Donald Trump can’t escape controversy because he is a “lone wolf whack job,” one foreign policy analyst says.
David Rothkopf, appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, said that the attempted assassination of the president at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner ultimately won’t change much.
“I think this weekend’s story is going to get a lot of play because there were so many journalists there for whom this was a big event. They can talk about it in a first-person sense, but it was actually meaningless,” Rothkopf, the Daily Beast’s chief global affairs columnist, told host Joanna Coles.
“It won’t change the subject, and tomorrow or next week, when you and I get together for this conversation again, what’s going to happen? We’ll be talking about Iran. We’ll be talking about Epstein. We’ll be talking about Trump’s corruption. We’ll be talking about his mismanagement of the government. We’ll be talking about the next unexpected crisis that is caused by the fact that he is a lone wolf whack job,” Rothkopf said. “The momentary grace that he gets out of, you know, ‘Butler 2.0,’—the mini version—is just not going to last."
On Monday afternoon, less than 48 hours after the shooting, Trump welcomed to the White House King Charles III and Queen Camilla, who are making a four-day state visit. Though the visit is intended to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it may cause renewed questions about Trump’s relationship to Epstein, Rothkopf said.
“One of the things that the King is bringing over in his luggage is his brother and the Epstein scandal,” he said.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Charles’s disgraced brother and a former Epstein associate, is the subject of an investigation by British authorities into alleged misconduct in public office.
“King Charles will not get within 10 feet of a reporter who does not want to ask him a question about Epstein, and there will be a hundred stories about Epstein because of the Prince Andrew connection and because of the Mandelson connection that will follow this visit,” he said, referring to how Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the U.S., is also under investigation for alleged misconduct in public office related to his Epstein ties.
“It will once again prove that no matter what Donald Trump does to try to change the subject, he can’t,” Rothkopf said. “Epstein’s not going away.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast that Rothkopf “is a s--- human being who pretends he’s a relevant commentator of foreign policy, but in reality he’s a chronic sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has warped his ability to think reasonably.”
Also helping keep Epstein in the news is what Cole Tomas Allen, the alleged shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, reportedly included in his manifesto. Allen, 31, allegedly wrote he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Trump, 79, immediately grew angry when asked about that Sunday on 60 Minutes, insisting he is “not a pedophile.”
“Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things,” Trump raged.
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