In recent months, the Democrats have found a new favorite word — “distraction.” When President Donald Trump or his administration achieve anything of value, the Democrats will claim that such action was meant to “distract” us from whatever the they would rather talk about. Conversely, when the Democrats are criticized for something, they will claim that such criticism is meant to “distract” from what the Republicans are “up to.”
Earlier in September, it was announced that Israel had reached an agreement to fully normalize their relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The UAE and Bahrain were only the third and fourth Arab countries to recognize Israel’s existence since its founding in 1948. Trump and his administration — particularly Jared Kushner — brokered this once-in-a-generation agreement.
Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on September 11th about the agreements between Israel and the two Arab states, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that a step closer to peace in the Middle East was a “distraction.”
“Good for him for having a distraction on a day when the numbers of people who are affected and the numbers of people who are dying from this virus only increases.”
This is not the first time Nancy Pelosi has accused Trump of attempting to “distract” us from “the truth.” In May, for example, she said that “she believed President Trump was using his feud with Twitter and an upcoming executive order on social media regulations as a distraction from the impact of coronavirus.”
The same is true of the mainstream media, who happily direct and divert focus based on political necessity. The Atlantic published a piece titled “‘Obamagate’ Is Just Trump’s Latest Effort at Distraction,” arguably in a bid to distract us from the “outrageous abuses” at the heart of the accusations. Similarly, The New Yorker published a piece titled “Trump Is A Superspreader — Of Distraction,” and CNN went with “A week of distractions from Trump shows a leader in crisis.”
These suggested that any of Trump’s actions — whether real or imaginary — were motivated solely by a desire to “distract” his supporters from his “original sins.”
Now, it’s important to acknowledge that politics is entirely a game of deflection and distraction. The most successful politicians are experts at redirecting criticism with lightning-fast flashes of “whataboutism” or shameless refusals to accept culpability. For example, Pelosi’s unbelievable assertion that her decision to attend a San Francisco hair salon during lockdown was “a setup” and that it was the salon who owed her an apology.
However, the attempt by the Left to label everything Trump says and does as a distraction proves how willing they are to avoid any context or perspective, and how unwilling they are to remain rooted in reality. While the odd reckless tweet is likely designed to distract from a breaking news story, this logic simply doesn’t hold when it comes to the positive of his administration on a broader level.
According to the Democrats, Trump announcing that the United States would withdraw from the World Health Organization has nothing to do with the fact that the WHO are simply high-level shills for communist China. It’s a “distraction.” Trump’s warning that universal mail-in voting will provide huge opportunity for fraud is not an obvious statement of fact for anyone who doesn’t want to benefit from such potential fraud. It’s a “distraction.” Brokering once-in-a-generation peace agreements in the Middle East — when countless Democrats sneered at the very idea of Trump achieving what they claimed was impossible — is not deserving of praise, and certainly not a Nobel Peace Prize – those are reserved for Democrats who set the Middle East on fire. It’s a “distraction.”
Ironically, accusations of distraction from Democrats are themselves distractions from the objective success of the Trump administration on several occasions. If peace in the Middle East or our withdrawal from the corrupt WHO is a “distraction,” keep the distractions coming, Mr. President.
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