It’s OK to dodge Totally Irrelevant Distraction
There really is a lot going on in the country these days. Perfectly OK to ignore totally irrelevant distractions like, say, Donald Trump.
Hey, let’s rename him Totally Irrelevant Distraction. TID. In medicine that means three times a day, and I’d be willing to bet a lot of you still experience at least three distracting Trump moments in the course of every 24 hours.
Right now, TID is trying to fling himself into a series of rallies, in which he supports Republican congressional candidates by talking about himself for 90 minutes or so.
On Wednesday he took a sort of break for a trip to Texas where he was scheduled to visit a few of his favorite things — the wall, Sean Hannity. “Our poor borders — they were so perfect,” Trump said, improbably, the weekend before his departure.
On the rare occasion when there’s serious news about the former guy, it’s almost always something bad. Like reports of pending criminal charges against the Trump Organization. We’ll have months and months to go over the specifics, although TID’s version was immediately available:
“Radical Left New York City and State Prosecutors, who have let murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and all other forms of crime skyrocket to record levels, and who have just announced that they will be releasing hundreds of people involved in violent crime back onto the streets without retribution of any kind, are rude, nasty, and totally biased in the way they are treating lawyers, representatives, and some of the wonderful long-term employees and people within the Trump Organization.”
Aaaand … he said that these rude and nasty prosecutors were also “relentlessly seeking to destroy a reputation of a President who has done a great job for this Country, including tax and regulation cuts.”
I know, we all miss the @realDonaldTrump era. C-SPAN just issued its latest survey of historians on presidential leadership. Trump was fourth from the bottom, so we can expect to see banners at his rallies boasting “Better Than Buchanan!” or “Even Fiercer Than Pierce.”
Trump’s other mission these days is to keep insisting that he actually won the election. His loss is clearly something he will never get over. On his deathbed he’s gonna be yelling at the attending physician about the vote count in Michigan.
Just the other day he laced into Wisconsin Republicans for failing to show appropriate obsessive interest in “a Forensic Audit of the election results.”
Now any self-respecting Republican would have just retorted: “Good God, man, will you please go away? You LOST.” However, the Republican president of the state Senate issued a pathetic, fawning response in which he stated that the power of Trump’s “pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a bobby pin.”
OK, this is one of the reasons we’re still getting distracted by Trump anecdotes. They’re a diversion from the real world. How many fun dinner party conversations have you had about the infrastructure package?
But we can do better. Besides contemplating the terrible crises of the moment, from climate change to collapsing condominiums, also try to think about all the women and men in Washington slaving away to promote worthy causes that keep getting ignored.
For instance, gun safety. Back in the day, pre-political Donald Trump was fine with New York City’s strict gun laws. Then he started running for president and was shocked by how excited conservative crowds got when he said anything bad about gun control. Witness an overnight conversion.
It’s been impossible to pass even the most modest gun reform for a long time. But there are still lawmakers who don’t give up the fight.
Right now the topic is background checks, meant to ensure gun buyers don’t have criminal records. There’s a gaping loophole exempting purchases made at gun shows. And some experts believe that the gun shows are the source of the so-called iron pipeline — the flow of weapons from the South up I-95 into otherwise highly regulated places like New York, which has recently suffered a serious spate of shootings, some in Times Square while it’s flocked by tourists.
Now closing that loophole doesn’t seem like a big deal. You’d just do the same thing at a gun show sale you do if you’re buying a weapon at a store.
But a leading reform advocate, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, says if it passed, it’d be “the biggest thing since 1993” for gun control. Murphy isn’t sure whether there’s going to be a serious attempt to get it through this year, but he said he’d be tempted to push hard if he thought there was “a 30% chance” of success.
And that’s just one thing! OK, one of my favorites, but pick your own unheralded cause. Every time someone tells you some new story about Trump’s strange new pants design, or his irritation that Jill Biden got in Vogue when Melania didn’t, or the weirdest thing he says at his rally — every time you go into TID mode — remind yourself that you owe that cause equal time.