Driven to Distraction
How many times a day or week does some well-meaning pundit or soul warn darkly that “we” are being distracted from the “real” issues? Or, more cogently, how often has a political analyst advised us that Trump masterfully uses distraction techniques to chase critical issues out of the news? The warnings look generally like this:
- Stormy Daniels is a distraction! Summer Dervos is a distraction! The real issue is #TrumpRussia.
- #TrumpRussia and Stormy Daniels are a distraction from the real issue — income inequality!
- Trump’s trade war is an attempt to distract us all from the fact that he is weak and inept! (This is a slightly different species of the distraction argument.)
- #MeToo is a distraction! The “real” issue is Trump’s assault on our democracy, on the GOP’s ongoing war on the social safety net.
- The chaos and incompetence and scandal in the White House are a distraction ! The real issue is always something else — whether it’s gun control or another issue that is bad for Trump and gaining traction.
- Trump’s name-calling of citizens and denigration of immigrants are a distraction! The real issue is Trump’s corruption, or #TrumpRussia.
- The potential pee tape is a distraction from the far more serious issues of corruption, conspiracy, and criminality at the heart of the #TrumpRussia investigation!
It seems like every five minutes some well-meaning person is telling the rest of us that we are incapable of focusing on what “really” matters and that this or that is a distraction from something more important.
These well-meaning admonishments are neither helpful nor fully correct, though they have at their heart several grains of a depressing truth that was summed up well in this Washington Post column a few months ago:
There is simply an absolute onslaught of awful coming from this administration, and that onslaught is overwhelming. It means that it is difficult for any one story to get significant traction for long. As many have noted, even one of the terrible actions or scandals that Trump has mired himself in would consume another presidency, but with Trump there are so many that we are shell-shocked and it’s almost impossible to keep it all straight. Shocking headline chases shocking headline off the front pages and TV taglines, and in a way the chaos and the corruption and the evil get normalized. It’s almost as if each new terrible thing cancels out the last one, and unless there is some absolutely massive piece of legislation on the horizon, the mainstream media barely covers it given the rest of what is happening, and so the pace of #resistance calls to action seems to have slackened as our attention is defused by both the relentless tide of shocking news and our own collective exhaustion.
BUT. BUT. BUT.
Though the number of minor scandals is truly shocking and some really are just silly distractions — potty-mouthed bro-toady Anthony Scaramucci’s short-lived almost-tenure in the White House comes to mind — there are broad, overarching stories that have real legs and are not ever going away; there are themes and issues that do not leave the news or our consciousness. The basics are clear, and we are capable of holding more than one thought in our heads, because all of Trump’s depredations are connected to one other. All of them stem from the singular fact of his lack of character — his corruption, his narcissism, his bigotry, his cruelty, and his mendacity.
The driving forces behind all Trump’s “policies” are those same traits — Trump’s personal financial self-interest, Trump’s narcissism, and Trump’s bigotry. My view is that he has no other considerations. Period. (As I said before he was ever elected, these flaws make him incapable of carrying out his oath of office.) And Trump’s cabinet takes its marching orders from Trump in that regard, focussed heavily on their own self-interest, i.e., they pursue corrupt agendas for themselves, their donors, and the industries they serve, rather than act for the people they are supposed to serve. In addition, bigotry against women, LGBTQIA people, people of color, immigrants, and Muslims undergirds almost all policy decisions, wherever that bigotry can be called upon. Trump’s personal, vile character traits are being replicated and installed across the government like some horrible unstoppable virus, destroying governmental norms of public service and replacing it with a culture of corruption, cruelty, and brazen lies.
In this way, the corruption and lies and bigotry are intertwined with Trump’s assault on women’s rights, LGTBQIA rights, social and racial justice, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, CHIP, Medicaid, food stamps, public education, our national lands and parks, the climate, our air and water and oceans, NATO, human rights, our treaties, diplomacy, net neutrality, voting rights, immigration rights, a free press, and on and on. A corrupt kleptocrat who wants power in the hands of the most privileged is pursuing relentlessly an agenda to remake the United States in the image of his idol, Vladmir Putin. His ability to succeed in this subversion of democratic values depends on his deployment of the bigotry, corruption, and lies that have defined his entire life.
