Don’t Be Distracted
I need you to focus on this for a second. Donald Trump rattled off a few Tweets after the Hamilton cast made a statement to Mike Pence. But don’t be fooled. He was just trying to distract you from the $25 million settlement awarded to those cheated by Trump University.
That settlement, as you may have guessed, was intended to distract you from Trump’s backtracking on his promise to build the wall.
The Wall flipflop got your attention. And that was by design. Trump wanted to distract you from his decision to have a sitdown with Nigel Farage, who — in breaking with international protocols — he met with before talking to Theresa May.
Of course, the Farage meeting was only held to divert your focus from the fact that Trump included Ivanka in a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister at Trump Tower.
This potential conflict of interest provided a perfect way to distract you from the president-elect’s attacks on cable news execs and on-air talent, which was intended to take your attention away from Trump’s fake story about the NYT changing the rules of their face to face meeting, which was in fact a perfect head-fake to keep you from focusing on the really embarrassing transcript from that meeting.
This series of ill-conceived attacks on the media provided good cover to keep you from noticing cabinet picks such as Tom Price, Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions. And, just as he knew they would, those awful selections distracted you just long enough so you wouldn’t realize that the swamp had been drained, only to be replaced by a far more expensive swamp. All of these picks and decisions, you probably know by now, were intended to distract you from Trump’s assertion that he only lost the popular vote because of millions of illegitimate votes. And, according to plan, your shock at that lie provided perfect cover to obscure Trump’s odd and dangerous decision to skip almost all of his daily intelligence briefings since the election.
It goes without saying, that this trend away from the norm was nothing more than a smokescreen to obscure his victory rally speech, during which chants of “lock her up” were once again heard (either just before or just after Trump’s promise to heal and unify the country).
But don’t focus on those chants, as they were an obvious diversionary tactic deployed to keep you (and a billion or so folks in India) from giving serious consideration to the transcript of Trump’s call with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Your preoccupation with that transcript functioned as the ideal decoy to distract your from the much more embarrassing, and potentially dangerous, congratulatory call from Taiwan.
And, just as Trump planned, your fixation on the Taiwan call made you hardly notice his chat with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who welcomed Trump’s warm comments about his government’s anti-drug blood-bath (and was doubly pleased to receive an invitation to the White House).
That invitation and the kind words about Duterte’s murderous rampage were all part of a plot to distract from the fact that your president-elect stays up late at night to tweet critiques on comedy shows, such as his most recent TV review: “Just tried watching Saturday Night Live — unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad.”
Unthinkably petty Tweets like that are Trump’s way of distracting you from the horrifying reality that he really is your next president — and the perfectly reasonable concern that America is being swirled down the same drain that has sucked all prior empires and superpowers into history’s unforgiving pit of nevermore. (Which is intended to distract you from the appointment of Ben Carson.)
At this point, it probably goes without saying that Trump anticipated exactly the kind of coverage of these distractions that you’re reading right now. Who knows what he’s been up to while you were working through these several paragraphs? Whatever it is, don’t let it distract you.
