On Friday, the Trump White House quietly dumped an incredibly damning report about the immediate impact of climate change. On the one hand, it was amazing that the report was even allowed to see the light of day, but obviously it demonstrates two things about information in Trumpistan.
First, they used the Friday News Dump. This was a favored tactic of previous administrations - Dubya was especially good at it. If you have bad news, get it out on Friday afternoon, so the story gets lost in the weekend. Dumping it the Friday after Thanksgiving was especially deft, since literally no one is watching the news with any urgency. This demonstrates, as if we didn't know, how little Trump and the entire GOP cares about climate change. The GOP is literally the only major political party in the developed world (and that includes the Chinese Communist Party) that doesn't accept that climate change is man-made and needs a policy solution.
Second, it demonstrates how poorly news organizations can handle bad news in Trumpistan. This is a big deal. It's about...everything. It comes on the heels of a major catastrophe in California. It comes a few months after catastrophic hurricanes hit Florida. There is context galore for major stories about the impact of climate change.
But simultaneous to this, you have a GOP Senate candidate exposed as a literal neo-Confederate; the ongoing outrage of Khashoggi's murder; the ongoing feud between Trump and Chief Justice Roberts; another migration crisis on our borders and...well, let's just see what Monday brings, shall we?
The complete overloading of the puke funnel with terrible stories is having an impact. I believe that those formerly GOP leaning suburban women who flipped on Election Day were influenced by the steadily rising flood of bad stories. It creates a feeling detached from specifics of a world gone shitty. What it doesn't necessarily do is create focus on certain issues. Right now there are probably two major policy concerns: in the short term, Trump's corruption, in the long term, climate change. Neither one can hold any one's attention for more than a few hours before something else horrible comes along to distract us.
Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a curse.
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