Democrats Need to Ban the Word “Distraction” From Their Lexicon

By Jacob Weindling | August 25, 2025 | 11:04am

Screenshot via CNN

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Democrats Need to Ban the Word “Distraction” From Their Lexicon

Over the weekend, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was on CNN speaking out against the Trump administration. It was a classic Jeffries performance, where every syllable he uttered was clearly focus group-tested first, but one line resonated because of how often many Democrats use it as a crutch. “We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular,” said Jeffries. The “distraction” part raised the ire of the internet, in part because calling this occupation a distraction sells occupied people out, and also because it’s such a common thing that Democrats say that it has now spawned a distraction-centric discourse unto itself.

Trump sending jack-booted thugs to harass American citizens in our major cities is not a distraction. It’s the major event unfolding across our lives right now. This is the fascist takeover of America, and it says a lot about the Democratic Party leadership in Congress that when that fact is brought up to them, the default instinct is to call an invasion a distraction and pivot to whatever braindead talking points their consultants fed them that day.

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Democrats love to call lots of things distractions. Right as MAGA was starting to unmoor itself from Trump to a degree over acting like the guiltiest man alive around Jeffrey Epstein, Nancy Pelosi said “this is a distraction,” when handed an absolute political gift on a vote in Congress to release the Epstein files. Even though she had a point that the recissions package to claw back $9 billion was the more important vote that day in Congress, the Democratic Party’s repeated insistence on calling a wide constellation of what Trump does a “distraction” nets out in the aggregate to looking like they never want to address anything Trump does head on.

“The actual communication problem Democrats have is that they are afraid of conflict and voters, correctly, think they are weenies because of it,” wrote the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie. Democrats may have polling that supposedly shows voters are amenable to the “distraction” framing, but when you apply it all the time, it loses all its meaning and just looks like you just want to run from a fight. ‘This is a distraction from kitchen table issues’ is the go-to management consultant line of thinking in the party, and it has led it into the wilderness where polling shows the vast majority of the country agrees that the Democrats are a bunch of weenies.

And the polling we know they value from professional wrong people like David Shor is just bad data science. As Will Stancil, the most online man on the left pointed out, Shor’s best and worst testing lines in this latest memo from Blue Rose Research are remarkably similar, something that should not happen if you are practicing good data science. “Donald Trump’s takeover of D.C.’s police is a stunt to distract from the pain his tariffs are causing families. Trump’s tariffs are driving up prices on groceries, cars, and everyday goods, hitting working people hardest. Instead of fixing the economy he’s hurting, he’s picking political fights to change the subject. Americans deserve lower costs, not more chaos” tests positively at a 52 percent rate. Now compare that to the worst canned line that Shor tested, with his data saying it appeals to just 12 percent of respondents.

“Democrats are taking crime seriously – funding more officers, improving investigations, and backing proven community programs. Trump isn’t making anyone safer. He’s using a federal takeover of D.C. police as a stunt to distract from skyrocketing costs caused by his tariffs and from his own connection to the Jeffrey Epstein files. Real safety comes from real solutions, not political theater.”

Frankly, if you are working in political data science and you come up with a result that suggests any Epstein connection makes voters less interested in those talking points, you are too incompetent to belong in politics. Plenty of polls like this one from Quinnipiac in July show 63 percent of voters disapprove of how Trump handled the Epstein files, while 62 percent said they were following the story “very closely” or “somewhat closely.” David Shor is bad at his job, and the natural revulsion that most Americans have to poll-tested Democratic talking points is proof.

To be clear, not all Democrats talk like focus group-tested robots, and as Thor Benson wrote for Splinter this morning, there is a growing wing of fighters across the ideological spectrum strenuously pushing back against Trump. Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are far closer to each other in this moment than either is to Hakeem Jeffries or the rest of the feckless Democratic Congressional leadership not using the full force of their power. “You need to force people to deal with these uncomfortable truths, because otherwise you’re just lying to yourselves,” said David Karpf, associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, to Splinter. “And if you’re lying to yourselves, and you’re also lying to the attentive public, then the attentive public will just turn to nihilism.”

Democrats need to stop calling everything a distraction and prove to voters that they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Sure, Trump probably saw the benefit to knocking Epstein off the front pages in his occupation of American cities he has long said he would like to do, but calling it a distraction downplays the immense severity of what is happening. This is a fascist invasion and occupation of blue state America by Donald Trump, and anyone who thinks that is a distraction is just aiding Trump in his bid to be America’s first King.