By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
September 21, 2026
When a con man’s shtick grows old, the distractions and misdirection he relies on to divert attention from his failures stops working.
That’s what President Donald Trump is discovering now.
Ever since he descended the golden escalator more than a decade ago to declare his candidacy for the White House, Trump has been a master at getting the public to focus its attention anywhere but on his own performance.
Whenever he has screwed up something in the public policy arena, or there has been a damaging revelation about his character, conduct or personal finances, his technique for escaping the consequences for his incompetence or misbehavior has been to point his finger somewhere else.
Often—in fact, far, far too often—his tactical reliance on creating diversions has worked.
Generally, because he has few genuine accomplishments about which he can boast, his approach is to muddy the waters to confuse poorly informed observers to lose track of his transgressions.
A prime example came early on, when he responded to the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” video recording in which Trump boasted about grabbing women in ways that amounted to committing sexual assault.
Caught red-handed, Trump responded by bringing women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment to his next presidential debate against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent and Clinton’s wife.
There were at least two problems with Trump’s tactic.
The first was, whatever Bill Clinton’s indiscretions and transgressions may have been—and there were many of them—he never bragged around a live mic about committing sexual assault like Trump did.
But then, Bill Clinton may have been amoral at times, but he was never dumb. As the late, great Molly Ivins once said, there’s stupidity and then there’s felony-level stupidity.
Trump committed the latter.
But the even bigger problem was that, if one bought Trump’s complaint about Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton was a victim of the former president’s misconduct, too.
Trump’s defense against charges that he abused women was that a woman whose husband had betrayed their wedding vows should be blamed instead of him.
Somehow, though, it worked.
In fact, this weird mixture of misdirection and projection has been so effective over the years that it’s allowed Trump to slip out from under scandals that would have destroyed any other politician’s career.
For more than 10 years, the man’s had a magician’s touch.
But now there are signs that people have grown weary of this president’s act and that his bag of tricks no longer has the power to either amuse or distract.
Some of this can be attributed to the sheer volume of his failures and scandals.
He was elected to bring prices down and keep the United States out of foreign wars. Inflation, though, remains a persistent and escalating problem, in large part because Trump plunged the United States into a foolish war with Iran that closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing, and that now threatens to spread throughout the Middle East.
If the war does widen, diesel at $6 per gallon will seem like a fond, fond memory.
Then there are the scandals.
His friendship with the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein clings to the president like superglue. Trump’s attempts to suppress the release of the Epstein files in which his name is mentioned nearly 40,000 times have been ineffective at best and self-defeating at worst.
For the first time since he rode down that escalator at the Trump Tower more than 10 years ago, a significant slice of the president’s base has either deserted him or turned on him because of his Epstein stonewalling.
On top of that, Trump’s sons—who seem to have both the intelligence and ethical sensibilities of sewer rats—have been exploiting their White House connections to make billions. One of them, Don Jr., even let a Russian oligarch pay for his wedding.
Trump has reacted to all this bad news—and an accompanying plummeting of his public approval numbers—in typical fashion.
He attempted first to distract the public’s attention by threatening to destroy the Kennedy Center and, when that only deepened his problems, picked a fight with MS Now, CNN and Politico by refusing to let them into the White House.
It hasn’t worked.
His poll numbers reveal he’s about as popular as cancer.
Yeah, the act’s getting old.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
