than to oppose it, 4 in 10 of each group say they aren’t exactly sure if they approve — which, translating from partisan poll-speak, means they disapprove but are wary of saying they disapprove of Trump.

A similar phenomenon emerges when people were asked if they think the legendary “Epstein files” contain information that would be embarrassing for Trump. Most Americans (and a huge majority of giddy Democrats) think they do. But only a small fraction of Republicans agree … though a an additional 4 in 10 say they aren’t really sure if the material about Epstein might inculpate the president in whom they’ve invested so much confidence.

It’s important to point out that Donald Trump is not making any of this easier for himself. I don’t think the Epstein thing will persist for months to come; there’s only so much that can be explored and discussed. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected it to last this long. But Trump keeps doing things that revive it, from his transparent call for the release of an extremely limited set of information to the weird, unhelpful outreach from his former personal attorney (and now deputy attorney general) to Epstein’s collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump’s desperation to get his base to ignore this whole thing is palpable. His efforts to throw out shiny balls for his supporters to chase is painfully obvious, like a five year-old doing a magic trick. He tried to strong-arm Rupert Murdoch into killing the Wall Street Journal’s story about a letter he (allegedly) penned for Epstein’s 50th birthday. It didn’t work, for which you gotta hand it to the guy who also owns Fox News.

But this is dangerous terrain for Trump. If others on the right come to see the Epstein story as a better generator of attention than standing with the (lame duck!) president, there are incentives on both sides of the aisle to keep the story alive. There is a path — a narrow and tricky path — for someone else to become the champion of the “someone’s out to get you” narrative, someone who can point at Trump as being in bed with the scoundrels he was supposed to be fighting.

Trump’s obvious unease with the Epstein situation may well center on what he and his friend were actually up to back in the day — a possibility that seems more likely with every over the top protest from the president. But it may also be that he senses that this fissure is widening, not closing.

* Barack Obama didn’t do anything.