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Trump's Forever War of Diversion
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-25/trump-s-forever-war-of-diversionTrump's Forever War of Diversion
Jan 25, 2017 11:48 AM EST
By Leonid Bershidsky
President Donald Trump's executive activity has been frantic in the first days of his term. He has moved to keep a number of the scary promises that were easier to dismiss as unfeasible during the campaign than to accept as actual policies in the real world. But the big stories he has generated have had nothing to do with these actions.
According to data collected by BuzzSumo.com, the most widely shared CNN news story about Donald Trump since January 21 was one about Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer attacking the media for their reporting on inauguration attendance. It was shared 169,700 times on Facebook. A story on Trump's executive order to start rolling back Obamacare clocked just 71,100 shares. On The New York Times' website, the most widely shared story debunked Spicer's "alternative facts." It showed up on Facebook 170,900 times. The New York Times piece about Trump's executive order abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership got 44,600 shares.
This is the result of a manipulation strategy described long ago by Noam Chomsky: "Keep the adult public attention diverted away from the real social issues, and captivated by matters of no real importance." Leftists such as Chomsky argue that this is what capitalist elites do, but I know it as a common tactic of kleptocratic regimes such as Vladimir Putin's in Russia.
There's even a term for the tactic: "diversionary conflict." Faced with economic difficulties or other problems potentially threatening to its survival, the regime starts a war somewhere or sharpens domestic ethnic divisions. Since the oil price plummeted in late 2014, the Putin regime has kept Russians on a steady diet of war news from eastern Ukraine and Syria (Russia and its allies have been winning). With the Syrian operation, Putin sharply raised his international standing, but a big reduction in protests against worsening economic conditions has probably been more important to him.
