Is there anyone who is still as obsessed with Joe Biden as Donald Trump? A year after the Democratic President was pushed out of his reëlection campaign by his own party, Trump hardly lets a day go by without bashing his predecessor. This week alone, he claimed that Biden was personally to blame for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, or, as he calls it, “Biden’s war”; that Biden was responsible for Jerome Powell, the Trump-installed chairman of the Federal Reserve who has since become another of his frequent targets; and that Biden’s incapacity while in office was the biggest scandal in the history of the country. He also boasted of having ended “Biden’s war on clean, beautiful Pennsylvania coal,” and insisted that the United States “had the worst inflation in history under Biden”—a favorite attack of his—though it is nowhere close to being true.

In the Trump playbook, blaming is the best kind of distracting, so it’s no surprise that much of the President’s Biden-bashing this week came as he was trying to quell a furor among his own MAGA supporters over the Justice Department’s decision not to release additional records about the death of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Trump called out Biden by name and other Democrats for having supposedly “made up” the Epstein files. On Wednesday, Trump lectured reporters about “the scandal you should be talking about,” not Epstein but the use of the autopen by Biden’s Administration, supposedly to cover up his age-related infirmity, which Trump called “the biggest scandal—one of them—in American history.”

Back in March, the Times found that Trump had gone after Biden three hundred and sixteen times in the first fifty days of his second term, mentioning the ex-President more frequently in speeches than “America.” The fixation continues. And why not? Trump’s approach to politics requires him to take credit for all successes, no matter how minor or nonexistent, while deflecting responsibility for any problems. Biden, out of office and unpopular even among many in his own party, who blame him for Trump’s return, is an easy target. But Trump’s enemies list is hardly confined to Biden. Others he has taken aim at in recent days include Powell, the Fed chair who has refused to bow to Trump’s demands for lower interest rates; the Hollywood celebrity Rosie O’Donnell, whose citizenship the President threatened to revoke; a “very evil” reporter who dared to ask what might have caused the belated alerts to residents in the recent deadly floods in Texas; and the California senator Adam Schiff, a “scam artist” who “needs to be brought to justice,” according to one of Trump’s social-media posts this week, which laid out an elaborate, unfounded allegation of mortgage fraud against Schiff, his onetime impeachment prosecutor.

One of Trump’s problems in his second term, though, is that this daily stream of vilification is, by now, a very familiar script. I’m not sure that even MAGA diehards still care about another attack on Sleepy Joe or Shifty Schiff. He certainly has not managed to get them to shut up about Epstein. But that doesn’t matter. Trump keeps doing it because there is so very much to distract from; picking fights on Truth Social is a lot easier than winning wars or trade negotiations. And, as the Republican-dominated Congress increasingly becomes a subsidiary of the Trump White House, the President has found a new way to divert attention, by taking on targets like publicly funded media and foreign aid for starving children in Africa, as in the rescissions bill passed by the Senate early Thursday at Trump’s request. Beating up on the weak is a lot simpler than confronting the strong.

In the real world, there is no peace deal in Gaza, no peace deal in Ukraine, no trade deals with Mexico or Canada or the European Union. Inflation is rising again; Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have proved immune to Trump’s flattery; and the President’s disapproval rating just hit its highest mark yet in his second term, with fifty-five per cent in a new Economist/YouGov poll looking unfavorably on his job performance; a new Associated Press/NORC survey, also out this week, found that majorities of Americans were unhappy with his handling of the economy, government spending, trade, taxes, immigration, health care, and the conflict in the Middle East—every issue that the poll asked about. But, hey, Joe Biden . . .

I’m writing from the Aspen Security Forum, a nonpartisan annual gathering of national-security wonks, which has also, as of this year, been designated a member of Trump’s enemies list. On Monday, hours before the forum was set to begin, the Pentagon forced the withdrawal of about a dozen senior officials who had been scheduled to participate, including the admiral who oversees the Indo-Pacific Command, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the secretary of the Navy. The forum’s crime? It is an “event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the President of the United States,” according to a statement from the Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson. Its specific misdeed seems to involve giving a platform to former Biden officials or, as Wilson called them, “architects of chaos abroad and failure at home.”

Being on the enemies list might be a badge of honor in the Trump era, but it is striking that the adversaries that consume the leadership of the United States right now are, for the most part, not the country’s actual enemies but the personal obsessions of an insecure would-be autocrat. The point seems to be that engaging with the world, as it actually is, demands too much of the MAGAverse; the lesson of our polarized politics is that everything—from the national-security implications of the international supply chain to the cursed Epstein case—is now subject to the dispiriting laws of frenzied partisanship. It’s not as though Trump or his Administration is laying out in clear, debatable terms what the foreign policy of the United States is right now. This week, while the Pentagon refused to allow defense officials to explain their strategies for containing America’s foes and to sit for questions from independent moderators, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was publicly celebrating such major policy initiatives as a new “sex-neutral fitness test” for military recruits.

At the forum, in contrast, sessions have included discussions of China’s worrisome militarization of space and the prospects for an Iran nuclear deal in the wake of the recent joint U.S.-Israeli attack on the country’s nuclear facilities. There have been panels on artificial intelligence, on Trump’s tariffs, and on the future of foreign aid. In Trump 1.0, the Administration found the forum valuable enough to send its incoming Secretary of State, its director of National Intelligence, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. How revealing, then, that it now won’t allow its top brass to participate in earnest foreign-policy conversations if it might mean breathing the same mountain air as Jake Sullivan. Is the problem that Trump has Biden on the brain—or that he wants our foreign policy to be as brain-dead as our domestic politics have already become? ♦