With the Jeffrey Epstein controversy continuing to dominate headlines, President Donald Trump is using much of the rhetoric he used during Russiagate back in 2016 and 2017 as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Trump is accusing the mainstream media of pushing “fake news,” railing against “the deep state,” and repeatedly using the word “hoax.” The president is also describing himself as the victim of a “witch hunt,” a phrase he used during his two impeachments as well as when he was facing four criminal indictments.
Never Trump conservative David French, in his July 31 column for the New York Times, emphasizes that Trump and his allies are responding to the “ongoing Epstein saga by playing one of MAGA’s greatest hits: the claim that Trump was the victim of a witch hunt, that the establishment attempted to destroy him even before he began his first term.”
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“The (Trump) Administration’s claims about the Russia investigation are designed to alter our understanding of history, to foster MAGA’s fake narrative of Trump and MAGA as perpetual victims of a maliciously corrupt ‘deep state,’” French explains. “In fact, the response to the Russia story provided the template for how MAGA has responded to nearly every Trump scandal. And once you recognize the pattern, you can see it play out time and time again. It comes in four distinct steps.”
Those “steps,” according to French, are: (1) “redefine the scandal on the terms most favorable to Trump,” (2) “lie relentlessly,” (3) “ignore genuine concerns,” and (4) “reverse the villains.”
“Trump has run this same playbook for more than eight years,” French argues. “Whether he was facing impeachment in 2019 over charges of threatening to hold back aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine investigated the Biden family or facing impeachment again over his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the pattern is the same. It has worked on Republicans every single time. It works because he’s telling them what they want to hear: Trump is not corrupt; his critics are.”
French continues, “But for the first time since he announced his first campaign in June 2015, Trump’s team has told his base something many definitely did not want to hear — and very much did not expect: that the Epstein scandal is less expansive than they thought, that there was nothing to see here. He has been flailing ever since. So it’s no surprise that he turned back to the ‘Russia hoax.’ It was the first significant scandal of his administration, and the fight over the (Robert) Mueller investigation helped bond Trump to his base. But the real Russia hoax is the idea that there was nothing to investigate.”
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David French’s full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).