The story about Cambridge Analytica's attempted collusion with Russia for Trump should be enough
to bring down this presidency or at least render it impotent. The story about a 300 million dollar contract to a two year old politically well connected company with just two workers under contract, to restore electricity in Puerto Rico, should be enough to bring down this presidency or at least render it impotent. A rigged Voter Integrity Commission should be enough, or an EPA that muzzles scientists from reporting on climate change. That should be enough. Or repeated rifts with American allies, or Trump's failure to appoint a U.S. Ambassador to South Korea ten months into his administration while talk of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsular intensifies.
Stories about the next slew of radical revisions in federal agency regulations barely register a one day blip in page six coverage before fading from public consciousness entirely. Except for those personally effected, we can barely hold onto our awareness of the Las Vegas carnage, let alone track what is or isn't being done to prevent a repetition of it.
Puerto Rico might as well be a province in Iraq given the attention we can collectively muster to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe there engulfing millions of U.S.citizens. Chartered jet flights by Cabinet members, continual presidential weekends spent golfing, frequent turn over among top Administration figures, threats to the First Amendment, these all should be enough to to bring down this presidency or at least render it impotent. The list goes on and on. And on.
And that is why none of these things are bringing down Trump's presidency, or yet rendering it impotent. The deluge is utterly mind numbing, and it then has to compete with the latest presidential tweet outrage of the day for any public notice. DACA is expiring, CHIP already expired. We might as well be talking about random strings of letters for all the continued focus we can muster on any of it. The Affordable Care Act has been effectively sabotaged but there is little time left to talk about that while Republicans are unilaterally ramming though a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthiest, under the ruse of "Tax Reform". There is minimal capacity to concentrate for more than an instant on any of the critical actions or inactions of the Trump Administration in any substantive way.
All we are left with is the fog of war and the figure of Donald Trump. And that is how he wants it. He wants public attention on his administration to be reduced to a referendum on him alone. And Trump is more than willing to lose that referendum, so long as he can solidify the support of a majority of a small minority of a small minority - the lion's share of Republican primary voters. With that he blackmails whatever relatively sane Republicans remain in Congress. Trump doesn't need the approval of the American people to reign, just that of a small fanatical base. With that he continues to veto all efforts by the overwhelming majority of Americans to rein him in.
The more Trump is attacked personally, the more Trump uses those attacks to rally his hard core believers to defend him. And in the ensuing fury, his actions evade focused scrutiny. It is as intended.
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