'What are they trying to hide?' Analyst warns Trump and Musk's 'sucker bait' a smokescreen

Nearly every antic that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have pulled off since inauguration day has been meant to keep Americans as off-balance as possible, for as long as possible, according to a new piece by The New Yorker's Errol Louis. Louis cited some of the major distractions used to "flood the zone with s--t," as Steve Bannon likes to say, including Trump undermining NATO, wanting to annex Canada and Greenland, attacking transgender Americans, pardoning violent Jan. 6 offenders, agreeing to what has been compared to a "quid pro quo" with New York Mayor Eric Adams — that caused a "mini-revolt" at the Justice Department — renaming the Gulf of Mexico, mass firings, granting DOGE access to pretty much everything — the list goes on and on. "That starts with identifying — and downplaying — sucker bait like Trump’s mid–Super Bowl announcement that he had 'instructed my Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to stop producing new pennies.'" Louis also had advice for the media tasked with covering the day-to-day upheaval: "All news reports about the Trump-Musk dismantling of our government should include phrases like 'the businessman, whose companies currently hold billions of dollars in government contracts from the very agencies he is probing' or 'Musk, who stands to make money by weakening the agencies that regulate his private business.'"