Nothing to see here! President's Epstein files tactics miss the mark

Donald Trump displayed the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sitting in the Oval Office, he was asked by a reporter about the justice department's hunt for evidence about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

- David Smith

"I don't really follow that too much," he said. "It's sort of a witch hunt."

And then the handbrake turn: "The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold."

Trump was claiming a plot by Barack Obama had rigged the 2016 election, accusing his predecessor of "treason." For good measure he warned: "Whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people."

Why this and why now? It is not much of a mystery. Trump, who once claimed that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, has shot himself in the foot. His support base is in open revolt over his failure to release files relating to the convicted sex offender Epstein and a rumored list of his elite clients.

The president's solution is to reach for a very familiar playbook: distract, distract, distract.

It worked for him during his biggest crisis in the 2016 election campaign. On the same day that an Access Hollywood tape emerged in which Trump was recorded making lewd comments about women, his campaign seized on the WikiLeaks release of thousands of emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta. Trump survived and went on to win the election.

Since then, whenever he lands in trouble, his fans have been eager to help him turn the page. But the Epstein saga cuts into Trump's core political identity as the slayer of the deep state. He is once again throwing out numerous shiny objects, but they are losing their gleam.

Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, observed: "It is the distraction machine that has worked in the past breaking down - trying the old favorites and not getting much traction. What has happened is like massive whiplash."