The 1997 satire Wag the Dog may be worth a repeat viewing. Starring Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman, it sees the president of the US caught in a pre-election “sex scandal” – ie making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office. To deflect media and public outrage, his aide creates a fictional war against Albania.

There is no evidence that Donald Trump preyed on underage girls. But faced with a Maga civil war over long-stalled promises to release the Epstein files, the master of distraction has shot into “look over there” overdrive. This includes a massive military build-up – including a $30 billion warship, the world’s largest – off the Venezuelan coast, with the Rambo threat of a land war. His justification that it’s all about destroying the narco-states that are ravaging Americans looks thin placed alongside his weekend pardon for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once said he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos” before getting 45 years for flooding the US with 400 tons of cocaine.

None of it makes sense, not even to Magaworld. The frantic conceal-and-distract tactics strongly........

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