Let’s wage our fight against Trump as a multifront war

We in the commentariat complain about President Donald Trump, but we’re locked in a symbiotic relationship with him.

News organizations, especially cable television channels, feed off Trump — like oxpeckers on a rhino’s back — for he is part of our business model in 2018. As long as our focus is on Trump, audiences follow.

It’s not optimal to have as president an authoritarian who denounces journalists as enemies of the people, but he has given us a sense of mission and a “Trump bump.” Every time he denounces us we get more subscriptions.

Yet I worry that our national nonstop focus on Trump is helping to usher America into a hole: a Trump obsession.

As president, Trump is enormously important, but there’s so much else happening as well. Some 65,000 Americans will die this year of drug overdoses, American life expectancy has fallen for two years in a row, guns claim a life every 15 minutes and the number of uninsured is rising again even as a child in the U.S. is 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than one in other advanced nations. Those issues are rather more important than the question of whether Stormy Daniels slept with Trump.

Or look abroad. In Myanmar, the government is engaging in what many believe to be a genocide against the Rohingya minority. Gaza is erupting, and there’s heightened threat of a new war in the Middle East. The carnage in Syria continues.

Progressive snobs like me bemoan Trump’s inattention to these global issues, but the truth is that we don’t pay attention, either. At cocktail parties, on cable television, at the dinner table, at the water cooler, all we talk about these days is Trump. So we complain about Trump being insular and parochial — but we’ve become insular and parochial as well. We’ve caught the contagion that we mock.

In fairness, there’s good reason we’re all Trump addicts: Trump truly is the story in America today. He is systematically undermining American institutions and norms that underlie democratic government: courts, law enforcement, journalism, the intelligence community, truth. He is also being investigated for possibly obstructing justice and colluding with a foreign power’s attack on our electoral system. Epic battles will follow.

So I’m not arguing that we avert our eyes from Trump or mute our criticism. Far from it. But we have to figure out how to spare bandwidth for genocide in Myanmar, opioids in America and so on.

It would also be useful if we recognized that the biggest Trump scandals are not what he says, but what he does.

His tweets against immigrants may be cruel, but his actions are crueler, particularly the pattern of tearing children away from their refugee parents at the border and sending them to foster care. And his efforts to curb reproductive health programs, which will leave more women dying agonizing deaths from cervical cancer.

In other words, the biggest Trump scandals aren’t those unfolding in Washington, but those devastating the lives of the poor and vulnerable in distant American towns.

In short, think of this as a multifront war. Trump is mounting one assault on our values, institutions and policies, and we have to fight back. But if we battle only on that front, we are in effect surrendering everywhere else.