The Weekly Sift

Are any of Trump’s distractions worth chasing? How do we decide which ones?

---

Midway through his debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump had to have known he was losing. Trump’s debate technique relies on rattling his opponent, and Harris was clearly not rattled. She was systematically hitting the points she had set out to make, while he was allowing her to bait him into wasting his time on things voters don’t care about, like his crowd sizes or how he really didn’t lose the 2020 election. And the moderators, in contrast to his debate with Biden, were not letting him lie with impunity.

He had been insisting on — and getting — the last word on virtually every topic, which normally ought to mean that he was winning. But all he had to do was look at his opponent to realize that he wasn’t. She wanted him to keep talking, and he couldn’t stop. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the next day’s headlines would be: “Trump Loses Debate: ‘stable genius’ gets humiliated by woman ‘dumb as a rock’.” That could set the narrative of the campaign for weeks.

He couldn’t let that happen. So he used a tried and true Trump technique: He said something outrageous. That won’t be the narrative, I imagine him thinking, this will be.

Look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

And it worked, mostly. I mean, the media did notice that Harris humiliated Trump in their mano-a-womano confrontation. But that narrative didn’t stay in the headlines long. The audacity of Trump’s lie; the fact that even Republican local officials, like the mayor of Springfield and the governor of Ohio, wouldn’t back him up; the immediate destructive consequences for the town he claimed to be defending — it demanded attention. (BTW: His reference to Aurora, which he had also talked prior to the debate, was based on a false story about immigrants as well.)

The conundrum. I can’t point fingers here, because last week I also devoted a post to the Trump/Vance Springfield libel. (That post got more page views than last week’s other featured post, which analyzed what recent polls predict about Electoral College totals.) So I understand the difficult choice editors face: If you just let the libel pass, the public may imagine that there’s some kernel of truth behind it, and real people could suffer from that misperception. But if you give it a thorough debunking, you have helped Trump shift the narrative from his debate humiliation to immigration, an issue that he thinks plays in his favor.

So as a distraction, the Haitian Fright was less like the golden apples Melanion dropped in Atalanta’s path, and more like the escape tactics supervillains have used since the early days of comics: Hide a few gas bombs in a crowded area, and Batman will have more to worry about than where the Joker is vanishing to. If we all refused to take Trump’s bait, innocent people would pay the price.

Post-shame politics. Under the standards of a mere decade-or so ago, Trump’s tactic wouldn’t have worked: Being caught in an obvious and hateful lie used to shame a candidate, and his supporters as well. Headlines like “Candidate X Lies Again About Y” would sink a campaign, because voters wouldn’t want to associate themselves with the liar, or find themselves in a position where they had to defend the lie in front of their friends. Whatever advantage a candidate might gain by changing the subject would be swamped by the moral outrage his lie would call down.

But the innovation of Trump and his MAGA movement has been to transcend shame. “Grab them by the pussy” didn’t sink his 2016 campaign. “Good people on both sides” didn’t derail his administration. Probably hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily because Trump happy-talked his way through the opening months of the Covid pandemic. (“The Covid Crisis Group concluded that ‘Trump was a co-morbidity’ with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously.”) Yet Trump could say during the debate

We did a phenomenal job with the pandemic. … Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. We made ventilators for the entire world. We got gowns. We got masks. We did things that nobody thought possible.

The standards of truth-telling have so eroded around Trump that this blatant rewriting of recent history mostly went unnoticed.

But many of us (myself included) are having a hard time adjusting to this new world. We had always been taught that truth endures, while lies are ephemeral. But Trump has flipped that axiom of philosophy on its head: He can keep repeating a lie until fact-checkers get bored and truth-tellers collapse from exhaustion. All the while, his supporters will stand by him, reveling in the reflected glory of his victory over reality.

And yet we hope — and this is what the future of American democracy will ultimately hang on — that truth still matters somewhere around the edges of the MAGA movement. Perhaps a few percent of independents or swing voters continue to care about it. Perhaps even a handful of Republicans chafe at constantly repeating lies. (I’m looking at you, Governor DeWine. You resist the lie, but support the liar. How long can you hold that contorted position?) Maybe, in a close election, truth could still make a difference.

And yet, recent history shows that truth by itself is not enough. The American people already know Trump is a liar, just as they know many other negative things about him: He is a felon, an abuser of women, the perpetrator of numerous frauds (a fraudulent university, fraudulent foundation, fraudulent business), a racist, and much else. He has so far avoided going to trial for three of the four indictments against him, but the evidence in those indictments remains unrefuted.

Given all that, it is remarkable that only 53% of Americans report having an unfavorable opinion of the man. But will they all vote for his opponent? Unlikely.

Once, the fact that Trump is provably a bad man would have been enough to defeat him. But today, it no longer is.

This week’s squirrels. As the election approaches, the number of outrageous stories is mushrooming. As David Roberts put it:

It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.

Just in the past eight days:

• Trump tweeted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on Truth Social. I can’t find anything to compare this to. Has any presidential candidate ever announced his HATE for a pop-culture megastar who has done nothing more objectionable than endorse his opponent?
• Blame the Jews. Thursday, at an event that was supposed to be against antisemitism, Trump demonstrated how antisemitism works. If he loses, Trump said, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss”. No doubt the Proud Boys and other violent January 6 extremists are listening and will remember. Pogroms have been started for less.
• Mark Robinson is a “black NAZI!”. Also Thursday, CNN outed Trump’s handpicked candidate for governor of North Carolina for posting wildly over-the-top stuff on a porn website’s message board back in the early 2010s. Trump has remained silent about the reports, after previously giving Robinson a speaking slot at the Convention and calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids“.
• Legal is illegal. J. D. Vance has been calling the Haitians in Springfield “illegal aliens” even though he knows they’ve got temporary protected status under the law. Wednesday, he acknowledged that, but said he’s going to keep calling them “illegal” anyway. This is all part of keeping the cat-eating lie going. (Oh, and this is trivia, but it sticks in my craw: Vance said “Haitia” (HAY-sha) instead of “Haiti”. Imagine if Biden had done that.)

