Trump's Chaos is a 'Strategic Weapon of Mass Distraction'

"It's a strategic weapon of mass distraction to get you to look over here as the Trump administration is planning to increase our deficit by $800 billion a year with tax cuts to the wealthy."

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“I believe, for the most part, it's a strategic weapon of mass distraction to get you to look over here as the Trump administration is planning to increase our deficit by $800 billion a year with tax cuts to the wealthy,” Scott Galloway said of the chaos and pain the Trump administration is inflicting across the board due to DOGE.

He points out that if they really wanted to save money, they could get six times the savings of what DOGE has allegedly found to date “by cutting off all subsidies to Tesla, which is cost taxpayers $15 billion.”

Watch Scott Galloway on PBS’s Amanpour & Co (start at 9:15) here:

Scott Galloway: Well, every administration from Clinton-Gore has had some sort of task force to try and root out inefficiency, fraud and waste. So far, if DOGE is an audit of the US government, then the US government has been issued a clean bill of health, because this wall of receipts is surprisingly scant.

The first one said they were claimed they were saving $8 billion, it ended up to be $8 million of spending that had already been spent. And then numbers two, three and four on the list of DOGE receipts that have since been taken down, were just blatantly false. The Wall Street Journal reports and so far, DOGE has found $2.6 billion in cost savings, you can 6x the savings from DOGE to date by cutting off all subsidies to Tesla, which is cost taxpayers $15 billion.

But I think it's more mendacious than that. I mean, yeah, we all like the idea of cutting waste, but I believe it's a misdirect and that is, while we all kind of have our hair on fire and looking over here at DOGE $2.6 billion, the indignance (sic), the emotional upset of firing good people doing good work, or the just the general incompetence of laying off air traffic controllers or firing people oversee our nuclear stockpile and then trying to hire them back.

I believe, for the most part, it's a strategic weapon of mass distraction to get you to look over here as the Trump administration is planning to increase our deficit by $800 billion a year with tax cuts to the wealthy.

All of this is a misdirect. It's sad, it's unfortunate, it's incompetent. These savings are illusory, right? But at the end of the day I think it's a purposeful distraction from the tax cuts they are trying to put forward at the expense of future generations.

This theory makes a lot of sense, although I’d add that Trump also achieves undermining America and our national security with all of this chaos, so that’s a win for Putin, which is to say Trump is doing his job if his job is to please Putin rather than his actual job of president.

A president is supposed to be responsible for overseeing the “execution and enforcement of laws for the well-being of everyone in the country and its territories.”

Yeah, read that again: The well-being of everyone in the country and her territories.

So he’s obviously not even trying to do his job.

But Galloway’s point is a good one. Trump always uses distraction as a method of manipulation, and he does so by hitting emotional sensitivities, like any transactional type person learns to do. When they get people emotional, people can’t and won’t fight by the time they figure out what’s been done to them. That’s not to suggest what he’s doing isn’t harmful; quite the opposite. It’s harmful and it’s meant to be.

The Republicans are in hot water because they can’t come up with the $880 billion the House budget demands without major cuts to Medicaid.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wrote last week that Republicans were voting to cut Medicaid, “Everyone who voted for this - almost every House GOP - voted to cut Medicaid. When they try to pretend later that they didn’t, know that they are lying to you. This was the vote. They knew it, we knew it, CBO confirms it. Good news is we can still defeat it. Time to organize.”

She wrote this over Jonathan Allen linking to CBO and summarizing, “CBO says Congress can’t cut the $880 billion the House budget calls for without taking hundreds of billions from Medicaid. But in CBO fashion, it is stated more diplomatically. But the numbers don’t lie.”

This is why Republicans will just increase the deficit by $800 billion a year if they need to, even as they identify as the party of fiscal conservatives (their pronouns are fiscal/lies) who are against the deficit. But it turns out, they are not actually against the deficit unless the deficit is helping regular Americans and our national security. They’re all for it when they can roll that $800 billion a year to their donors through your tax money.

Things are so bad two months into Trump’s second term that CEOs are losing faith in him and “gone is the optimistic dream of economic growth spurred” as they realize “Trump’s policies were bad for the U.S. economy,” according to Fortune:

Gone is the optimistic dream of economic growth spurred by Trump’s pro-business mindset around taxes and regulation. In its place is the grave uncertainty of not knowing what this administration will do next. As the host, Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, noted afterward, the consensus was one of bewilderment, condemnation and a feeling that “Trump’s policies were bad for the U.S. economy.”

Though the attendees identified as 60% Republican to 40% Democrat, the mood was dour. In a flash poll at the summit, 80% of CEOs said they find themselves “apologizing to our international partners for Trump’s capriciousness.” Eighty-five percent oppose his approach to tariffs and think they’re backfiring. Almost all—92%—are now concerned about recession. Indeed, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist just downgraded the entire U.S. economy.

Yes, the U.S. economy was just downgraded. The entire economy. And CEOs are apologizing to their international partners about “Trump’s capriciousness.”

We really need to take a moment of silence for CEO’s belief in Trump’s supposed “pro-business” policies spurring economic growth. It’s as if they weren’t wildly succeeding under Joe Biden and as if they all got amnesia about how bad it was under Trump, with the contraction starting even before the pandemic.

Trump is causing deliberate pain and he doesn’t seem to care at all about the economy, telling people to shut up about egg prices because he is rich and he can afford eggs. What he cares about is enriching himself and the people who put him in office. If they really cared about cuts, they’d cut the subsidies to Tesla, which cost us all $15 billion.

Instead, Trump is playing used car salesman on the White House lawn, causing the stock market to careen into wild plunges and making enemies of our allies while setting us up for the Trumpcession. The only reason he is in the White House is to grab your cash and funnel it to himself, his family, and his entourage in an endless parade of mafioso-style quid pro quo.

Is Trump using mass distraction? Share your thoughts in the comments below.