The Politics of Eternal Distraction

We are in the midst of a crisis unprecedented in modern American political history: the President is deploying the military domestically, with the very openly stated purpose not just of quelling civil unrest but violently subjugating his political opponents. It’s a significant authoritarian escalation, and the President has made it clear that he’s going to run the same playbook across the country. But there’s a big lingering question: is it all just a distraction?

Many elected Democrats seem to think so. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claims Trump is “attempting to distract from his many failures.” Senator Ed Markey said he’s trying to distract the public from the budget fight. Senator Alex Padilla said the same thing. So did Rep. Robert Garcia, a California congressman. Even California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is at the forefront of the political fight in Los Angeles, has adopted the “distraction” language. 

It’s not limited to politicians, either. Jon Stewart said that the ICE raids that sparked protest in Los Angeles were a distraction from the Elon/Trump feud. Which is interesting, because just a few days prior several Democrats were arguing that the Elon/Trump feud was itself a distraction.

This isn’t a novel phenomenon. When Trump announced last week that he was launching an investigation into Joe Biden’s mental capacity, Biden and other Democrats said it was a distraction from the budget fight. When Trump instituted a new travel ban, Democrats said that was a distraction, too. When Gavin Newsom was asked about Kilmar Abrego Garcia being sent to a Salvadoran gulag without due process, he called it the “distraction of the day,” saying we should be focusing instead on Trump’s tariffs (although back in December Senator Chris Murphy said it was the tariffs that were the distraction from Trump’s “real agenda.”) 

It goes on and on. Trump saying he’ll turn Gaza into a resort? Distraction. His plans to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal? Distraction. His joint address to Congress? Distraction. The publication of his tax returns? Distraction (that one’s from 2017, lest you think this is a recent development).

This rhetoric veers quickly into being offensive. The idea that something is a “distraction” pretty plainly implies that it’s not worthy of our political energy, and maybe not even worthy of our attention. That’s a pretty grotesque thing to say about people being forcibly taken from their homes and communities while the military is sent in to crush any resulting dissent. It’s a pretty grotesque thing to say about a man who was shipped off El Salvador without so much as a hearing. Even if Trump was doing these things to divert media attention, the human toll would obligate the Democrats to action.

On top of that, calling these things distractions downplays how central many of them are to Trump’s presidency. Mass deportations aren’t some ancillary item in Trump’s platform – they’re his foremost campaign promise, the beating heart of his agenda. Ever since he built his political star on the foundation of “build the wall,” Trump’s politics have revolved around the question of whom America belongs to and whom it does not. To relegate the issue to the status of a “distraction” isn’t just dismissive, it’s a gross misunderstanding of the whole project.

On the other hand, I understand where the tendency comes from. Donald Trump has a talent for commanding attention, especially in a media ecosystem that lives off of turning sensational headlines into clicks. Democrats would like very much to halt the ceaseless headline churn and have the media focus on the issues that favor them (their ability to discern which issues actually favor them is a topic for another piece).

But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just demand that the public’s attention be focused in one place rather than another. You need to say and do things that actually capture it. Shouting “distraction” whenever Trump successfully draws attention has the energy of a little kid getting into a fight and then yelling “time out!” when he starts to lose. It doesn’t work that way, little buddy.

The average person is seeing dozens of news stories a day. If you’re a politician, you have two primary goals. One is to get the stories that you want people to see in front of them. The other is to make the stories that people do see conjure up the thoughts and feelings that you want them to think and feel. When you see footage of unrest in Los Angeles, Donald Trump wants you to think about criminal immigrants and blue state disorder. The goal for Democrats shouldn’t be to change the topic – it should be to associate those same images with Trump’s authoritarianism and inhumane immigration policy. People will see the headlines and video clips either way – the only question is what they’re going to be thinking when they do.

A lot of elected Democrats, especially the older ones, still think of media cycles as something that can be readily controlled. It wasn’t long ago that there was some truth to that. You chose your message, made some prime time TV appearances, hit the Sunday morning talk shows, and the media would more or less follow your lead. Now our attention is dispersed across thousands of sources, curated by a handful of algorithms. It’s an environment that moves quickly, and Democrats complaining about “distractions” are essentially just wishing that it would slow down.

In other words, the problem is less that Donald Trump has a distraction strategy and more that we live in an age of distractions, which Trump slots into very cleanly. Competing with him doesn’t mean eliminating distractions, it means learning how to take advantage of them. Whether we like it or not, politics now exists as a whirlpool of information. You can’t make it stop; you either learn to swim in it or you drown.