The current furor over Trump's comments about the NFL is leading to some much needed discussion about race issues on mainstream venues -- which is important.
But...
While Trump stirs up another high profile culture conflict that sucks-up all the media oxygen:
- Trump's administration has done little to diffuse the potentially devastating conflict with North Korea.
- Trump is threatening to tear-up the Iran nuclear deal, despite no reason to do so, the consequences of which would be to potentially create another North Korea situation and, moreover, would massively alienate the other partners in the deal and make future deals much harder to negotiate.
- Puerto Rico has not been granted the disaster relief it needs; meanwhile, Trump has been silent on the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Maria on the territory.
- The environmental disasters caused by Hurricane Irma on Houston, and the warnings of scientists that climate change would led to this, has been effaced from public view.
- The Trump administration has revised and extended its travel ban.
- The massively destructive GOP Obamacare repeal effort is no longer making headlines, and although repeal seems doomed, the repeal effort is not going away, and there are other health programs serving millions are under threat.
- The news that Jared Krushner and other Trump admin officials have been using their own private email accounts to conduct government business has barely registered in public consciousness -- one can only imagine how Hillary Clinton feels about that.
- The massive graft and personal enrichment of the administration continues.
- Facebook is finally being forced to admit its platform actually did have a pernicious impact on the spread of actual fake news in the 2016 election.
- and, then there still is the ongoing revelations of the Russia investigation.
I haven't seen the analytics yet, but I'm willing to bet the NFL/anthem tweets and subsequent story dominates almost mainstream media at the moment. Dangerously, Trump may not know much about anything, but he is very effective at disguising that fact and distracting everyone from pressing issues at any given time.
