If one correctly understands the large role that spectacle and distraction play in the Age of Trump, then its full horror and ugliness are easily demystified and revealed. Unfortunately, too many Americans, especially those in the mainstream news media and the responsible political class, refuse to do so. Why? It is very frightening to wake up one day and realize that you are a stranger in your own country.
Billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently engaged in a major and highly publicized dispute. Its origins have been well-documented: ego, ambition, money and power.
The news media were predictably obsessed with this fight, labeling it a “divorce” and using other such dramatic language.
Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will take the harmful policies that have been inflicted on Americans who live in Republican-controlled parts of the country and make them national.
Applying the logic of professional wrestling and carny culture, I do not know (nor do I care) if the fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is a “work” (a pretend fight or some other scripted part of the business) or “a shoot” (a real fight) or something in between (“a work” that becomes “a shoot” and the audience is not exactly sure what is happening). We may never know the whole truth.
What really matters is that this fight, be it real or not, is a distraction from Trump’s “big beautiful bill” and how it further guts the social safety net and gives trillions of more dollars to the richest individuals and corporations. It is critically important to emphasize how Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans’ gutting of the social safety net, and further immiseration of the middle class and working poor to give even more money to the kleptocrats and plutocrats, is not separate and apart from the country’s rapid collapse into authoritarianism. These destructive forces gut and weaken democratic life. Moreover, such forces may bring a people closer to the authoritarian leader in an attempt to win favor as a protected group. Learned helplessness becomes a survival mode.
At the risk of mixing my metaphors, the fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is ultimately an example of the old African proverb that when two elephants fight, it is the grass beneath their feet that suffers.
To that point, the economic and larger societal harm that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will cause is well-documented, easily predictable and not hypothetical. In a public letter addressed to the Senate Finance Committee, public health experts at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania are warning that Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican policy changes and budget cuts to programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the social safety net more broadly will kill at least 51,000 Americans a year.
Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” also guts educational funding, science and health research. These cuts will also imperil the health and well-being of the American people, making the country less prosperous and dynamic, both in the present and for future generations.
Decades of social science research have repeatedly shown that right-wing and “conservative” policies across a range of issues cause harm to the American people. To that point, Republican-controlled parts of the country are a type of laboratory for what happens when these policies are applied without sufficient pushback: People who live in Red State America live shorter lives, have less economic mobility, wealth, and income, are less educated, have higher rates of preventable diseases, more suicides, higher rates of addiction, experience higher rates of murder and in total enjoy a worse quality of life. As journalist William Kleinknecht documents in his book “State of Neglect,” “What this means is that not all of us are living in a declining nation, only half of us":
If the United States were thought of as two countries, the Blue Nation would have much more in common with the America of the mid-twentieth century, when we led the world in almost every measure of progress, whereas the Red Nation would be middling and second-rate.”
When enacted, Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will take the harmful policies that have been inflicted on Americans who live in Republican-controlled parts of the country and make them national.
In a new essay at the Guardian, Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson detail the harm that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will cause tens of millions of the most vulnerable Americans and the fictions about poverty that are being used to justify this Darwinian right-wing social engineering:
Here’s the reality check: a majority of those receiving this aid who can work are already working. More than 70% of working-age people who receive nutrition benefits or Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income children and adults that covers one in five Americans, are already working, according to the Government Accountability Office. Those who aren’t working, research shows, are mostly ill, disabled, caring for a family member, or in school.…
There is a problem with making policy decisions based on the unfounded belief that poverty is about people with bad moral character making bad choices, or on debunked racial tropes of undeserving “welfare queens.” (In fact, white people make up the largest group receiving public food and healthcare aid.) Shaping policy around false stereotypes, rather than the complex reality, prevents policymakers from working together on real solutions.
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Why is the American news media so easily taken in by the professional wrestling-like feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk? On a basic level, this is a story that has heroes and villains, conflict and intrigue, an easy storyline to follow (and therefore is comparatively easy to write), and is “fun” for mainstream liberals, progressives, and “centrists." Perhaps most importantly, the Trump versus Musk narrative attracts attention (the clicks and downloads that drive the 21st-century media) and ad revenue. In so many ways, Trump versus Musk is a type of sugar high for the news media (and those pro-democracy Americans who are desperate for some good news to distract them from the reality that their side is getting rolled over, rather easily, by MAGA).
Al Jazeera’s Andrew Mitrovica explains this as Trump’s great power as “the magician-in-chief”:
Trump understands better, I reckon, than any US president since Ronald Reagan how to bend and manipulate the squirrel-like attention spans of much of the new and “legacy” media to his will and advantage….
He does this by flashing shiny, fleeting baubles that further his parochial interests, while more consequential matters drift by like a passing cloud, unnoticed – leaving the hard, complex stuff to fade into neglect.
Trump is the human equivalent of a 24/7 cable news outlet pumping out intriguing content that the real cable news channels are happily addicted to – admitted or not….
What Trump wields is far more practised and pernicious. He doesn’t just distract – he rewrites the story in real time, making the serious seem trivial, and the trivial seem epochal. Oh, and he figured out long ago that most political observers are far more captivated by personality than policy.
The Beltway press is conditioned to look where the president points – again and again….
The antidote to manipulation is not detachment – it’s sharp, vigilant coverage of the profound, human consequences of the president’s actions, not his antics.
In its exhausting dance with Donald Trump, the fourth estate can and must stop mistaking the fireworks for the fire.
In the end, the American news media, the responsible political class, and the general public who are closely following the Trump-Musk feud will likely end up being marks who were being worked the whole time. As journalist D. Earl Stephens writes in a new essay, “Right-wing media will trumpet ‘Hail to the Victors’ and Democrats will be pointing at the smoking carnage of what was, while what is actually happening is even worse than it was 24 hours before":
Two weeks from now, all this will be forgotten, and we will be smack in the middle of the next existential crisis that will demand all of our time, while even more of our rights have been incinerated, and billionaires like Trump and Musk have even more of our money.
While Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is being forced through Congress by his MAGA Republicans, he has federalized thousands of National Guard troops and 700 active-duty United States Marines to help put down protests in response to the ICE deportation raids in the Los Angeles area (and per Trump's Executive Order other parts of the country as well). This is a violation of long-standing norms and laws governing how the United States military should not be used against the American people. The United States Marines are the country’s elite shock troops and an expeditionary force that specializes in amphibious assaults. The potential for a nightmare scenario is growing by the hour.
Once again, the American people and their news media and other leaders and gatekeepers are, in the words of media scholar Neil Postman, “amusing themselves” and their democracy to death. Professional wrestling and carny culture can be great fun. Having a ringside seat for the end of American democracy and the rule of law in real-time is not.
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