Trump's Scottish golf trip looks set to tee off everyone

Donald Trump’s golfing trip to Scotland this weekend has started to look like a few days of welcome relief for the US president.

- MARY DEJEVSKY

From Downing Street’s perspective, however, it may all look a bit different.

At home, Trump is embroiled in linked controversies that seem to have come out of the blue. Having seen off most of the legal challenges to the orders he issued in his first days back in office, he now faces a quasi-rebellion from his hitherto loyal and largely unquestioning base over a case that has little obvious bearing on high politics at all.

These die-hard Trumpists were disappointed by official findings that the accused child-trafficker and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, did indeed die by suicide in prison and that there is, and was, no secret client list. They had shared a conspiracy theory that Epstein was part of a shadowy elite, that he had been killed to keep him quiet, and that after Trump came to power, the truth would emerge.

Now, Trump is himself being accused of an establishment cover-up, and is confronting a social media storm that even this master of the medium is struggling to control.

Trump has also launched lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal, its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, and two journalists, denying a report of links between Trump and Epstein, including a bawdy birthday greeting allegedly sent by Trump. The prospect of a court confrontation between the two titans is tantalising.