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At first glance, the three dozen or so posts that Donald Trump published on his social media site over a span of 12 hours on Sunday seem like the president’s usual fare: Plenty of self-aggrandizement, threats against his political opponents (including a video with an AI-generated Barack Obama in prison), a plug for a Fox News program, the promotion of Tulsi Gabbard’s ridiculous suggestion that correctly telling Americans that Russia intervened in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf amounts to “treason,” a pressure campaign to get a couple of American businesses to change their names to something more racist, and, for some reason, a video of viral moments that begins with a woman catching a snake.

However, in light of the week that Trump has had, what really stands out here is what none of them are about: the president’s former pal Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump has spent the past couple of weeks trying to (clumsily) quell dissension within the MAGA ranks after his administration essentially announced that it considered the case against the child sex trafficker closed, that Epstein’s death was definitely suicide, and that nobody else would be charged.

He initially did so by urging his supporters to move on from the sordid saga. Of course, demanding transparency and accountability in the case is one of core tenets of MAGA dogma, so that was always going to go over poorly. 

And it did. 

While Trump’s allies on Fox News, in the GOP leadership, and some right-wing influencers eagerly accommodated the president’s request to move on, the base did not comply. 

In fact, for the first time in his political career, Trump found himself on the receiving end of the conspiracies that he has been stoking for a decade and that formed the foundation for his success among GOP voters.

He didn’t handle it well.

Or, to put it differently, Trump reacted exactly how you would expect somebody to react who knows that there is some incriminating information about himself in the files.

In quick succession, he used just about every tactic that usually works for him. 

First, he dismissed the entire Epstein affair as a nothingburger, which was a huge mistake.

Telling his base that a massive sex trafficking operation involving global elites that has resulted in minimal accountability is no big whoop was perhaps the dumbest thing he could have done. 

Then again, maybe he was panicking a bit about the walls closing in on him. After all, Trump clearly knew that Epstein liked his women “on the younger side,” and the two of them knew each other well, so releasing the files is just not something that he seems interested in all that much (as we now know from the unedited version of a Fox News interview that gave an entirely different impression).

Next, Trump blamed the Democrats and suggested that it was all a hoax. 

Finally, he called his core supporters dumb and said that he no longer wanted their backing. 

Shockingly, none of it worked. 

In fact, with Trump clearly freaking out, even the conservative Wall Street Journal published a story about a lewd birthday message the president sent his pal for his 50th birthday.

That earned the paper a presidential lawsuit (another tactic to make bad news go away), which will surely result in Trump getting paid another bribe from a media organization.

It seems unlikely that this will be the last revelation now that the president’s behavior indicates that there may be information out there that he’d prefer to keep hidden, or at the very least that he has reason to believe that such information may exist. 

And that brings us to Trump’s social media blitz on Sunday, which apparently constituted the last arrow in his quiver. 

Essentially, it appears as though he was following Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone with [excrement].”

The question is whether his base will be distracted by shiny objects like the prospect of MAGA foes such as Obama or Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) in prison, Trump’s assertion that he just keeps winning (with the implied plea to let him continue delivering results for his voters and not get distracted by what might be in the Epstein files), or that he wants to force Washington’s NFL team to return to its racist name if it wants a new stadium. 

We are skeptical. 

That being said, expect an absolutely crazy week in the nation’s capital. 

If Trump continues to panic, there is no telling what he will do to divert attention away from the Epstein story and his connection to it, so stay tuned. 

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.