And I still feel like I’m missing something. It would be easy to spend the week talking about nothing else.

What we’re being distracted from. I hear lots of frustration from Harris supporters (but not from Harris or Walz) about how anyone can still be on the fence in this election. How can anyone with sense and a conscience even consider voting for this guy, or even staying home on election day?

But let’s put that frustration aside and face the fact: Something like 5-10% of people either still haven’t made up their minds or aren’t willing to tell pollsters what they’ve decided. The key to winning this election, for either side, lies with convincing those people or making their support firm enough to get them out to vote.

Getting frustrated at them isn’t likely to move them in our direction. Also, the fact that Donald Trump is a vile person has been well covered. As I’ve already noted, he’s a felon, a fraudster, a scam artist, a race baiter, an abuser of women, and all sorts of other things. MAGA types deny all that, but I don’t think they’re fooling a lot of people outside their bubble. People know, they just don’t care. Hitting that point harder also isn’t going to move them.

Here’s how I picture the maybe-Trump voter: They’re mainly motivated by pre-pandemic nostalgia. They knew in 2019 that Trump was a vile person, but it didn’t seem to matter. They were doing fine and felt like the country was doing fine. If electing him again would bring that back, that sounds good.

Meanwhile, a lot of bad stuff has happened since 2019. Yeah, a bunch of that stuff happened in 2020 under Trump, but it’s easy to overlook that. Life has been disrupted, and the most visible disruption is that there was a lot of inflation in from 2021 to 2023. It’s largely over now, but the cumulative effect is still with us.

The economy. The argument against that view is a little complicated, and is hard to get people to pay attention to: The pandemic had two main effects around the world: a surge in unemployment before vaccines were available (under Trump), and a surge of inflation afterward (under Biden) as the money governments created to keep people fed, housed, and out of bankruptcy hit the reopening post-vaccine economy.

Trump doesn’t usually get blamed for the job losses, but Biden does get blamed for the inflation. Neither should be: Those two tidal waves hit the whole world, not just the US, and the US has surfed those waves better than any other economy. No other country has gotten its jobs back and tamed the post-vaccine inflation as quickly as we have.

It’s a tricky message to communicate: The economy still isn’t wonderful, but the Biden/Harris administration has done a great job managing it through a difficult stretch.

That message needs to be coupled with a simpler message: Everything Trump is proposing will make the economy worse. His high tariffs will raise prices not just on everything we import, but on American products that compete with imported products. Deporting millions of people will make it hard for businesses to find workers, which will also raise prices, as well as constrict the economy in other ways.

In short, putting Trump back in the White House won’t make it 2019 again. The pandemic really happened, and the effects will still be here.

Non-economic messages. Trump is relying on the complexity of the economic situation to keep voters bamboozled, but the squirrels are supposed to keep them from noticing more obvious things

• Women are dying because of the abortion bans he made possible. ProPublica recently put names on two of the corpses Trump is responsible for: Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Harris supports legislation to restore the pre-Dobbs status quo. If your 2019 nostalgia extends to how abortion was handled, Harris will bring that back
• A second Trump administration will be far more autocratic than the first. Project 2025 (which Trump denied responsibility for after it became unpopular) outlines the plans in detail. But even if you don’t believe Trump will follow that plan, the general outlines are clear: His first administration started out staffed by generic Republicans who were constantly telling him that he couldn’t do illegal things. By the end of his term, he had gotten rid of most of those people, which is how the January 6 insurrection happened. His second administration will be staffed by people like Kash Patel, who will do whatever he tells them. And he will enter a second term with a Supreme Court guarantee of immunity from subsequent prosecution, so if a staffer does have the temerity to tell him his orders are illegal, he can tell them to jump in a lake.
• Harris believes in democracy and the rule of law, but Trump does not. Trump believes in the rule of Trump. Harris will obey laws and court orders. She will accept the results of elections, even if she doesn’t like them.
• Harris believes in science. Trump believes in whatever is convenient. The worst of Covid is behind us, but we’re in an era where pandemics are becoming more frequent. If another one hits in the next four years, we’ll be better off with Harris in the White House, because she will face reality rather than try to happy-talk through it.
• Harris will continue fighting climate change. Trump will undo everything Biden has done to fight climate change. “Drill, baby, drill” is a recipe for stronger hurricanes, bigger wildfires, and unlivable temperatures in much of the United States. Climate change around the world will bring more refugees to our borders. Trying to hang on to the dying fossil fuel economy will put us behind the rest of the world, especially China.
• Dictators are not our friends. Trump admires and wants to be like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He would give Ukraine to Putin and endanger NATO allies like Poland.

Handling the squirrels. Before you react, ask yourself if there are real victims, like the Haitains of Springfield. If there aren’t, make sure you don’t get too distracted from the points above.

In general, we should notice the squirrels, bookmark them, and be ready to show them to people who need to see them, like undecided Swifties and Jews who think Trump’s support of Israel cancels out his overall antisemitism. But let’s not pound on them. As a lead argument, Trump-is-vile won’t persuade the people we need to be persuading.