Don Lemon believes that the lies have finally caught up with Donald Trump.
Discussing the 79-year-old president with Daily Beast Chief Creative and Content Officer Joanna Coles, the 59-year-old journalist outlined why he felt the president lost his “mojo.”
“I think that, if you build something based on conspiracy theories and a lot of lies and a lot of distractions and distortions, eventually people start to see through it, and they become disillusioned,” said Lemon.
For Lemon, Trump’s myriad scandals have hurt his standing with MAGA, but the place where Americans are seeing through Trump’s braggadocio is their wallet.
“You can’t go out there telling people, ‘The economy is great! The economy is great! The economy is great! This is the best economy ever!’” he said. “And they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t have any money. My energy bills are up. My utility bills are crazy, right?’”
But for Lemon, the thing that’s caused Trump to flail the most—and harm his standing with MAGA–is the Epstein files.
“It’s the thing that breaks the spell,” said Lemon of how Trump has handled his connection to disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “And I think it has broken the spell for a lot of people, a lot of MAGA supporters.”
Lemon believes that Trump, faced with the looming Dec. 19 deadline for the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, has desperately tried to drum up distractions to make the Epstein issue go away. The problem for the president, according to Lemon, is that all of his attempts have backfired.
The former CNN host characterized Trump’s dogged attempts to hit his political enemies with criminal charges, which keep getting thrown out, as characteristic of Trump trying to distract from the Epstein scandal.
“Tish James backfired on him. James Comey backfired. Putting all his people in at the Justice Department has backfired on him. And he thought that maybe, maybe I can strike a boat right in Venezuela and I can create this whole thing about drugs and then that’ll distract from Epstein.”
Reuters/Ipsos found Friday that 62 percent of Republicans think Trump is hiding information about Jeffrey Epstein. House Democrats this week published pictures from the Epstein estate showing Trump and Epstein hanging out with mystery women.
Epstein isn’t the only issue where Trump is tanking with voters. The president’s brutal ratings on the economy and overall approval are believed to have been a significant factor in the GOP’s brutal local election losses.
The mounting losses and bad polls have Republicans in a panic over Trump, manifesting in the party finally starting to shake itself from his grip.
Lemon and Coles went over multiple high-profile ways Republicans have expressed their independence from the president.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump’s biggest sycophant in Congress, had a public and messy breakup with Trump, leading to her resignation from Congress.
“I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is just the first domino to fall in this,” said Lemon. “There will be others. There’s Lauren Boebert, there are others, Nancy Mace, they’re still supporting the president, but not on every issue, not on the Epstein issue.”
The pair also discussed the news out of Indiana on Thursday, when the state’s heavily Republican Senate rejected the gerrymandered congressional map Trump demanded the state concoct.
“That was a loss for Donald Trump,” said Lemon. “This is a problem of his own making. Because he started with this by telling Texas, ‘you got to do this.’ And then going around to Indiana and all those places, and now Gavin Newsom is going to be in a position to be able to add seats.”
Though Lemon believes the Trump administration has been a disaster, he did outline one silver lining for America.
“I do think that, in a weird way, I think it’s kind of good that this happened because then now people see that we need guardrails as it relates to a president, right? That not all presidents are going to abide by the rules.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung has previously said of Coles and Lemon, “Joanna Coles and Don Lemon are two dips--t losers who have been fired from every job they’ve held. None of those two morons are capable of telling the truth, because they suffer from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted their pea-sized brains.”
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