The idea that one news story has been fabricated to distract from a more important news story is so common that we seldom stop to examine it. In particular, Republicans have deployed this charge against the multitude of criminal indictments against Donald Trump. These indictments, they insist, can only be the result of a shrewd yet sinister conspiracy to divert the public’s attention from the real story.
That “real” story usually involves President Biden’s son Hunter, whom Republicans remain convinced will be what takes down the president once and for all.
This is not to say that some things don’t distract from other things. But the trouble with the current cries of a “distraction” is that they are so often based in “Wag the Dog”-style conspiracy theorizing.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called one of the federal indictments “DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news,” as though Attorney General Merrick Garland called special counsel Jack Smith and said, “The heat on Hunter is getting too intense. Let’s drop an indictment next week.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has asked whether it was “any coincidence that the DOJ rushes to add these new indictments … after the Hunter debacle,” referring to the plea deal for the president’s son that collapsed. “Every time more bad news comes out about Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, you can set a stopwatch, within hours some clown goes and indicts Donald Trump again,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) is certain that there is a complex conspiracy at work to divert attention from his committee’s buffoonish attempts to nab President Biden. Asked in March about a potential Trump indictment, Comer said that “it almost looks like it’s an effort to distract.”
In response, the White House has argued that the endless series of Republican investigations “serves to distract” from the president’s economic successes.
Of course, there are instances when competing news developments will quickly shift the public’s attention from one major topic to another. Think back to 2016: When the “Access Hollywood” tape became public, revealing Trump bragging about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity, WikiLeaks dropped a group of Democratic National Committee members’ emails obtained via Russian hackers less than an hour after the story broke. (Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone — who would later receive a pardon from Trump for his crimes — was in close contact with both the campaign and WikiLeaks at the time.)
So, yes: Every once in a while there really is an effort to distract the public. But the conspiracy alleged by Trump’s allies — that indictments emerging from lengthy investigations involving teams of career prosecutors and grand juries are actually nothing more than a short-term PR strategy based on Hunter Biden’s news cycles — is utterly inane.
If an indictment was only brought to divert your attention, the thinking goes, then there’s no need to evaluate the crimes that are alleged and come to a rational judgment about them.
But try telling Trump’s supporters that. They’ve been taught conspiracy theories alleging that every liberal demonstration only happens because George Soros pays the protesters; that every bit of right-wing violence is carried out by antifa or the FBI in disguise; that every Democratic win at the polls is because the votes were rigged, and every story they don’t like is “fake news.” They believe it so fervently that they’re immune to distraction. Even by the truth.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes an indictment is just an indictment. You can conclude that it isn’t sufficiently compelling to produce a conviction without believing that it’s also a tool for mind control.
Credit: Source link
