Say you are the president of the United States and the relationship with a significant chunk of your political base has become less than blissfully harmonious. What do you do?
Well, one option is to stage a summit, accompanied by much fanfare, with the president of Russia, ostensibly in order to end that country’s war in Ukraine.
And this is precisely the manoeuvre that was pulled by US President Donald Trump, who on Friday rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The short-lived encounter was ultimately anticlimactic, with Trump offering the incisive assessment that “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.”
Fox News reported that Trump had rated the much-anticipated meeting with Putin a “10” out of 10 and that he particularly “appreciated the Russian president’s comments when he claimed he would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump won the 2020 presidency”.
Fox went on to add that neither head of state had bothered to specify the “reasoning behind these comments”.
At any rate, the no-deal talks constituted a convenient distraction from current intra-MAGA strife, which owes to a couple of factors. There is, for example, the matter of the files relating to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.
When US Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May on the Justice Department’s review of the content of the so-called “Epstein files”, she reportedly informed the president that his name appeared therein.
Despite having pledged while on the campaign trail to declassify the Epstein files, Trump changed tack earlier this year and angrily dismissed the investigation as a “hoax”. He went as far as to insult many of his Republican followers as “stupid” and “foolish” for continuing to insist that the Epstein details be released.
On July 12, the president took to social media with his signature preference for manic capitalisation to berate those demanding declassification: “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”
And yet this is not the only headache facing the “PERFECT Administration” from within Trump’s own MAGA base, many of whose prominent members have become vocally critical of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, which Trump persists in aiding and abetting.
The genocide, which will mark its two-year anniversary in October, has officially killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians thus far – although the true death toll is undoubtedly many times higher. Apparently, Israel’s behaviour was entirely palatable to much of the US political establishment when it simply consisted of unending massacres, slaughtered and mutilated babies, bombed hospitals, and razed neighbourhoods.
Now that mass starvation has been visibly added to the genocidal mix, however, Israel seems to have crossed a red line even among formerly staunch devotees. As per Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the death toll from malnutrition has hit 251, including 108 children. Images of skeletal Palestinians have flooded the internet, and the United Nations World Food Programme has categorised food shortage in Gaza as “catastrophic”.
Furthermore, according to the UN, the Israeli military has killed at least 1,760 Palestinians since late May alone, as they sought aid, including at sites run by the nefarious so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Backed by the US and Israel, the GHF has not only served Israel’s plans for mass displacement and forced eviction of Palestinians; the aid distribution hubs have also functioned as a sort of one-stop shop for indiscriminate killing – which, after all, is the whole point of genocide.
And while Trump has intermittently chided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the disagreeable optics of the whole spectacle, it has not been sufficient to appease the scrutiny of the likes of right-wing US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a traditional ally of the president known for such antics as wearing a hat imprinted with the words “Trump Was Right About Everything!”
In a social media post last month, Greene – a leading figure in Trump’s MAGA movement – was unexpectedly explicit in her condemnation of “the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza”. Other MAGA fixtures like far-right influencer Laura Loomer – a self-defined “proud Islamophobe” and general bona fide sociopath – wasted no time in responding to Greene’s post: “There is no genocide in Gaza.”
Anyway, political tensions and infighting were at least temporarily removed from the spotlight by the Trump-Putin extravaganza in Alaska. It’s hardly the first time the old art of distraction has come in handy – Trump’s pal, Netanyahu, is the master of this trade. His commitment to waging genocide in Gaza has more than a little to do with his desire to stave off domestic opposition and avoid dealing with the assorted corruption charges in which he is presently embroiled.
And while the Alaskan red-carpet stunt provided little to write home about, distraction may yet prevail as folks ponder what the hell that was all about.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.