I, too, am busy making my mind a sunless space.

An administration or official that is otherwise competent, stable and uneventful can be rocked by a single scandal. If everyone can focus on one thing, spend time researching it, and drive it to ground finding out everything about the situation, they can shine a light on it and try to make a giant political issue out of it. A mistake can be career ending if they can find or manufacture some culpability or negligence in it.

But if you just constantly make incompetent decisions, mistakes, lies, threats, scandals, military actions, crimes, etc. and never give any breathing room between them, then despite the plethora of things to scandalize, no one ever had time to run any single issue to ground and use it against you politically. It’s a high risk, high reward strategy that works, unfortunately, very well. It puts your opponents on the back foot and makes their work seem daunting, and by the time someone does put in the time with one issue to expose the details, dozens more issues have stolen the limelight.

Think about this. Years later, everyone remembers scandals under or related to the Obama and Biden administrations. Benghazi, Hunter’s Laptop, Hillary’s Emails… but despite the overwhelming number of scandals under or related to Trump, it is a lot harder to pick just one off the top of your head. The exception to that is probably the things he was actually tried for, because those got a.lot of time and focus and people understand them well, and he wasn’t in a position of power to generate a many new scandals to steal the focus away. But things that didn’t get that focus? Despite being bigger deals than any of that shit accused of Democrats, they are just blips on the radar among many. Someone might bring one up and you think, “Oh yeah! I remember that!” That’s the strategy. That’s what they are doing. Intentionally.

In the context of Andor (Star Wars series this scene is from), people stopped caring about what the Empire does because they made all of their atrocities commonplace. People grow apathetic because they just internalize it as a new normal and assume “If we couldn’t/didn’t do anything about it all those other times, why care now?”

It’s a bit like how I feel every day I come to Lemmy and see yet another news article about any 2d20 number of Palestinian civilians murdered by Israel. It’s just an everyday thing now. Hamas’s indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians on Oct 7 was met with immediate retaliation and condemnation, but when Israel performs several Oct 7-scale massacres on a regular basis, no one bats an eye. There’s no arbitrary point where you can convince people “Enough is enough, now we have to do something,” because people couldn’t or didn’t do anything all the other times and they don’t see why this instance should be any different.

“flood the zone” — Steve Bannon

Remember teapot-dome?

Subprime mortgages?

9/11?

President getting his dick sucked by his secretary?

They stood out in the narrative. They were specific things you could dig into, dissect, promise “never again” and have it feel substantial even if you didn’t mean it.

Now, name one incident from the current trump admin that isnt currently in the forefront, and one from the last trump admin.

Took a while, didn’t it? And you don’t have as deep an understanding, do you?

If theres one thing sticking out, you can grab ahood of the thing. If its just covered in spikes, they become a defense. It just becomes the texture of the thing.

Or if you’ve ever been in a fight. Try grappling a championship wrestler. Youll lose but you can get hands on. Track whats going on. Now try to get hands on enough people to surround you in a thick crowd. You cant even track that shit.