It's Not a Distraction. It's a Strategy.

A guest post from Congressman Maxwell Frost

by Congressman Maxwell Frost (FL-10)

Since January, some politicians and pundits have been fixated on calling every outrageous thing Trump does as a “distraction.”

When they call something a “distraction,” they are implying that we shouldn't pay attention to it—that we should pay attention to that other thing instead.

Right now, some folks want us to believe that there's really two different things going on. But these aren’t two separate stories. It’s all part of the same story.

On one side, we saw Republicans pass their Big Ugly Law—the largest transfer of wealth from the working class to billionaires in history. They’re gutting Medicaid, slashing nutritional assistance, and leaving families drowning under rising cost of living.

On the other side, we see the federal government occupying our cities, masked ICE agents terrorizing our communities and kidnapping people and deporting families, and Republicans redrawing Congressional districts across the country and attacking our right to vote.

These aren’t two different things. It’s the same damn thing.

Because the only way they can pass something like the Big Ugly Law and feel like they won't see any political repercussions is by doing things like deploying the military to our streets, scaring people with ICE, and trying to redraw maps to favor Republicans in every red state.

These aren't acts intended to distract from each other. These are acts that are meant to enable each other.

It’s all part of one story, a story that a lot of us are familiar with: the billionaires getting richer and working people getting poorer.

Let me give you an example:

The first time I went to the Everglades “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility in Florida, I saw two private planes on the tarmac. I asked “who do those private planes belong to?” They didn’t look like official government planes to me.

The answer I got? “Oh, they're executives from two of the biggest corporations that are running the place.”

This one facility—part of the national campaign of intimidation and fear against immigrant communities—is also a source of $450 million of Florida taxpayer money going to billionaires and mega corporations. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It's the same story that we’ve seen for decades. Corrupt politicians and billionaires taking resources away from working people so they can grow even richer. Our democracy being stripped away all so they can keep getting away with it with no accountability.

But we can fight back—and we can beat them. It will take all of us finding strength in each other, organizing together, and building the kind of political power for working people that can’t be ignored.