Whether the magic is of a "pocket trick" variety or a large stage production, misdirection is the central secret. The term describes either the effect (the observer's focus on an unimportant object) or the sleight of hand or patter (the magician's speech) that creates it.
Everybody, look here while I'm doing this here.
He's doing the same thing with his DEI purges and his scrubbing certain words from government websites. He's doing this with his nominations to misdirect from the worst of the worst.
On the website word scrubbing, he even had Rachel Maddow wasting time in her smiling and chuckling introduction about government websites scrubbing words with the story of sprinter Tyson Gay whose name was changed automatically to homosexual in some media in an effort not to be offensive. This led me to wonder if there were books reivews which changed the names of novelists Gay Talese, or worse, Gay Courter, but then that's the way my mind wanders since Gay Courter has been a friend since she was my childhood neighbor. Her name would have been Homosexual Courter.
Trump's lunacy has even led my mind to be misdirected.
Rachel wasted time with her lead story. We couldn't stand her smiling as she told her story. We turned off her show, and watched some streaming video. Then we turned MSNBC back on to watch Lawrence O'Donnell soberly address the cuts to USAID. He talked about how people were dieing because of this. That is one of the issues the media should be addressing. Website scrubbing is a comparatively minor story. Even these aren't the most important stories.
There are two major stories about what Trump is doing. One is, obviously, about what Trump is doing to destroy democracy and how he is becoming a dictator. The other is about how the media is being taken in by his misdirection.
Not every outlet is taken in all of the time. As I write this Mika Brezinski is talking about how Pete Marocco was putting in charge of the USAID. He was a participant in the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol.
Look this way: Greenland, the Panama Canal, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Krist Noem, even Leon, uh, Elon Musk. Pay attention to Trump flubbing Musk's name. I think Trump does his Leon thing on purpose so it makes the news.
Musk's machinations are marvelous misdirections as well. Consider:
With a cadre of engineers as young as 19 years old, and with the encouragement of Trump, Musk has demanded and been given access to sensitive government databases and the Treasury Department’s payment system with an unprecedented series of bureaucratic maneuvers. NBC News
Put one 19 year old in a position like this and that will be a major part of the story. Don’t look too closely at the ramifications of what Musk is able to do at Treasury.
Most importantly, just don't look too closely at Kash Patel who is about to turn the FBI in Trump's personal Gestapo.
Trump's misdirection can be dealt with by the media if they explain how he does this to hide what he really is doing. He is paving the way for a modernized Hitlerian Project 2025.
The media should explain that Trump is like Hitler in many ways, but unlike him because he doesn't care about initiating a thousand year reich. He wants to reign over his personal reich (German for realm or empire) for as long as he lives. After that he doesn't care what happens.
I'd like to see someone develop and publicize a checklist from both Project 2025 and the things Hitler did in the 1930's and call it "Steps On The Road To An American Dictorship" and as more and more of the steps are attempted and then accomplish the list should be republished.
There could be a countdown click similar to the Doomsday Clock. It is a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As of 2025 the most recent clock shows us to be slightly less than 1½ minutes from midnight due to the "continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Middle Eastern crisis, increased nuclear proliferation, effects of climate change, biological threats, and advancing technologies." I think that it needs to be updated in light of what Trump has done in the last few weeks.
The media needs to prioritize. Everything from the blowback caused by Trump's tarrif threats to the price of eggs, including stories about Waffle House raising breakfast prices, should be covered. These are like straws added to the camel's back. Eventually they will break Trump's back. But until that happens more and more of the 50% of Amercians who still approve of Trump need decide that they really don't want to live in a cruel dictatorship which has it's own Gestapo.
They need to be reminded of the Martin Niemöller poem First They Came:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Overly Dramatic Afterthought:
I liken what Trump is doing to what you see in movies where criminals or terrorists use a celebration like the Fourth of July or a Superbowl game to pull off a bank robbery or an attack elsewhere in the city.
I would agrue that Heather “Digby” Parton’s featured column about Trump’s Gaza proposal (or threat) in Salon today is an example of how Trump misdirects and distracts. I wish she had addressed this in what she wrote.
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