Jennifer Horgan: Masters of misdirection Trump and Musk are laughing at our stupidity

Marx viewed religion as an invention, a tool used to anesthetise people by promising rich rewards in heaven. In his time, religion led people to accept economic hardship, thereby blocking change or action.

Social media provides a similar emotional salve today. Just as factory owners were happy for their oppressed workers to pray between shifts, Trump and his band of misanthropes, Musk chief among them, are thrilled to hear Kamala Harris supporters laughing over memes on X. Equally, they delight in our reaction to Trump’s claims of Haitians eating cats and dogs.

Busy laughing, and feeling clever, enjoying the comical disbelief of funnymen like Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel, we pay no serious attention. We face away from the reality: that the world is confronting the re-election of a convicted felon, who cuts taxes for his rich friends, whilst demolishing basic rights for women.

As religion was in Marx’s time, social media is an opiate in ours.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance admits it. In an appearance on CNN, he confessed a desire to “create stories so that the ... media actually pays attention.” Vance created the ‘cats and dogs’ story’ to draw attention to Springfield, Ohio’s high Haitian population. We’re laughing, but somewhere in keeping the joke going, Vance’s message survives, that there are too many immigrants.

Besides being harmful to immigrants, Peter Buttigieg, US Secretary of Transportation and frequent Democratic spokesperson, sees the ‘cats and dogs’ comment for what it really is.

“The last thing [Trump] wants us to do, is to talk about his record or his agenda,” Buttigieg says. Our focus on his “crazy nonsense” suits him. He’s creating stories we talk about, to “suck up all the oxygen.” Trump knows how to play us.

It strikes me as ironic that everyone commenting on last week’s Presidential debate gloried in how easily Trump took Kamala’s ‘bait.’ All the while, Trump’s opponents are jumping up and down to react to his idiot comments, revelling in them online, in lieu of stepping back and coldly analysing his tactics, his policies, and his plans or, indeed, his ‘concepts’ of plans.

Trump is not avoiding another debate because he doesn’t want to lose again — he doesn’t care about losing on rational, reasonable grounds. 

He cares about optics. He cares about the show. He cares about keeping it colourful and shiny enough, so nobody peaks backstage long enough

It’s ironic. We are laughing at his stupidity, just as he is laughing at ours.

Trump is avoiding another debate because he doesn’t want people to know Kamala Harris, and he doesn’t want to lose his existing polling lead on economic policy. His misdirection is preserving the polls and inching him closer to office.

He is also thrilled that Harris laughed at him throughout their one debate. The world dislikes strong women willing to emasculate older men, disrupting the old-world order. Her body language, her dismissiveness, will push that sexist undecided voter towards Trump.

Trump’s hatred of women and his desire to strip them of basic rights is central to his philosophy. Yet we focus on peripheral hints of this devastating truth. We laugh at his running mate’s gaffe about ‘childless cat ladies,’ or his own weird suggestion that Taylor Swift will ‘pay’ for her endorsement of Harris. We laugh and he persists, holding his position, or gathering votes.

We laugh at Taylor’s message on X too, her signing off as a ‘childless cat lady.’ Isn’t she clever? We watch and smile, but like the Haitian nonsense, by not dissecting Trump and Vance’s misogynistic language coldly and seriously, we inoculate their message: women, especially powerful women with the ability to disrupt, are witches.

Trump is equally delighted to see the Taylor/Harris friendship bracelets. It keeps politics in the realm of entertainment. And it keeps us distracted. Baited by Trump’s performative stupidity, we imagine we’re winning. We jump every single time, not noticing ourselves tire

Similarly, whilst Musk shares blatantly misogynistic and provocative tweets, promising to ‘give’ Taylor Swift a baby, we miss that he is also gaining control of the majority of the globe’s satellites, and becoming far more powerful than many governments or states.

According to scientists in the Netherlands this week, his Starlink satellites now block their ability to peer into the universe and are increasingly interfering with radio telescopes.  It is all part of the same strategy. We laugh and share memes about his grossly sexual posturing. Hilary Clinton joins in, as does his transgender daughter, who he accuses of being infected by a ‘woke virus'. It’s perfect, because it means that nobody is looking at what he’s up to, gaining enough power to control wars, and, you know, the future of the entire planet.

Maybe I’m wronging the guy? Maybe he only wants faster internet connection? But that conversation is far less important. Genius or evil genius? Who cares? The level of power he’s amassing, either way, is a profoundly serious threat.

And Musk is busy while we’re laughing. Last week, he launched his billionaire friend Jared Isaacman up on a private space walk. The Polaris Dawn mission lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Tuesday and arrived back early Sunday. Previously, only astronauts from government space agencies had conducted spacewalks. That’s what we should worry about — the threat of one individual, riding high on his ego and his fleet of companies, potentially becoming more powerful than any elected government. We’re sleepwalking, just as he and his chosen billionaire friends are space-walking into world domination.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, we herald him for his genius, and see no alarm bells when he pretends to have only just learned a lesson most of us grasp in infancy: that jokes are different written down — the excuse he gave for commenting on the absence of assassins wanting to gun down any Democrats.

What an idiot, we joke. Genius or idiot — we’re missing the point.

Assuming the best of him, we swoon over his work on Neurolink. In isolation, the work deserves a swoon, granted. Their brain-computer interface has the potential to change the lives of people living with paralysis. Dr Matt MacDougall, the head neurosurgeon at Neurolink, shares that their current mission is to design an implant to help those with bad spinal injuries. Patients might regain their digital freedom, connecting with the world through the internet, controlling a cursor with their minds.

Dr MacDougall sums up his endeavours by saying, admirably, that his team is working to reduce human suffering. Speaking of the exact same work, owner Elon Musk employs a different tone. Neurolink is progressing towards “human/AI symbiosis,” he says, something he describes as “species-level important.” I’ve written on this theme before — particularly about distractions relating to education — but as much as I might criticise Norma Foley for her antics, I’d be stretching it to suggest she wants to control the world.

Trump and Musk do. Foley uses small-scale media announcements to distract from gross inequalities in the Irish education system. Trump and Musk, on the other hand, are masters at misdirection. They use humour, idiocy, and distraction to stupefy us all. We can’t blame the media or ministers for this one. This is all on us.

Trump and Musk are providing a new opium for the masses, for us, and we’re chuckling ourselves into oblivion.