Trump created 'distraction' — and reporters fell for it: analysis

12 June

President Donald Trump on February 24, 2025 (Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock.com)

Before Downtown Los Angeles was rocked by tense demonstrations and President Donald Trump responded by federalizing California National Guard troops and sending in U.S. Marines — despite strong objections from Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass — the United States' dominant news story was the bitter feud between Trump and Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk, who is now trying to bury the hatchet.

In a Wednesday, June 11 post on X, formerly Twitter, Musk wrote, "I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far."

The mainstream media quickly shifted their focus from the Trump/Musk feud to the tensions in Downtown L.A., but before the protests, they were covering the feud nonstop — coverage that Salon's Chauncey DeVega considers excessive.

In an article published by Salon on June 12, DeVega argues that the feud was a distraction from more important issues.

"Billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently engaged in a major and highly publicized dispute," DeVega explains. "Its origins have been well-documented: ego, ambition, money and power. The news media were predictably obsessed with this fight, labeling it a 'divorce' and using other such dramatic language…. What really matters is that this fight, be it real or not, is a distraction from Trump’s 'big beautiful bill' and how it further guts the social safety net and gives trillions of more dollars to the richest individuals and corporations."

DeVega continues, "It is critically important to emphasize how Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans' gutting of the social safety net, and further immiseration of the middle class and working poor to give even more money to the kleptocrats and plutocrats, is not separate and apart from the country's rapid collapse into authoritarianism. These destructive forces gut and weaken democratic life. Moreover, such forces may bring a people closer to the authoritarian leader in an attempt to win favor as a protected group. Learned helplessness becomes a survival mode."

According to DeVega, one need only take a close look at GOP-controlled states to see how much economic pain Trump's "big, beautiful bill" will inflict if it passes in the U.S. Senate and reaches Trump's White House desk for signature. Citing research from health experts at Yale University in Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, DeVega warns that cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare "will kill at least 51,000 Americans a year."

"Decades of social science research have repeatedly shown that right-wing and 'conservative' policies across a range of issues cause harm to the American people," DeVega warns. "To that point, Republican-controlled parts of the country are a type of laboratory for what happens when these policies are applied without sufficient pushback: People who live in Red State America live shorter lives, have less economic mobility, wealth, and income, are less educated, have higher rates of preventable diseases, more suicides, higher rates of addiction, experience higher rates of murder and in total enjoy a worse quality of life…. When enacted, Trump’s 'big beautiful bill' will take the harmful policies that have been inflicted on Americans who live in Republican-controlled parts of the country and make them national."

Reporters, DeVega laments, should have spent more time focusing on the harmful effects of Trump's policies than the "professional wrestling-like feud" of Trump and Musk.

"Once again, the American people and their news media and other leaders and gatekeepers are, in the words of media scholar Neil Postman, 'amusing themselves' and their democracy to death," DeVega argues. "Professional wrestling and carny culture can be great fun. Having a ringside seat for the end of American democracy and the rule of law in real-time is not."

Chauncey DeVega's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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