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The Trump Show is addling our brains and blinding us to what matters
The Trump Show is addling our brains and blinding us to what matters
A dozen stories with real impact on people got ignored during the memo fracas.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Feb 5, 2018, 1:00pm EST
snip//
When I caught up on the rest of my tabs from the week I noticed something else. There were a bunch of articles published recently about things happening in American politics that are making a real difference in actual people’s lives. Stories that haven’t attracted nearly as much discussion as the GOP’s bad-faith pushback on Robert Mueller and the counter-pushback from Democrats, but that have the virtue of not being total nonsense. Stories that, frankly, paint a frightening picture of the direction in which the country is heading.
Here’s a bunch of stories that actually matter
Obviously on a superficial level between the State of the Union, the Nunes drama, the collapse of the Strzok conspiracy theory, and the apparent evidence that Rick Gates is now cooperating with Mueller, it was a very eventful week in the Trump Show.
But a huge number of stories about things that have a real, concrete impact on people’s lives came to light.
Ben Penn reported that Labor Department political appointees spiked an internal economic analysis of a new rule governing the handling of tips received by millions of workers in the food service industry. If the suppressed report is correct, the rule the Trump administration is promulgating could cost workers billions of dollars in lost income.
The Centers for Disease Control reported that flu hospitalizations in the United States are taking place at a record pace, while Vox’s own Sarah Kliff reported on how Congress’s defunding of Community Health Centers is creating a crisis of health care access for 26 million Americans.
In separate CDC news, Lena Sun of the Washington Post reported that CDC efforts to halt new outbreaks of exotic infectious diseases abroad are headed for an 80 percent cut.
Kriston Capps reported for CityLab that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering new work requirements for recipients of public housing assistance, measures that would impose hardship on some of the most deprived people in the country.
Separately, Rachel Cohen and Zaid Jilani of the Intercept reported on HUD consideration of proposals to raise rents for public housing users.
Yet another HUD story has reporters from both the Washington Post and CNN uncovering considerable evidence that HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s son, who does not work at HUD, is nonetheless intimately involved in HUD business mostly in ways designed to benefit himself personally.
Mick Mulvaney, who is still serving as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while Trump fails to nominate anyone at all to fill the job on a permanent basis, stripped the CFPB’s fair lending office of enforcement powers.
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported that not only has the payday lending industry won a number of regulatory favors from the Trump administration, they’ll be repaying the president personally by holding their annual retreat at the Trump Doral Golf Club.
We had two significant train derailments, even as Trump revealed his infrastructure “plan” to be essentially a giant magic asterisk.
It would be wrong to say the media didn’t cover these stories — I read about all of them in the media, and most of them were broken by major mainstream outlets. What’s true is that none of them got a lot of play in the press. They didn’t land on cable news, for example, or spur tons of follow up and aggregation from competing outlets. And that, in turn, seems to reflect genuine audience interest (or lack thereof) — Vox garnered far more clicks for our various memo-related stories than we did for Sarah’s excellent article on the Community Health Centers.
The Trump Show is great for ratings, but it tends to crowd out other stories. Worse, not only does the Trump Show miss a lot of important points it actively impedes understanding of what’s happening in American public policy along a number of dimensions.
more...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/5/16966726/trump-show
