— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017
A good magician has plenty of different ways of confounding and amazing an audience, but the first, go-to device is distraction. The magician will get you to look one place while they're pulling off the trick in the place where you aren't looking.
It's not something that politicians often do normally or well. It's why so many people in the establishment and among his opponents find Trump so disorienting and are unable to do anything to effectively counter him. Trump has always been, first, and foremost, a showman.
Using showman's trick, Donald Trump is managing to completely dismantle Barack Obama's legislative legacy.
While the media is stuck revving its engine while its wheels stay frozen in neutral gear on a Russia scandal that will go nowhere, Trump has is pushing through legislation which will defund so-called Sanctuary Cities. Trump looks poised to get a bill through Congress which will undo Obamacare. Trump's Travel Ban has been mostly upheld by the Supreme Court and will likely restore even more of it in the fall.
Meanwhile, in just under six months of Trump's policies, the unemployment rate for African-Americans has dropped to its lowest number in almost two decades; far lower than it had ever been under Barack Obama. People vote with their pocketbooks, and Trump is, very quietly, eating away at a core element of the Democratic Party's base.
And during all this, what is the media talking about?
The headlines are about Trump and Russia, as if, with all the leaks, if there was any evidence of collusion between Trump's campaign and Vladimir Putin, it would not have been made public already.
But even more amusing is that the media is falling for Trump's distraction tricks by fixating on his twitter account. Trump calls a female reporter "crazy" and "dumb as a rock" and the media goes insane.
Trump tweets out a jokey video of him, in which he is pounding someone with the CNN logo superimposed over his face, and the media ridiculously claims Trump is "endorsing violence" against the media. It's pure mockery of Trump's opponents that the video was dug up from his days of involvement with professional wrestling. The showman of years ago remains a showman still, and the media, as stupid as ever, keeps falling for the same trick, over and over.
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