Trump in town

Donald Trump is visiting our neck of the woods this weekend; apparently his day job atop the most powerful nation on earth is quiet enough at the moment that he has time for a trip to Europe to play golf and promote his private commercial interests.

There was a time when I would have hit the streets to join one of the various protests that have been organised around the country, but these days I really don’t have the energy for anything more than posting some stern admonishment on the internet.

Trump is probably glad to be away from home while the fallout from his administration’s volte-face on the Epstein files question continues to roil his base. He seems to be moving away from a strategy of insisting there is nothing to see in the unreleased material, and instead is leaning into the conspiracy narrative by suggesting that any documents that do incriminate him are fakes, concocted by Barack Obama as part of the treasonous deep-state plot that Tulsi Gabbard says she has uncovered, while sending his Deputy Attorney General to offer Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon in return for some helpful testimony.

All this is completely ludicrous, even by Trump’s standards, but, if the last decade has taught us one thing, it’s that the MAGA faithful, and the GOP opportunists who have built their careers on enabling Trump’s madness, are willing to perform whatever mental gymnastics are required to relieve their cognitive dissonance, so it might just work.

The bigger problem for Trump is the medium-term outlook, particularly his vulnerability in the 2026 mid-term elections. Even if he keeps his core support on board, the social and economic havoc wreaked by his fiscal policy and spending cuts, his on/off tariffs, his ineffectual foreign policy, and the ICE reign of terror are such electoral liabilities that he cannot possibly let a free vote go ahead. I guess we’ll see if he just tries to fix it, or if he manufactures some sort of crisis to justify cancelling the elections altogether.

On second thoughts, maybe I should be out protesting…