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‘Mask Comes Off’: Trump Branded an ‘Elitist’ as Base Scrutinizes ‘America First’ Focus
President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda — or his ability to stick to it — is facing renewed scrutiny as the second-term president jets around the world, hosts a “Great Gatsby” party at Mar-a-Lago while wrongly claiming food prices are down, reportedly racks up at least hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency profits, oversees a $300-plus million White House ballroom project that demolished the iconic East Wing, dodges his vows to release the Epstein files, and greenlights a $20-plus billion bailout for Argentina.
He has also sued his own government for hundreds of millions and called for 600,000 Chinese nationals to receive student visas — all while his government was shut down, inflation continued to heat up, and millions of Americans lost food stamp benefits while bracing for health care premiums next year to double or, in some cases, even triple.
“For a president who returned to office promising to avoid foreign entanglements, make life more affordable and ensure that available jobs go to American citizens, it has been a significant departure from the expectations of his loyal base,” The New York Times reported on Friday. “And it is starting to open a rift with his supporters who were counting on a more aggressively populist agenda.”
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The Times notes that the president’s handling of the Epstein files has left “a small but vocal group of Republicans angry over his about-face, and risking a further rupture in the movement heading into next year’s midterm elections.”
“When they’re protecting pedophiles, when they are blowing our budget, when they are starting their wars overseas, I’m sorry, I can’t go along with that,” U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told CNN this week. “And back home, people agree with me. They understand. Even the most ardent Trump supporters understand.”
The president has given little indication that he plans to address the anger expressed by some of his supporters, nor has he signaled any major shift toward refocusing on what they believed was his “America First” agenda.
“Mr. Trump told aides recently that he might attend the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a gathering of the political and business elite, according to two people familiar with the matter,” the Times added. “Some of his advisers, however, feel such a trip would send the wrong message at a moment when they are trying to recapture a political edge on the economy.”
While some of his advisers may be pushing back inside the White House, externally they are pushing back on reports challenging his focus.
“As the architect of the MAGA movement, President Trump will always put America First,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Every single day he’s working hard to continue fulfilling the many promises he made and he will continue delivering.”
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Trump echoed that sentiment in remarks to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham this week.
“Don’t forget MAGA was my idea,” he said. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.”
The Times added that David Lapan, a recently former senior adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, “said he felt Mr. Trump had drifted away from important campaign pledges now that he was in office.”
“The messaging before was a means to an end to get elected, but once elected that can all fall by the wayside,” Lapan said.
“Now that he’s in office, the mask comes off and it’s all about taking care of himself and fellow billionaires and millionaires,” Lapan concluded. “He’s an elitist.”
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”
The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”
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