When Trump Finds a Lifeboat - 12/1/25
It was just one week ago when we discussed the growing rupture between Donald Trump and his previously unfailingly loyal base of support. The president’s retreat in supporting the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files was a tacit admission MAGA nation would no longer automatically follow its leader, but there have been a number of recent policy disagreements that have demonstrated his challenge in navigating this suddenly fractious relationship.
The America Firsters who have populated the ranks of Trump loyalists, already uncomfortable with his ongoing exertions in Ukraine and the Middle East, grow even more restive as the US edges closer to war with Venezuela. His longtime backers are also unhappy that the inflation that ended the political careers of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has not yet subsided, and Trump’s decision to pull back on many international tariffs to ease food prices has not helped matters. Health care and artificial intelligence are brewing political crises for Trump, as his current agenda on both matters fails to address the rising concerns of his working-class constituents. Temporarily distracted from their own political struggles over the past year, Democrats have been gleeful as they have watched their longtime nemesis attempt to convince his erstwhile enthusiasts to look past their differences with him.
But Trump is not stupid. His survival skills are keen, and he possesses feral instincts that allow him to fight his way out of danger. Despite his willingness to submit to political reality and agree to the Epstein files’ release, he knew that this was no longer an issue that could help him with his base. His continuous warnings about narco-terrorists and fentanyl have not convinced isolationist conservatives to support his military adventurism in the Caribbean. And prices are not going to go back down again (barring a devastating recession), which means that the debate over inflation will never be a political winner for him the way it had been in 2024.
Trump needed to change the subject. Smart political professionals know that an election is very rarely about changing voters’ minds on the substance of issues. (When is the last time you talked to someone who switched their position on abortion, immigration, or same-sex marriage because of a TV ad, a social media posting, or a candidate speech?) They recognize that the goal of an effective campaign is to convince those voters that the issues on which their candidate agrees with them should determine their vote. A swing voter who supports both abortion rights and a wall at the US-Mexico border was unlikely to rethink their beliefs on either topic during the 2024 election. If the former of those two issues was more important to those voters, they were likely to cast a ballot for Harris. If the latter was more concerning, they almost certainly sided with Trump.
The president and his advisors knew they needed an issue that would remind his loyalists why they had stuck with him for so long. As if on cue, a controversy presented itself that was tailor-made for his needs. The day before Thanksgiving, two young National Guard members who had been deployed to Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s crime-fighting agenda were shot by an Afghani refugee who had been granted asylum in the US after our country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the time of this writing, one of the two Guard members had died of her wounds. The other is barely clinging to life.
The crisis has provided Trump with a gold-plated opportunity to move public attention away from Epstein, inflation, and the other troublesome issues. He has issued a full-throated call for a series of even more stringent anti-migration measures than those that he and his administration have already implemented since his return to office in January. Most noticeable was Trump’s call for “reverse migration,” but within a day the Department of Homeland Security had already stopped processing all immigration requests from Afghanistan, expanding restrictions for applicants from 19 other “high-risk countries” and halting all worldwide asylum requests. DHS also announced its plans to review all refugee applications that had been granted throughout the Biden presidency.
The tragedy of these shootings is undebatable. There are legitimate policy and oversight questions that must be addressed to prevent such a horrible episode from happening again. But the political ramifications of this catastrophe provide a gift of invaluable benefit to Trump, who can now remind his supporters of the horrors that await if they do not return to his side.