Harry Litman - Distracter-in-Chief
On top of his many other faults, Trump is among the most erratic presidents in American history. He lurches from scandal to scandal like a drunken sailor on leave.
Part of it is temperamental. Trump has the attention span of an eight-year-old, and seems genuinely incapable of sustained focus on any single problem. His own staff learned early to condense the Presidential Daily Brief into bullet points, maps, and graphics, because the president wouldn’t read the full document. Jim Mattis, his own Secretary of Defense in his first term, reportedly said Trump had the understanding of a fifth or sixth-grader.
Part of the erraticness feels tactical: a seasoned con man’s instinct for escape. He senses when political heat is becoming dangerous and when to pivot to a new subject, throw a new shiny object in front of a press corps that can rarely resist chasing it. The political and media energy that had been trained on Scandal A suddenly redirects to Scandal B, and the country moves on.
What we rarely stop to notice is what happens to Scandal A after the cameras leave.
The answer, almost invariably, is that it keeps happening. The harm continues to compound, in the dark, without accountability, without the friction that public attention provides. Trump lurches to a new streetlight, and the cameras follow him, but the damage continues to mount where we have stopped looking.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/distracter-in-chief