As President Donald Trump continues to bleed Republican support, a report in The New Republic posits that his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal may prove to be too much for even his staunchest supporters.
Senior editor Alex Shephard wrote in an article titled "Everybody Hates Trump Now" that Trump's talent for collecting voters in the first place has never been about attracting them to his own groundbreaking ideas; rather, Trump identified where voters were on particular issues, then said "what other political leaders are too afraid to say."
"His rapid rise within the Republican Party came from simply recognizing that the party’s voters were significantly further to the right on immigration than most of the party’s presidential candidates," Shephard wrote. "Trump parroted back to voters what they were already saying about undocumented immigrants, and he rapidly rose in the polls."
Likewise, Trump's assault on "political elites" and his alignment with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s MAHA movement tapped into the voter zeitgeist at the time of the 2024 elections. More than six months into his second term, however, Trump's policies in action have repelled some of his base, while the Epstein sex-trafficking scandal threatens to strip him of even the most stalwart MAGA faithful.
"His failure to follow through on his (admittedly half-hearted) promise to release [the Epstein] files has rattled his core supporters, even as he is ramping up an unprecedented deportation regime," Shephard wrote, adding, "There are signs that all of this is going to get worse too."
"Trump has no way out of the Epstein problem; he can either continue to stonewall, which makes him look guilty, or he can release everything, which may make him look even guiltier," Shepard wrote.
Democrats have voter problems of their own, of course, but Shephard concluded, "For now, all that really matters is that Trump’s support is tanking—and he looks powerless to halt the slide, let alone reverse it."
Read The New Republic Article here.