President Donald Trump was facing a potentially very bad news cycle, with special counsel Robert Mueller preparing to testify before Congress and a past friend, Jeffrey Epstein, charged with sexually molesting underage girls. So he went on a rant about four minority, female members of Congress, calling on them at rallies and in tweets to "go back" to their countries of origin.

It was a classic Trump move: distract, divert, repeat. When a presidential problem surfaces, the president finds a way to move the problem out of the public eye, relieving pressure on him to solve the actual problem.

But two and a half years into his tumultuous presidency, Trump is finding that problems at home and abroad are mounting, getting harder to obscure. And with the presidential campaign heating up, the president is getting daily criticism from two dozen people who want his job.

Trump is trying to get people to look away from the crisis of the moment, but "We're running out of places to look," says Vanessa Beasley, a professor and expert on presidential rhetoric at Vanderbilt University. And while distraction has been Trump's M.O. since the beginning of his presidency, "something is different about this moment," with Trump unable to distract the nation from the question of how to respond to the recent mass shootings, she adds.

Even before separate killers gunned down dozens in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, Trump's presidential to-do list and personal troubles were building.

"(Donald Trump) is an extremely skilled social-media operator and his control over public discourse via Twitter is unprecedented."

Internationally, the president is facing the economic and diplomatic complications of the Brexit process in the U.K. as the country attempts to leave the European Union. Long-standing tension between India and Pakistan escalated when India this week moved to remove special status granting autonomy to the disputed territory of Kashmir – a particularly worrisome development since both countries are nuclear-armed.

The nation is in a trade battle with China, which this week took the dramatic move of canceling all agricultural purchases from the U.S., a hit to American farmers.

Trump faces all kinds of setbacks in court, ranging from a lawsuit to prevent California from demanding tax returns from all presidential primary candidates to a lawsuit by the House Judiciary Committee, which is seeking grand jury testimony that was redacted in Mueller's report. Trump's own intelligence officials are warning that Russia is continuing efforts to interfere with the U.S. elections. So many high-level officials have resigned from Trump's administration that now, more than a dozen officials leading federal agencies are there only in an "acting" capacity.

The shootings have put Trump in a politically unenviable spot between a frustrated public, demanding action, and the National Rifle Association, which does not want more restrictions on guns or gun owners. It also has diminished the nation's reputation abroad: Amnesty International this week joined a growing number of nations in issuing a warning to travelers visiting the United States.

Photos: Trump and His Supporters View All 72 Images

Meanwhile, the march to impeach the president, or at least to begin an impeachment inquiry, is getting bigger: Rep. Gerry Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, became the most recent lawmaker to add his name to the list. Not only is there evidence that Trump has obstructed justice, Connolly said in a lengthy statement, but the president is failing at even the most basic role of the occupant of the Oval Office – to bring the nation together at times of tragedy and turmoil.

"At every moment, whether it was in the aftermath of Charlottesville or El Paso or Dayton, he has failed to heal our country and call us to our better angels," Connolly said. "Instead, he has stained the Oval Office with his racism, xenophobia, and bigotry."

Trump has weathered such criticism before – even using it as a way to buttress his standing with his core supporters. But the recent shootings appear to have changed the dynamic, Beasley and other experts say. Attempts by the president to cast the events as the tragic outcome of mental illness – or to turn his visits to the affected cities into tests of how well he was treated by officials there – have not succeeded in distracting the media, his critics or the public at large from the broader question of what to do about gun violence.

"Politicians have always dissembled and tried to distract, but in the past the agenda-setting power of the president was limited. Donald Trump has changed that. He is an extremely skilled social-media operator and his control over public discourse via Twitter is unprecedented," says Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of cognitive psychology at the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol in the U.K. "I think it is not just those recent tragic events but generally some of his recent Twitter engagements may not have gone terribly well," adds Lewandowsky, who is at work on a paper on Trump's first two years in office. Trump's criticism of the four congresswomen, for example, "did not go over well with many people," Lewandowsky says.

And while Trump has had mass shootings (such as the Parkland, Florida, school shooting) happen during his term, the recent gun violence is affecting Trump more in part because they are connected to other controversies attached to the president, Beasley says.

El Paso, for example, is the location of an immigrant processing center and camp where the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general reported "dangerous overcrowding," and where occupants, including children, have complained of mistreatment and inhumane conditions.

It's also where Trump and now-Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, a former congressman from the region, held dueling rallies in February. At Trump's event – happening when lawmakers were coming to a tentative border control finding deal that would keep the government from shutting down but not provide money for a border wall – the president told ralliers, falsely, that "we started a big, big portion of the wall today at a very important location."

As Trump returned to the city this week, local officials reported that the Trump campaign still owes the city more than $500,000 in rally costs – feeding a complaint about Trump as a businessman that he stiffed his contractors.

"There's something about coming back to a particular place" that re-ignites attention to other controversies and failings, Beasley says. "The shooting eclipses the way he wants us to think about the border."

Trump still benefits from his Twitter attacks and misinformation campaign against others – in part because the media gives his remarks coverage, experts say. "What really happened in the world while people were getting outraged about the accusation of racism against women of color? Was this a shiny object to distract us? If so, from what?" Lewandowsky says, urging the media to cover "what is behind" that controversy.

And George Lakoff, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, says even negative reports of Trump's tweets and efforts to mislead can help him. "They may think they're negating or undermining him, but that's not how human brains work. As a cognitive scientist, I can tell you: repeating his messages only helps him," Lakoff says in a lengthy series of his own tweets about Trump's tactics.