Trump Diversion. Eyes on the magician's assistant

The media cannot help itself.

Trump is incredibly clever.  He makes the media look like idiots.  They keep falling for his tricks.

Trump does it again and again.  

When there is a bad story for him he creates a new story.  The ideal new story is a shocking assertion that is so wild that every news outlet simply must cover it.   It doesn't have to be true.  It just has to be interesting, and better yet, shocking.

A classic technique is to accuse the accuser.   Fox News and Breitbart treat it as Explosive Breaking News!   It makes sense for the partisan conservative media to treat the charges as news.   Their own audiences don't want to hear about Trump and Russians.  They want to hear that Obama was a cheating tyrant.

Terrible!  Worse than Watergate!

Why does the mainstream media fall for it?   Ratings.  People watch.  

Trump is about spectacle.  Audiences cannot take our eyes off someone so bold and outrageous.  And the media wants to be fair.   It is possible that the charges have some truth in them.  They want to be fair, or at least not unfair.

Besides, they have learned that if they do not cover it then the competing cable networks will and their audiences will follow Trump.   

Guest Comment: Barbara Saigo

Barbara Saigo, a biologist and science educator noted that Trump is using a classic defensive maneuver

Barbara Saigo and husband Roy

She wrote:  "Donald Trump's habit of launching tweets and other comments to deflect the conversation from observations that are concerned about or critical of his actions reminds me of a classic aerial defense tactic.  That is, the tactic of throwing metallic chaff out of planes to confound radar and tracking devices; more recently, launching clusters of flares to fool heat-seeking missiles.   Here's a bit (with attribution) about the effect of decoys on confounding attention on real targets.  It seems to be a pretty good analogy of Trump's volatile style.

'Flares decoy infrared-guided missiles by creating a bright source of infrared radiation that either prevents the missile from tracing the aircraft's heat signature, or fools it into believing that the flare is the aircraft's heat signature.    A classic technique is to dispense flares and then immediately change direction and reduce engine power to reduce the aircraft's thermal signature.  The flare, continuing with the momentum of the aircraft, appears to the seeker to be the original heat source.  From Quora'"