Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Trump's Forever War of Diversion

The new president is fueling meaningless outrages as cover for the legitimate ones quickly piling up.

January 25, 2017 at 11:48 AM EST

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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President Donald Trump's executive activity has been frantic in the first days of his term. He has moved to keep a number of the scary promises that were easier to dismiss as unfeasible during the campaign than to accept as actual policies in the real world. But the big stories he has generated have had nothing to do with these actions.

According to data collected by BuzzSumo.com, the most widely shared CNN news story about Donald Trump since January 21 was one about Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer attacking the media for their reporting on inauguration attendance. It was shared 169,700 times on Facebook. A story on Trump's executive order to start rolling back Obamacare clocked just 71,100 shares. On The New York Times' website, the most widely shared story debunked Spicer's "alternative facts." It showed up on Facebook 170,900 times. The New York Times piece about Trump's executive order abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership got 44,600 shares.

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