President Donald Trump and his administration are sinking deeper into "desperation" with their latest moves, according to reporter Sarah Ewall-Wice, and it marks what could be a "monumental shift" in power heading for Washington.
Ewall-Wice is a political reporter for The Daily Beast who appeared as a guest for the latest edition of the outlet's flagship podcast. During the conversation with host Joanna Coles, she said that there is "a growing sense of desperation ... coming out of this White House," based on the things she has heard, and this desperation is reflected in the questionable things that the president is choosing to focus on.
“I talked about Republicans and the swagger they had coming into Trump’s White House in early 2025. There is no swagger right now,” Ewall-Wice told Coles. “There’s an active attempt to try and promote ideas that are not sticking. And so it feels like there’s about to be a monumental shift in Washington... Making over Washington, D.C., renaming lakes, and just a plethora of other things that smell of desperation [are] coming out of this White House as a distraction."
She added: "The president puts the focus on these useless things that he’s focused on and promoting, and the White House pushes out this kind of bizarre social media campaign to tout him renaming the lake."
Ewall-Wice noted that considerable discrepancies have emerged between Trump and his administration, and the Republicans actually on the ground running midterm campaigns. Those candidates, she explained, are pushing "how they’ve helped or how they can help the voters who need to go to the ballot box to vote for them," which Trump is "not focused on... in the same way whatsoever," spending all of his time on "random spiels about changing names of lakes or redecorating the White House or building a ballroom." All of this, she noted, can be seen coming to a head in recent polls showing Trump's grasp on his past supporters slipping away.
She also compared the past reaction from Republican lawmakers to Trump's order to try and change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America," which many touted publicly as a "great thing." Now, however, hardly any of them have anything to say about his attempt to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" to try and spite Canada amid trade talks, even though the order carries about as much weight for actual voters as the "Gulf of America" order.
"So he’s been using a lot of these distractions that are completely pointless, useless, and a complete waste of the office of the president of the United States," Ewall-Wice said. "And that’s what I hear from people out across the country who are just trying to get by, where they hear so much about some of the nonsense that’s coming from Donald Trump."
She added further: "And they’re like, well, that’s not helping me, and that’s frustrating. And it just goes to show that the president is focused on how he appears and what he’s looking at. It’s not about making things better for us. And I get that sense from Democrats... but independents, who are not really aligned with Republicans or Democrats, have been making the same case. And some Republicans also are like, ‘We are frustrated by this. This is not working for us.’”
