This week, U.S. President Donald Trump rolled back tariffs on about 200 imported food items, giving into political pressure over inflation.ALLISON ROBBERT/The New York Times News Service
The last few weeks have not been kind to U.S. President Donald Trump. In short order, he has been forced to reverse himself on two major issues. The image of a man with iron-fisted control of the Republican Party and his political base has taken a hit for the first time.
It’s welcome news, of course, that Mr. Trump’s fortunes are fading, if only a little. He has been able to defy political gravity to date; that the would-be strongman in the White House is feeling the pull of democracy is indeed encouraging. The question now is, how far will he go to limit the damage?
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His aura of invincibility was weakened on Tuesday when every Republican but one in the House of Representatives voted in favour of a bill that forces the U.S. Department of Justice to release more files related to its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in prison in 2019.
The Senate voted Wednesday by unanimous consent to pass the bill, sending it on its way to Mr. Trump for his signature.
Mr. Trump has spent his second term bullying Republicans in Congress into following his every order, including his insistence that none of them dare support the Epstein bill. But in recent weeks those formerly docile legislators let him know they could not be seen by their MAGA constituents to be taking part in a cover-up for a sexual predator.
Seeing he had lost the fight, Mr. Trump reversed himself on Sunday, two days before the vote, and said on social media that Republicans should “vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax.”
His attempt to portray himself as still in charge creates its own problems, because he could have long ordered the release of the documents with a single phone call to his attorney-general. If he had nothing to hide, why did he oppose the bill in the first place?
A steady drip of new evidence about the nature of his relationship with Mr. Epstein – including newly released e-mails from Mr. Epstein saying Mr. Trump “knew about the girls” – compounds the impression that the President is in a corner and buying time.
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His reversal on Sunday came two days after he gave in to growing political pressure and rolled back tariffs on 200 food items imported from Central and South American countries.
After insisting that tariffs do not cause prices to rise, there he was tacitly admitting that his capricious trade wars were partly to blame for painful jumps in the cost of beef, orange juice, coffee and other household staples.
Mr. Trump was pushed into that corner after voters in state and municipal elections in New York, Virginia and New Jersey handed unexpectedly large victories to Democratic candidates who blamed the President for the pinch being felt by so many Americans.
But Mr. Trump didn’t help himself when, until last week’s sudden change of heart, he had insisted counterfactually that prices were dropping.
It has rarely gone well for kings, despots and elected leaders who tell people to ignore the evidence of their eyes and trust only what they are told.
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It gets worse when the same leader, in the middle of a lengthy government shutdown that furloughs federal workers and suspends food stamp programs, builds a new $420-million ballroom and renovates bathrooms in the White House with marble and gold fittings, as Mr. Trump did. Or when a leader uses his office to enrich himself and his family, or to pardon his political allies, another Trump trait.
Mr. Trump’s approval ratings are plummeting. Polls show he is losing the support of older voters, younger voters, Latino voters and independent voters. And now he has been shown to be vulnerable to his base and his party.
He still has time to reverse the slide; the mid-term elections are a year off. But if he can’t swing enough voters back his way and reassert his dominance, a president who claims falsely that he has never lost an election, who has ordered troops into American cities on the basis of fictional emergencies and who has been granted immunity for his actions while in office by a compliant U.S. Supreme Court could yet take a darker turn.
The tighter the corner Mr. Trump so deservedly finds himself in, the more dangerous he can become. That is the uncomfortable dilemma Americans face today.