Words & Phrases are Driving us to Distraction

Pay attention no matter what

MAGA politicians’ go-to response in Donald Trump’s first term was to deflect errors, scandals, and failures as being “fake news”—the ultimate ad hominem attack. “Don’t believe [fill in the blank: the New York Times, the Democrats, the scientific community, etc.] because these ‘enemies of the people’ are out to get us.” With that, they refused to address the merits of criticism or engage with opponents, reporters, or reality. The favorite and equally overused excuse in Trump 2.0 has become: “It’s a distraction.”

Jeffrey Epstein is a distraction from Dear Leader’s magnificent tax cuts (for the rich, of course), the White House insists. Evidence that Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity was not in fact “obliterated” is a distraction from his glorious military achievement, Trump whines. Signalgate, migrants’ deaths in detention, Trump’s health and mental decline, grotesque ethical lapses at the Justice Department—anything, really—is a distraction from celebrating the mythology of Trump.

If a distraction is “a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else,” then any of these things do distract from Trump’s autocratic reign of terror and miserable economic performance. But “distraction” is meaningless in that context since it ignores the importance of the given issues (e.g., inflation, human rights violations, non-stop lies). It would have us believe that the only legitimate narrative is Trump idolatry.

Unfortunately, short-sighted Democrats also fall into the “distraction” trap when they underestimate the potency of certain behavior (e.g., Trump’s lawless, abusive ICE raids). Too often, nervous Democrats urge the public to ignore one set of Trump abuses to focus on more “popular” issues. The naysayers too frequently assume that Trump has a permanent advantage on matters like border security or deploying military force in the Middle East, or that the public is fundamentally uninterested in topics like corruption or mistreatment of immigrants.

That perspective is self-defeating. What Democratic insiders think is important or popular and what the public thinks is important or popular can be miles apart. Many Democratic consultants and elected officials believed that focusing on the illegal, cruel, and destructive raids in Los Angeles would be a mistake. The public, the chatter went, would think Democrats were on the side of violence or illegal immigration. That conventional wisdom turned out to be dead wrong. The majority of voters disapproved of Trump’s violent, chaotic, and cruel approach. Democrats who defended migrants, constitutional rights, and besieged residents were politically rewarded.

If the Jeffrey Epstein scandal proves anything, it is that what insiders deem as trivial may reveal and expand serious cracks in the MAGA base. It might seem counterintuitive that Trump’s lies about Ukraine, the economy, and Jan. 6 did not cause a ripple in MAGA’s world, but a refusal to release all documents concerning Epstein’s friends and colleagues sent tremors through its ecosystem. But that seems to be precisely what has occurred.

Moreover, ignoring victims and corruption cedes far too much territory in the battle to defend the rule of law and essential American values, such as empathy and inclusion. An overly narrow view of what “matters” in the fight for democracy or an unduly pessimistic view of the public’s concern for vulnerable people (e.g., migrants, Medicaid recipients) leads to moral indifference and rot. This sort of calculated blindness risks that the public will come to view Democrats as selectively outraged and inauthentic.

Moreover, screaming “distraction” can be morally treacherous. What politician would have the nerve to say out loud, “The public hates illegal immigrants, so I will keep quiet about shocking human rights violations that besmirch our democracy”? Nobody should fall back on the reasoning that: “Most Americans don’t care about academic freedom, so I’ll be silent as Trump bullies universities.”

Certainly, in an era of information overload, Democrats would be wise to prioritize essential matters like healthcare or economic well-being, but that is a far cry from denigrating legitimate issues that reflect the fundamental dishonesty, inhumanity, lawlessness, and incompetence of Trump and his minions.

A few rules of thumb might be in order before writing off concerns as being mere “distractions.” An issue is not a “distraction” simply because victims or the causes they espouse are disfavored by large swaths of red America (e.g., Palestinian students, government workers, trans kids) or because they can be categorized as “elites” (e.g., university professors, Stephen Colbert, law firms, Sen. Alex Padilla). An issue that seems to be a sui generis distraction (e.g., ABC’s settlement with Trump) has the power to set the pattern for a new line of attacks against democracy, such as defunding universities or blacklisting law firms. And something is not a “distraction” simply because Republicans claim (falsely) that a MAGA malefactor is an outlier (see: Sen. Mike Lee on the assassinations in Minnesota or Rep. Andy Ogles’ call to denaturalize and deport Zohran Mamdani).

“Distraction” talk is morally vacuous, lazy, and shortsighted. If you have no moral core, anything that does not align with obvious, short-term advantage can receive that label. However, as we are in the fight of our lives to preserve democracy, objective reality, and humanity, politicians should understand that doing the right thing—standing up for migrants, not forgetting Epstein’s victims, vocally abhorring state instigated violence, calling out ludicrous lies, defending universities and the free press—can also be the smartest move.