Convenient Pawns?

The Guardian published an interesting op-ed on Saturday with the headline "The story of the week is Trump, Russia and the FBI. The rest is a distraction" (link here).

A lot of news was circulating last week about scandals involving the increasingly chaotic Trump White House. It's quite possible some of those scandals were deliberately ignited to distract attention from the most serious one of all: the potentially illegal coordination with Russian intelligence during the campaign.

In short, Donald Trump and his government want you talking and reading about anything else besides that.

This is not the first time Trump has whipped up scandals, often via Twitter, to divert attention away from something much more damaging. When the "pussy grab" recording surfaced during the campaign, for instance, Trump almost immediately ignited several Twitter tirade scandals to divert voter attention.

Some of the scandals last week may also have been diversion techniques. Take, for example, the story that blew up when the Trump White House barred major news outlets from a media briefing (details here). This happened concurrently to another scandal Trump had been creating when he declared in speeches that, for all intents and purposes, anything negative about him was "fake news" and then labeled the press as an "enemy of the people," using similar wording to that of both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

Another scandal was created when the Trump administration broke its promise and reverse President Obama's protections for transgender school students (details here). Was that betrayal, which generated voluminous media coverage, another attempt to divert attention away from the Russia scandal?

The result of all this is that LGBT Americans could be pawns that Trump will shaft when he needs to divert media attention away from a damaging scandal. A test of this theory could come when Trump signs the disgraceful "First Amendment Defense Act," which allows for open and unfettered discrimination against LGBT Americans.

Will Trump shaft us when he's desperately hoping people won't notice he's done something else?