First he drained the swamp, now Trump is draining his own base
In addition, the US President is moving to isolate his internal critics by making an example of Marjorie Taylor Greene – once one of his most loyal allies – and branding her a “traitor” and a “disgrace to our GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY!”
The flurry of activity reveals a US president who is feeling the political heat and eager to show he still retains the ability to dictate and harness the passions of the MAGA movement to advance his own interests.
Trump’s bid to wrest back control of the political agenda is likely to come at a high price by setting off a new chain reaction of unpredictable consequences and igniting new battlefronts.
This is already apparent. His decision to lift reciprocal tariffs on selective goods – backdated to Thursday – is being widely interpreted as a major backdown and a glaring concession that his signature economic policy had been increasing prices for Americans all along.
The decision to exempt hundreds of imports, including Australian beef, from his April 2 tariffs has been targeted to capture goods not produced inside America including coffee, tea, tropical fruits and juices, cocoa, spices, bananas, oranges, tomatoes and a wider range of fertilisers.
Predictably, the move has triggered demands from American business and industry groups for the tariff relief to be more widely spread.
US Chamber of Commerce executive vice-president Neil Bradley encouraged Trump to lift imposts on “other products not readily available from domestic courses and in instances where tariffs threaten American jobs”.
“We also urge the administration to provide tariff relief for the more than 236,000 small businesses who import into the US,” he said.
National Association of Manufacturers chief executive Jay Timmons said “just as coffee primarily must be produced elsewhere, the same is true for a range of critical manufacturing inputs and machinery that keep our factories humming”.
“Tariffs on essential manufacturing inputs raise costs on factory floors, slow investment in equipment and risk undercutting … efforts to boost US manufacturing output and jobs.”
Attempting to dilute the potency of the Epstein issue, Trump is leaning into the scandal to try to share the political pain more broadly. He is flagging plans to ask the Justice Department and FBI to launch an investigation into Epstein’s ties with Bill Clinton, his former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (a Democratic donor) and the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase.
His goal is to generate a new narrative that release of the Epstein files is a “con job” being pushed by the Democrats as a distraction – a dubious ploy given he and senior members of his cabinet stoked interest in the issue and the need for greater transparency during the 2024 presidential campaign.
The pushback from the US President comes after more than 20,000 of Epstein’s emails were released last week, providing further insights into his contact network. They included correspondence in which the convicted sex offender, who died by suicide in August 2019, said Trump “knew about the girls” and spent hours at his house along with one of his victims, later identified as Virginia Giuffre.
Finally, Trump’s political attack on Greene risks deepening the fissures in his own political constituency. He is now trying to ostracise any breakaway figure seen as a greater MAGA purist than himself, with the President accusing his former ally of shifting to the “Far Left.”
“I understand that wonderful, Conservative people are thinking about primarying Marjorie in her District of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her and her antics and, if the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support,” he said on Truth Social.
Greene crossed the President by suggesting he was straying too far from his America First platform and spending too much time on his foreign agenda. In addition, she championed the release of the Epstein files along with greater efforts to address the affordability crisis.
She will not go down without a fight. Responding to Trump’s attack on her, Greene posted that “most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families, and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream.”
“I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him. But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump … For me, I remain America First and America Only!!!”
In trying to solve the problem presented by Greene, Trump’s solution is to pour petrol on the fire and embrace the chaos. He will be hoping the blaze doesn’t also burn through his own political credibility.
Harsh truths in Trump’s foreign policy ramble, but hardly a word on Russian aggression
Donald Trump is on a mission to reset the political narrative, unveiling tariff exemptions to lower grocery prices while floating a new Department of Justice probe to drag the Democrats into the scandal over disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.