Don’t allow yourself to be distracted.
The essence of any successful con game—and Donald Trump is one of the best con artists who ever lived—is diverting the eye. If the con artist can reroute one’s attention from where it normally would be—where it should be—then he or she can pilfer and fleece at will.
At the moment, Trump has almost all of his critics sputtering with rage about his campaign to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force and use the National Guard to patrol the streets of the nation’s capital.
They argue that the president is blurring the line between military and civilian authority. That the crime rate in D.C. actually has gone down. That his legal authority for doing so is shaky and this move likely will result in a protracted legal battle with the taxpayers footing the bill for the lawyers on each side of the tussle.
All of these are valid arguments, but they play into Trump’s game.
He’s not interested in facts. Nor has he ever demonstrated much interest in how the law works unless it involves figuring out ways to evade the consequences of his own capricious lawbreaking.
What he is interested in doing is refocusing our attention.
If we’re screaming and yelling about his attempts to turn the garden of American democracy into a police state, we’re not locked in on certain things.
Such as, he promised when he campaigned to be returned to the White House that he would bring prices down “on Day One.”
Well, we’re now more than 180 days into this second Trump presidency and inflation continues to climb, unabated and unimpeded by presidential leadership. Trump partisans were doing happy dances because inflation was “only” 2.7% in the July numbers. They feared the number would be much greater because the president’s on-again-off-again tariff policies have turned determining consumer pricing practices into a rollercoaster ride.
Worse, as prices continue to soar, the president has taken steps to make sure that Americans will have fewer incomes with which to pay for the goods and services they need.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers indicate that the only sector of the U.S. economy that currently is adding jobs is health care—and even that may slow when Trump’s plans to slash health benefits and shutter hospitals and other medical facilities in rural communities take effect.
He’s promised that his tariffs will restore manufacturing to robust levels, but that would involve pumping vast amounts of federal money into the cities where factories are.
Most of those cities are under Democratic leadership. It’s hard to imagine that this hyper-partisan president—a commander-in-chief with a highly developed binary “you’re-either-with-me-all-the-way-or-you’re-against-me” mentality—seeking out common ground with political adversaries, much less collaborating with them.
What the tariffs likely will do is force the cost of paying for the president’s massive tax cuts for billionaires such as himself onto working-class taxpayers in the form of higher prices at the supermarkets and department stores.
Trump’s response to this reality has been to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and to try to install compliant, complicit loyalists in positions that monitor and report U.S. economic activity.
Most con artists have contempt for marks. In their view, marks exist to be fleeced. The fact that it is so easy to hustle them proves that they deserve to be hustled.
Still, Trump’s contempt for his own base is breathtaking.
He really seems to think that turning our economic-monitoring apparatus into a see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil operation will keep the people who voted for him from noticing that they’re paying even more for eggs, that their jobs or hours have dried up and that they have nowhere to go when they get sick.
Yes, he thinks Americans are that stupid.
That’s why he believes manufacturing a controversy over policing in Washington, D.C., will distract attention from the fact that he has no idea how to lower prices or stimulate job growth.
What he does know how to do is dance and prance and divert the eye.
And that’s exactly what he’s doing right now in the nation’s capital.
