Deflection is not protection, unless you are President Donald Trump, desperate to divert national attention away from your own self-inflicted crises, failures, and ongoing legal problems. Sounding false alarms over public safety despite falling crime rates, Trump is manufacturing misinformation to lead a dangerous military war on his own American cities as a dodge from accountability while, paradoxically, degrading public safety.
Despite Trump’s bravado, his firing of non-political career economists, prosecutors, and military leaders, and his attacks on former Trump administration officials and critical media commentators, he cannot hide the evidence—of rising inflation and wide-ranging national security failures, such as threats of nuclear war from North Korea, the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza, or the continued Russian mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. He cannot hide the public outrage over maneuvers intended to evade the release of the full Epstein sex-trafficking files, and cutbacks to Medicaid and disaster relief. Targeting critics for unwarranted criminal investigations and deploying thousands of National Guardsmen have sidetracked media attention from his own setbacks, but they have made the nation less safe.
