Donald Trump is in a Twitter war with Hamilton! Donald Trump is mad at SNL! Donald Trump is picking a fight with the New York Times!
Do not be distracted.
But Donald Trump called Hamilton "overrated!" How can it be overrated? It won 11 Tonys! It won a Grammy! It won the freaking Pulitzer! Look at this adorable 4-year-old rapping "The Ten Duel Commandments!" And have you seen Daveed Diggs?
Do not be distracted!
Sure, it was shocking and dramatic to watch video of Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, being booed in the Richard Rogers theater. It was even more shocking and dramatic to see—almost in real time!—a video of Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Vice-President Aaron Burr, single out Pence urgently from the stage in a plea to acknowledge the many Americans "who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights." In an address written in conjunction with the show's creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Tommy Kail, producer Jeffrey Sellers, and the cast, Davis implored Pence "to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us." ZOMGGGGG DID YOU SEE THAT????
And sure, it was also shocking and dramatic to see the president-elect of the United States tweet peevishly in complaint that Pence had been "harassed" and that Hamilton had violated the "Theater" as a "safe and special place." And though we were all buzzing about this on Friday night, and then Saturday, on Sunday morning Trump tweeted again, this time that Hamilton was "overrated" and demanding an apology, and called Dixon out for not actually memorizing the statement (he subsequently deleted that tweet, because Trump).
But. Do. Not. Be. Distracted.
Because on the same day that Mike Pence was booed at a Broadway show, President-elect Donald Trump appointed the anti-immigrant, so-racist-he-was-barred-from-being-a-judge Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and the on-the-record anti-Muslim former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his National Security Advisor. Oh and he also settled the Trump University fraud lawsuit for $25 million.
The day before, President-elect Trump had his daughter Ivanka sit in on a meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister and met with Indian business associates, both in a complete breach of presidential protocol and while Trump's plan to have his adult children both serve on his transition team and take over the family business comes under fire. Last week also saw the Washington, D.C. Trump hotel host a cocktail party for 100 foreign diplomats. And this in the wake of his appointment of a white supremacist as his closest advisor.
Now to be clear, the Hamilton fracas matters. It matters that Mike Pence, a politician whose rise to prominence—and this current role—has been in no small part due to his virulently anti-gay positions (and as Mark Joseph Stern pointed out at Slate, Broadway felt deeply the homophobia of the Reagan administration which turned a blind eye to the AIDS crisis, which decimated the theater community). It matters that a group of artists spoke truth to power. It matters that we have a clear view of just how a President Trump feels about dissent (he'd lump the Hamilton cast in with paid protestors, no doubt). It matters that Hamilton isn't just a show, but a political statement insofar as it has cast all the key historical figures portrayed in the show, save King George, with minorities and people of color. It matters that Hamilton is clearly inspired by the work of black artists and has a strong pro-immigrant message ("Immigrants - we get the job done"). It matters that Trump rejected all of that out of hand with a few churlish tweets because it is a clear window into not only how complex is the ecosystem of interlocking liberties at risk under a Trump administration, but also into just how little Trump cares, or thinks, about any of them.
So yes, the Hamilton fracas matters. But it also becomes a distraction when it becomes the only news story to dominate the cycle to the exclusion of all else. And unfortunately with Trump, there is plenty of all else. And as Laurel Raymond of ThinkProgress discovered, coverage of that "all else" declined, as evidenced by Google Trends, as interest in the Hamilton imbroglio spiked.
Part of why that happens is because the media is generally obsessed with Hamilton, true. But it's also because Trump knows how to hijack the news cycle with his tweets. And when Trump tweets, that becomes not just part of the story, but part of the lede, and even the headline (the story went quickly from "Pence booed" which focused on the substance of why Pence might be unwelcome on Broadway, to "Trump is mad at Hamilton" which put the focus on the president-elect, his temperament, and his Twitter proclivities).
Call it a "basket of distractibles"—whether whining about Hamilton, teasing "finalists" for cabinet positions, lying about the NYT losing subscribers (it actually picked up 41,000 subscribers post-election), or fantasizing about how he might have won the popular vote (fun fact: he didn't—the popular vote was won heftily by Hillary Clinton), Trump's tweets function as little news bombs that plop into the news cycle and explode into all the coverage of everything else that is going on. (And there is a lot of "everything else"—just today, Peggy Noonan called the news that Trump may have asked the Argentinian president to wave away permit issues for one of his projects a "terrible sign"...as though there has just been one terrible sign!)
This is the same trap we fell into during the campaign: Fresh headlines make the last ones fade from view, and blur into each other as Trump says or does or tweets something else outrageous and we just get used to it. Then it becomes a litany of crazy things, which take too long to itemize so it just becomes, "Trump is controversial!" and that's the talking point that is then debated, often on TV panels that are very carefully balanced to have pro-Trump speakers hewing to their talking points. And lo, that is how all of this gets normalized...even though none of this is normal.
Also being normalized: the new Donald Trump version of good-cop-bad-cop. As a follow-up to Trump's over-the-top Hamilton tweets, and the media maelstrom that followed, Mike Pence went on Fox News Sunday and said he wasn't bothered by the Hamilton criticism, no siree! "That's what freedom sounds like," he said, looking mature and professional next to Trump, or, like a "grown up" as one person in my Facebook feed noted. This, too, is a distraction—because as Trump moves the goalposts of what reasonable behavior looks like wildly off course, behavior that is merely reasonable begins to look praiseworthy. To be clear: Just because Pence is being reasonable about something that is inherently reasonable in the first place (expression of First Amendment rights) does not mean that Pence himself has suddenly become a safe harbor for people worried about Trump. Far from it.
This is what Donald Trump does: He moves the goalposts, he lowers the curve. He leaves the media on the defensive about why they should be able to follow him to dinner and makes just talking to Mitt Romney seem like a ray of hope. Meanwhile Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff projects stability and experience even while he normalizes all of the above.
This isn't a question of just one tweet. Heck, Trump spat out four just on Hamilton alone! This is about the avalanche of affronts, aggressions, abuses, and abnormalities that are the building blocks of anything and everything Donald Trump. And if we are not careful, he will continue to pit them all against each other in a zero-sum game of attention. Like he did here, because I mentioned the adorable 4-year-old rapping "Ten Duel Commandments" exactly as many times as I mentioned the $25 million Trump University settlement. For fraud, by the way. From the president-elect of the United States.
I repeated that one, just for emphasis. It's easy to get distracted.
