"Distraction" Isn't A Safe Word
Impeachable offenses are impeachable even if a president commits them as diversions.
I don’t recall enjoying the movie Wag the Dog all that much when I first saw it [REDACTED] years ago, but I think Washington Democrats might benefit from a rewatch, and I’m happy to screen it for them at my house, if it’ll get them thinking critically.
It’s about a U.S. president who’s poised to get run out of office after he gets caught trying to seduce a teenage girl in the Oval Office. He thus enlists a Hollywood producer to generate fake war footage for him—a distraction, if you will—then runs for re-election as a war-time president prosecuting a fake war against Albania.
And it works! The pervert president is re-elected. Except, by forcing everyone to live in a false reality, he also makes everything in the real world worse. Life begins to imitate art, and the United States ends up slipping into a bona fide war.
Fictional life; fictional art. And so it remained until 2025.
Set aside the logistical, um, problems with fabricating a war in the age of air travel and television-news reporting. My assumption is that Washington Democrats would be able to suspend disbelief and grasp the subtext of ethical degeneracy. They would understand the implication: that if a president got caught out in anything like this, he’d lose his job.
In other words, if I’m right, Democrats would be of clearer minds about the movie than about the situation we’re living through, as real life imitates actual art.
They would be able to answer clearly: What is the correct remedy for a president who abuses power in profound ways to keep the public distracted from his own politically damaging scandals?
DISTRACTOR TRAILER
I wrote about the “distraction” trope in last week’s mailbag, because many Americans, including many Off Message readers, have grown understandably short-tempered with Democrats who can’t stop telling them that their deeply held concerns—about secret police or the occupation of Washington or the state-sanctioned harassment of Donald Trump’s enemies—are in some sense trivial.
My point was that not all Democrats who use words like “distraction” are trying to be evasive. Some are just in a semantic bind. There are Democrats who want to fight Trump aggressively, but who also want to be honest with the public about what they’re seeing. And they assess that Trump has rotten, selfish motives: He’s treating blue cities like enemy territory and hunting Latino men for sport because it helps him generate propaganda. Not for any of the pretextual reasons he claims, but also not to, say, seize control of Congress by force. Abuses along those lines are not distractions, in the condescending sense of the term, but Trump sure hopes to distract us!
It shouldn’t go without saying, though: Democrats like that are not in control. Most of them, from the leadership on down, reach for “distraction” as a crutch, because they’re scared—they’re scared of engaging in politics on any grounds adjacent to crime-fighting and immigration, and they’re scared of the idea that citizens like us might expect them to do something about runaway presidential lawbreaking.