In Trump’s second term, there are no true distractions. It’s just one unrelenting firehose of madness blasting lies, grifts, vendettas, stupid ideas, cruel statements, cruel actions, etc. at full pressure in our face. You’re not dodging scandals anymore; you’re just drowning in them. Every spray and every drop roaring out of the filthy hose that is Trumpism is all part of one thing.

Nutso Truth Social posts were distractions for DOGE digging around in our data. The tariffs were distractions from tax cuts for billionaires. Trump’s babbling about a third term was a distraction from the stock market crashing. Signalgate was a distraction from egg prices not falling. ICE raids were a distraction from the Elon feud. Attacking Iran is a distraction from the ICE raids.

Round and round we go, to the point where if everything is a distraction, then nothing is. Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion, is quite correct here:

There are no distractions. It's all bad. Systematically stripping trans people of their rights, guys in balaclavas shoving any brown person with a tattoo into a ummarked vans, ending healthcare for millions. It's all in service of fascism and technofeudalism. It's all one thing. That's the point.

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-06-18T17:52:43.631Z

All of this is by design: Overwhelming the public with a constant stream of cruel, crazy, stupid, and/or scary stuff is how authoritarians operate. The argument that particular things that Trump does are distractions from other terrible things is that everything he is doing is related to his worldview. None of it is insincere in that Trump and his administration are doing everything he wants.

Attacking Iran and offering full support to Israel, no matter what, are two key right-wing foreign policy ideals. Tax cuts for billionaires, destroying the social safety net, and other things in the Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill are standard GOP, things that Paul Ryan used to fantasize about while in college (no, really, he’s a damn sick weirdo). Herding immigrants and removing them from America to make it whiter is a big part of Trumpism, as is doing it via thugs in masks. Stephen Miller must watch videos of it in a locked room.

Picking any of this and labeling it as a distraction also implies something else, and that is what certain people care about doesn’t matter. I will give the benefit of the doubt to the people doing it, but claiming that Trump going after the rights of trans people is a mere distraction is indeed throwing those folks under the bus. This, in turn, has led some centrist Democrats to urge politicians to do a “compromise” on transgender rights based around participation in high school sports. However, doing so will not work because 1) it’s such an insignificant issue, an effective counter would be with everything going on why are you weirdos focused on a tiny number of high school athletes’ genitals, and 2) they have clearly demonstrated that they can never be appeased and any appeasement is permission to push the awful thing further.

To trans people, it’s existential, a challenge to their very right to exist. Hardly a distraction to someone under the gun.

I think the firehose of bullshit is going increase in force before it gets better. Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns, and Money has some excellent thoughts on how lying is becoming normalized. Police lie so often in court, there’s a term for it, testilying. Police will often put out a statement about an officer-involved shooting that will be proven to be completely dishonest once the video of the incident is revealed. Campos notes that ICE officers have taken these lies to a new level, claiming that they were assaulted if there is video of them arresting an elected official or beating an immigrant. Unfortunately for ICE, the video clearly shows no such thing. However, for now anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter.

I guess you could say these lies are designed to be distractions designed to make people who are not really paying much attention to the news believe that the ICE officers are constantly under attack by violent immigrants. But lying is less distraction and more just how authoritarians operate.

The other factor I wanted to mention is AI, and the proliferation of it across the Internet. This is becoming a bigger and bigger tool for chaos in the hands of authoritarians and their supporters. This week, on the Chris Hayes-hosted Why Is This Happening podcast, writer Jia Tolentino is Hayes’ guest, and they talk about the advances in AI video. At this point, AI video has become good enough where it’s becoming impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not. Along with the obvious issue for society in general, politically this leaves us wide open for all kinds of chicanry, so add that to the blast coming out of the fire hose.

In my opinion, the best way to handle all of this is remain as engaged as you can, take breaks for self-care, and instead of taking the easy way out by calling it a distraction, my dear Democratic elected officials, get creative in dealing with attacks on marginalized populations. All of this is going to be necessary if we are to defeat this cancer, and get a break from it in 3 1/2 years (hopefully a long one).

The last word goes to Lucius, with a nice little distraction: