The Teen Zine 

In late 2025 and early 2026, over three million pages of the infamous “Epstein files” were released. Among them were thousands of pictures and mentions of Donald Trump. Other pages contained evidence that should have landed dozens of high-profile men behind bars. Yet, discussions rose, the public was outraged, and then it all died down with no repercussions. In the following, we will go on a deep dive into how exactly this effect works and its impact on the US population today under the Trump administration.

 

Why?

One explanation is the so-called “scandal fatigue.” The effect occurs when the public is continuously exposed to political scandals and leaks. Over time, the brain enters a state of emotional exhaustion from receiving shock after shock. This leads to a numbness in the face of new controversies or scandals. Once-dystopian ideas become the new normal and aren’t questioned anymore, or they just fall under the countless other controversies. Trump knows that and deliberately turned this effect into a systematic tool used to give him absolute power and control to enforce his ideas and views without repercussions.

 

So, how exactly does it work?

There are a few different layers to Trump’s strategy, all with the end goal of diminishing the impact of media coverage. Firstly, the main layer is to neutralize all the single scandals that would have once disrupted the entire country, making people numb to new scandals. He achieved this by oversaturating the media and diminishing the “shock and awe.” Within a short time span, the administration dropped multiple institutional overhauls like unprecedented Federal layoffs, implemented aggressive immigration rules, initiated military interventions, and released millions of pages from the “Epstein files.” Normally, an aggressive rule change—like when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) obtained almost 50,000 tax records around May 2026—should have been a constitutional crisis. The administration executed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the IRS and ICE. This allowed ICE to bypass old laws and pull taxpayer records like names and addresses to identify the location of undocumented individuals, who would then be deported or put into detention facilities. If this had been an isolated incident, it would have been a month-long debate with potential repercussions. But because there is simply so much political corruption happening at once, and every single one can and should be treated as an emergency, nothing stays in the media long enough for it to be fully processed and evaluated. Therefore, the coverage of multiple events at the same time results in them all happening in the shadows. Secondly, this strategy is used to create distractions from larger or more concerning crises by hijacking the news cycle. This is also called “The Dead Cat” strategy. This term originates from a famous political rule/saying: “If you are losing an argument and the news is destroying you, throw a 'dead cat' on the dining room table. Everyone will stop talking about your problems and start screaming about the dead cat.” Meaning, the Trump administration will toss a dead cat to distract the media from massive political shifts happening in the background. The “dead cat” in this sense is most often a cultural threat targeted to evoke intense emotions within the citizens. A major example is Trump’s proposal to either demolish or rename the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” in Washington D.C. This sparked charged debates. Meanwhile, the exact same week this threat was made public, the administration authorized massive environmental regulatory rollbacks concerning, among other things, major oil pipelines. Here, the “Dead Cat strategy” is connected to the “scandal fatigue strategy,” as major news outlets were distracted and saturated with the controversy around the JFK building and went on to discuss this over the next week. Meanwhile, the deregulation became law without drawing much attention. This strategy was also used to cover up the mentioned understanding between the IRS and ICE, as well as the massive loan I will talk about in the next paragraph.

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Personal gains

Further on, this strategy not only enriches Trump himself but also all the other high-profile men he favors. During his now active second term, Trump leveraged the “scandal fatigue strategy” to bypass traditional ethics and overshadow his self-dealing and “family enrichment.” In late 2025, a 620 million dollar federal loan—the largest to ever exist and consisting of taxpayer money—was awarded to a small start-up called “Vulcan Elements.” But only a few months before, “1789 Capital” took a staggering equity stake in the company. And who conveniently served as a partner of “1789 Capital”? None other than Donald Trump Jr. So, Donald Trump’s son directly profited from this loan. Soon, Democrats tried to intervene in March 2026 by making Donald Trump Jr. testify under oath about profiting off his father’s presidency but were blocked by congressional Republicans. Here, the “scandal fatigue strategy” functions as a protective shield. This kind of scandal would have normally been a career-ending incident, but by oversaturating the media with other scandals caused by the administration—which often had a larger impact on society, like the release of the “Epstein files” or the aggressive targeting and prosecution of immigrants—it led to the financial enrichment of Trump and his close followership becoming background static in the chaotic world he created.

 

Conclusion

So, to sum this up, the mentioned examples are not isolated events but rather an insight into what is happening on a daily basis. They are all part of the dangerous administration led by Donald Trump. But this is not only a political strategy but a psychological weapon that turns the natural exhaustion of humans into a tool to control the masses. To slowly make us numb to every upcoming threat administered by Trump concerning the country and its people. Until the baseline of political acceptance and normality permanently shifts, and the administration no longer even has a need to hide its true intentions and actions.