For 90 minutes last week Donald Trump was back where he is happiest. Egged on by hundreds of supporters at a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania, the president hurled racist insults at Democrats, immigrants and “shithole countries” overseas. To rich applause, he touted his tenuous claim that the US economy is booming under his leadership.
“I have no higher priority than making America affordable again,” Trump declared, before dismissing growing frustration at the rising cost of living as a “hoax”.
His positive mood is unlikely to have lasted, though, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that has plagued his second term reared its head once again late on Friday.
A cache of 19 photos from the estate of the late paedophile financier, released by House Democrats, included shots of Trump partying with young women alongside Epstein. One image showed the president grinning at the centre of a group of six young women.
Another picture displayed a bowl of novelty condoms with a caricature of Trump’s face and the caption: “I’m Huuuuge!”
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On their own, the photos offer little new about Epstein’s well-established ties to powerful men in politics, entertainment and business. Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Richard Branson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor also feature in the pictures.
But, inevitably, the focus has returned to Trump. A week that began with the president seeking to get back on the front foot on the economy heading into next year’s midterm election campaign ended with “Trump condoms” trending on social media.
The release of the photos comes a week before a deadline on Friday for the justice department to make public all the supposed “Epstein files” in its possession under a new law passed in November. The coming days will again be dominated by the scandal. Try as he might, Trump cannot outrun his ties to the disgraced financier.
Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, told reporters that it had examined barely a quarter of “over 95,000 photos” received from Epstein’s estate.
“Some of the other photos we did not put out today are incredibly disturbing,” Garcia said, promising that more pictures will be released “in the days and weeks ahead”.
Garcia added in a statement: “It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends… We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, now.”
Republicans on the committee sought to brush off the latest release. A spokesperson accused Democrats of “cherry-picking photos and making targeted redactions to create a false narrative about President Trump”.
That argument has only fuelled calls, including from Trump’s Maga base, for the government to release all the unredacted files, however. Among the president’s own supporters, whipped up by his campaign promise last year to expose the “deep state” cabal of paedophiles at the heart of the ruling US elite, anger at the suspected cover-up is growing.
Democrats sent a letter to the justice department’s inspector general last week, demanding an independent review of the Epstein case files to determine whether any records had been “tampered” with or removed.
Cracks are now widening in the Republican party as fears grow that Trump’s dwindling approval rating will condemn it to defeat at next year’s midterms.
A Grand Old party (GOP) rebellion that began with the vote to release the Epstein files last month, forcing Trump into a reluctant climbdown, has triggered further revolts against the president from a once-devoted party.
In another rebuke last week, Republicans in Indiana defied a months-long pressure campaign from the White House to redraw the state’s congressional map in an attempt to cling on to the GOP’s slender majority next year.
Underscoring the malaise, Joe Gruters, Trump’s diehard loyalist chair of the Republican National Committee, admitted to conservative radio last week that the party faced “looming disaster” at the midterms.
“There’s no sugarcoating it… We are facing almost certain defeat,” Gruters said. “The chances are, Republicans will go down and will go down hard.”
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge voters’ unhappiness at his failure to address the cost of living crisis he was elected to fix has infuriated supporters and prompted desperate Republican candidates to edge away from the president.
One Maga strategist said that the administration’s messaging on the economy was “horrible”. At the Pennsylvania rally last week, Trump again claimed that concerns about “affordability” were a “con job” by the Democrats. In an interview with Politico, the president rated his handling of the economy as “A+++++”.
“Gaslighting voters, telling them that the economy is great, actually – to ignore what they can see with their own eyes – these are the same tactics that [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris tried last year,” the strategist said. “It didn’t work for them and it’s not going to work for Trump. Sorry.”
Photographs by House Democrats' oversight committee