In the first three years of Donald John Trump’s presidential tenure, one thing we often marveled at was his ability to get his enemies to shift gears and focus on something else. Well, “shifting gears” is too anodyne a phrase: Trump derailed his opponents and set them on utterly orthogonal courses, careening out of control.

Can we be forgiven if we wonder whether other forces are now doing that?

Take 2020. At the start of the year, media focus shone almost solely upon Trump’s impeachment and trial in the United States Senate. All eyes gazed upon that steaming pile of compost.

Then, the “novel [China] coronavirus.” SARS-CoV-2 took over not merely the national focus, but the world’s. A most amazing turn.

Then, a few weeks ago, it became obvious that the lockdown policies were not going to hold: the people had had enough. Further, knowledgeable opinion was marshaling plausible scientific arguments against the lockdowns’ rationale. Progressives and Biden voters, overwhelmingly for the lockdowns, were seeing diminishing returns for their obsessions about the subject.

As if to save public ire against Trump, then came the execution of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, on camera. An eruption of horror, almost unanimous. The cop was fired and charged with a crime.

Yet protest rallies and marches ensued, despite the apparent working of justice to redress the problem.

And then the riots. Which may have included some infiltrators spurring on the violence.

If you think this might all be a conspiracy to channel public attention, in mad hopes of ousting Trump in the next election, you are probably wrong. But I think you should be given some license to express the idea. You might be right.

Public obsessions turning so quickly on a dime sure look managed!

Illusion, probably. Natural action and reaction, likely. 

But smart people resist being caught up in manias outside their control. Super-smart people place others under their control.

In any case, it seems the case that Trump has lost some of his mojo. He no longer controls the news cycle; he no longer controls the focus of our attention.

twv