And thus I believe we are fully capable of following the depredations being inflicted by this foul administration and its Republican Party handmaidens, while also following #TrumpRussia and the avalanche of corruption and lies and cover-up and criminality that the Stormy Daniels lawsuit is revealing and that the Zervos lawsuit may reveal. In fact I see them all as completely connected to the rot that is Trump. The Stormy Daniels scandal and how Trump has handled it are, in fact, emblematic of how Trump behaves generally, and thus, of his corruption of our government and public institutions, not only in fact and deed, but in word and with his lies.
Let me be more specific. But for Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit, would we know about Michael Cohen’s financial arrangements and how he sought to (and possibly did) broker access to Trump and possibly funneled money for Trump? But for Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, would anyone have broken the story about Elliott Broidy and the UAE and $1.6 million in hush money to cover up an abortion, all connected somehow to the RNC and Michael Cohen, and that in turn connected up to a secret meeting in the Seychelles with UAE and Russia and Erik Prince?
Donald Trump looked in the camera and denied paying any money to Stormy Daniels or knowing about any payments or reimbursing Cohen for those hush money payments, right? And yet two days ago, he released a financial disclosure admitting he’d reimbursed Cohen for payments that he has previously denied occurred, much less had been reimbursed. One thing is for sure: that gaping chasm between Trump’s lies and the truth ought to destroy his misbegotten presidency, but we’re so inured to his lies and his supporters are so indifferent, that the fact he could spout bald-faced falsehoods to the American people without a single consequence, doesn’t even seem to merit comment in most quarters any more.
And while I admit that is despair-inducing, we need to recognize that this pattern echoes exactly the pattern he has followed with the Russia investigation — and that matters. As he did with the Daniels situation, both before and after he was elected, Trump has looked in the camera and flat-out lied that he had anything to do with Russia, even as his team was actively seeking to secure a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 presidential election, even as he praised Putin and looked to gut the sanctions against Russia, even as the GOP party platform on the Ukraine was changed, even as Flynn and Jared Kushner chatted up Kislyak in secret meetings and calls. Trump looked in the camera and claimed that he and his campaign had nothing to do with Russia — and he still does, conveniently ignoring the indictments and guilty pleas that Mueller has amassed in a few short months of the investigation. He tweets nearly daily that the Special Counsel’s investigation is a witch hunt or a hoax even as detail after detail emerges of multiple campaign contacts with Russian operatives and cut-outs, even as the news piles up of shady business deals with sanctioned Russian companies and with mounting evidence of quid pro quos with foreign governments that reek to hell of selling U.S. foreign policy to line the pockets of Trump and his family.
Separate and apart from this, it is not a “distraction” that women are seeking, and deserve, justice. And it is most certainly not a distraction that the person who is the object of their lawsuits is the creature who was installed in the White House through a combination of voter suppression, James Comey’s hubristic disregard for Justice Department guidelines, Russian election interference, extreme misogyny, the mainstream media’s obsessive focus on an email server, and racism (and possibly conspiracy on the part of the Trump campaign). The justice that Stormy Daniels and Summer Zervos and Karen McDougal (and likely others) are seeking is not only deserved, it is interwoven with the search for justice concerning Trump’s possible treason, his shocking and unprecedented violation of the Emoluments Clause and other corruption, his likely money laundering, and other criminality.
