The steep price of the Trumpian circus

[Demovictory9]

One of the many costs of the Trump era is the dumbing down of our political discourse. The incoherent spoken and tweeted outpourings from President Trump and the daily outrages of his administration leave little time for serious debate about policy or meaningful dialogue about our larger purposes.

In a normal environment, the Republican Congress’s assault on food-stamp recipients, the administration’s waivers allowing states to erode Medicaid coverage, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s proposed rent increases for some of the country’s poorest people would be front and center in the news.

$$$$$ .

Nothing is significant for long, everything is episodic, and old scandals are regularly knocked out of the headlines by new ones. It’s a truly novel approach to damage control.

And governing? It seems almost beside the point. Thus does the unraveling of regulatory protections for workers, the environment and the users of financial services rush forward with little notice.

This is where the Trumpian circus benefits the Trumpian project. If there are too many scandals for any one of them to seize our attention for long, all of them taken together allow what are potentially very unpopular policies to take root without much scrutiny.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-steep-price-of-the-trumpian-circus/2018/04/29/51ae7d72-4bd5-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?utm_term=.4387602a4

[dalton99a]

1. The constant distractions are like chaff from a bomber

There is method behind the madness

"I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me." - Donald Trump