President Donald Trump has weathered political scandal after scandal, but last week may have been the week that “the wheels finally, at long last, came off the Bad Orange Man’s decade-long authoritarian project,” Zeteo reporter and columnist Peter Rothpletz argued Friday.
Trump had indeed been plagued with a number of major controversies this week. On Monday, Trump scrambled to defend Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for having allegedly committed a war crime; on Tuesday, the GOP suffered a major blow after winning a tight race in a district Trump carried by 22 points.
Wednesday through Friday saw a slew of other controversies as well, including GOP inter-party fighting, a federal court slapping down one of the Trump administration’s attempts to prosecute Trump’s political adversaries, and Trump appearing to doze off during a cabinet meeting, the latter of which Rothpletz described as “one of the least awful headlines to hit MAGA over the last five days.”
Furthermore, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, faces a deadline Friday imposed on her by a bi-partisan group of lawmakers to produce a plan of how she intends on releasing the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, which she’s now mandated to do after the passage of the Epstein Transparency Act, another thorn in Trump’s side given his long friendship with the convicted sex offender.
“Now, it should be said, over the last decade, there have been more than a few instances where Donald Trump’s political prospects seemed doomed: consider the Access Hollywood ‘grab them by the p----’ tape, the Ukraine quid-pro-quo impeachment saga, JANUARY SIXTH!!, etc… but Trump’s always managed to make a comeback,” Rothpletz wrote.
“I raise this only to say that liberals, leftists, progressives, pinkos, wine moms, Never Trump Republicans, and everyone opposed to the fascist threat of Donald Trump and his ilk should not count their chickens before they hatch. Donald Trump had a bad week. The country has a long way to go until 2028.”