Nor is it some accident that Zervos’s lawsuit is about defamation. Trump thinks nothing of vilifying other people without regard to any truth, using his megaphone and his platform to attack, in particular, women, people of color, immigrants, and Muslims — those who are the most vulnerable in our society — using lies and bigoted language and stereotypes to prop himself up, deflect (or should we say, “distract”?) from his misconduct, and denigrate them viciously. He does not care if his lies rain down abuse from his followers on those he verbally assaults; he appears to welcome the abuse and threats that his reflexive malice and character assassination bring out in his crudest supporters. But his lies do not only defame the people he attacks; they also serve to conceal and allow him to get away with his misconduct — misconduct that not only affected his accusers personally, but that affects us all because that misconduct is how he conducts himself in office. The personal is indeed political; he denied Zervos and 18 other women’s allegations during the election, arguably defaming them all in the process. These lies are how he resists accountability in every facet of his administration; indeed, his many mouthpieces like Sarah Huckabee Sanders stand up and lie for him on the daily. In seeking to hold Trump accountable for his (alleged) abuses toward them, these women are doing the entire country a public service. His actions with respect to them are metaphors for his actions, writ large, toward the rest of the world.
And so the Daniels and Zervos lawsuits are intricately wrapped up in #TrumpRussia because Trump’s lies and denials about his assaults on, and other mistreatment of, women — even in the face of Access Hollywood tapes/admissions which he now claims are fake and he did not apologize for — come from the same playbook of his lies and denials about Russia. These lawsuits are not a distraction.
And I’m sick of being told we can’t keep more than one thought in our little heads, that if I pay attention to those lawsuits, somehow I’ll forget to call my representatives about the Dreamers or gun safety legislation or I’ll forget to vote in November or I will not realize that Josh Bolton is horrible or I will not be able to know that Trump is ramming through dreadful judicial nominees with the aid of the odious Mitch McConnell or that I will ignore the fact that Trump is undermining civil rights across the country or that I won’t realize Trump’s Jerusalem ploy is a disgrace and North Korea “strategy” a joke, or that I won’t understand that the withdrawal from the Iran deal is a disastrous know-nothing mistake ginned up to march us again toward war, or that I won’t realize that the census count is at grave risk due to underfunding and other issues, or that somehow I will lose sight of the fact that the entire federal government is now for sale to Trump’s cronies and foreign oligarchs and money launderers.
The lies and corruption and impunity that Trump treats women with are cut from the same cloth of the rest of his lies and corruption and (so far) impunity in other areas. And because his character, or lack thereof, is immutable, everything is connected and any single thread can bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
So please, stop telling us not to get distracted. It’s fine to remind people to keep our eyes on the prize — register people to vote, support voter registration reform, help get out of the vote and support Democratic candidates, do all you can to hold this monstrous man to account, recognize that he and his enablers will lie and manipulate and try to change the conversation all the time to derail any accountability. That’s fine; we all need reminders. But don’t tell us #TrumpRussia is some distraction from income inequality; his endemic corruption is behind both and both matter. And don’t tell me women seeking to hold a misogynist abuser to some account are a distraction; accountability and truth matter. And don’t tell me his abusive, bigoted language is a distraction — his use of it is empowering hatred and its normalization across the country; his immigration policies are getting more draconian and hateful as he ramps up that othering language.
It’s all connected, the little scandals and the sweeping assaults on democratic norms and the middle class and the poor, the laser-like destruction of Obama’s legacy, and the Special Counsel’s investigation. The lie about the inauguration size mattered because it demonstrated not only his mendacity, but his pettiness, shamelessness, and narcissism. The lie about “illegals” voting for Hillary Clinton mattered because it was a face-saving brazen lie to try to justify his enormous loss of the popular vote, which he then used to set the wheels of government in motion to try to justify both the lie and active voter suppression of Democratic-leaning constituencies. Then the lickspittles in his party (and dupes in the press) started calling Trump’s lies his “belief” and refusing to condemn or refute it; and now his chief of staff, John Kelly, has all but endorsed that lie. The White House’s refusal to apologize for its operative’s insensitive remarks about John McCain don’t really matter, except that they are representative of its and his contempt for anyone and everyone who does not come to loyalist heel. These smaller scandals metastasize across government and infect and debase the entirety of our discourse and the workings of our country at every level.
None of this is a distraction. Stop saying that it is. Every little piece we are dealing with is part and parcel of the larger picture, which is an attack on truth, decency, democracy, and opportunity — the very fabric of a functioning society.
