The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
National, world news in 2017 accelerated to Trump speed
Overload makes seismic events disappear quickly.
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama was president earlier this year.
Really, eyewitness accounts from the period confirm this. It lasted nearly three weeks, it seems, or roughly the time elapsed since a Democrat won a Senate seat in Alabama, if memory serves, which it generally does not anymore.
That special election came before President Donald Trump helped usher a once-in-a-generation tax overhaul through Congress, but after he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which preceded threats to end U.S. aid to any countries that objected — and they did, en masse, in a remarkable U.N. vote that almost certainly took place somewhere in there, right?
Possibly around the time the president accused a female senator of doing “anything” for campaign contributions, touching off tremors in the #MeToo movement he helped inspire, and alleged another wide-scale conspiracy against him in the upper reaches of the FBI.
Or was that one over the summer? When were those hurricanes again? Oh, and the Pentagon has been tracking possible alien visitation. That definitely came up.
One year out, this may be Trump’s greatest trick: His tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory, producing a sort of sensory overload that can make even seismic events — of his creation or otherwise — disappear from the collective consciousness and public view.
He is the magician who swallows a sword no one thought was part of the act, stuffs a dozen rabbits into a hat before the audience can count them — and then merrily tweets about “Fox & Friends” while the crowd strains to remember what show it had paid to attend in the first place.
Diplomatic crises. Human tragedies. The Mooch. Poof.
“We crammed six years in,” said Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican congressman from Utah who left the job at the end of June.
“We get to the point where we’re just done dealing with something,” said Matt Negrin, a digital producer at “The Daily Show,” recalling unresolved maelstroms like Trump’s feud with a Gold Star widow, his baseless claim that Obama wiretapped him and his defense of white nationalist supporters amid the deadly violence this summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“That’s something, in my opinion, we should be talking about,” Negrin said. “But then the eclipse happened five days later.
Not that Trump created the eclipse. But maybe.”
The disorientation has had far-reaching effects, shaping not only Trump’s public image but also the ways in which lawmakers, journalists and others in his ecosystem are compelled to operate.
It is not exactly that “nothing matters,” to borrow social media’s favorite nihilistic buzz-phrase of the Trump age. It is that nothing matters long enough to matter.
“Las Vegas and the church in Texas have fallen off the map — two of the most heinous mass murders in recent American history,” said Tom Brokaw, special correspondent at NBC News, flagging two episodes that would have, under previous circumstances, most likely remained seared in the national conversation.
“It’s astonishing. It should be one of the defining stories not just of the year but of our time.
There are a lot of those. And the president’s apparent triumph over the spacetime continuum has created practical concerns across newsrooms and congressional offices, exacerbated by forces that predate Trump: the rise of Facebook and Twitter, the partisan instincts of cable news and, in the case of mass shootings, what many describe as a growing public imperviousness to horror.
Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., who became a prominent gun control advocate after the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, described his task under Trump as a “triage” mission, “newly overwhelming” every day.
“As someone who works on an issue that is unfortunately driven by news cycles,” he said, “it makes it harder to try to focus attention.”