I confess I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the doings and sayings and tweetings and lies of the current incumbent. When I worry about that, it is for two reasons: Reason A is that if one is just calling out President Trump’s lies (let alone his self-serving and self-obsessed hijinks in other non-mendacity areas) one is overlooking a great many important things going on in the nation and the world, many of which are relatively unrelated to Trump’s antics.

Reason B derives from having spent so many of my scribbling days (and years and decades) as a hard news reporter. I still sometimes hear the voice of the old norms of the “objectivity” paradigm within which that game was circumscribed. If I write about 10 Trump lies, do I have to find something he said that was true and make a big deal about it, to fend off the inevitable criticisms of bias? Or bring up some much-less-outrageous half-truth that the no-longer-terribly-relevant Hillary Clinton once uttered?

I’ve tried not to listen to that voice (and I do note that Trump admirers in the comment thread occasionally accuse me of bias along those lines) in part because I don’t want to engage in what smarties like the late Sen. Pat Moynihan called “defining deviancy down.”

This morning, I read this excellent piece by Foreign Policy Editor David Rothkopf. It brings up another argument against excessive focus on the Trump clown car: A great many other important things are happening in the world and many of them are very, very worrisome. Some of them relate to the larger Trumpian phenomenon and some of them don’t. But they are big and have long-term, real-world and potentially world-changing consequences, whether or not they are related to the latest 10 versions of Trump-is-a-liar, Trump-is-a-boor, Trump-said-something-that-might-be-called-racist-sexist-xenophobic-ignorant-egocentric categories.

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Rothkopf, whose writing is often on the dry side, showed off his gift for sarcasm and hyperbole in this piece, which is titled “The Soul-Sucking, Attention-Eating Black Hole of the Trump Presidency,” (followed by the subhead: “While we endlessly watch for the latest blunder or scandal, America is being pulled dangerously off course.”)

Perhaps you can infer the argument from that. I promised myself I would write short today so I won’t try to summarize all the ways Rothkopf suggests that Trump is sucking our souls and eating our brains nor the things to which we should be attending other than the latest Trumpian tweet (the rise of China as a threat to U.S. global leadership figures heavily in that part). But, in an effort to get you to read the whole Rothkopfian rant, I’ll paste in his first two paragraphs, in which he manages to mention both rapper Kanye West and theologian Thomas Merton, and see if you can resist clicking through to it.

Rothkopf begins:

America is a naturally narcissistic nation. From “exceptionalism” to being the “last best hope of Earth,” we are raised to believe that life on this planet revolves around those of us who live somewhere here in “God’s country.” But even with a history of believing that we are the sun around which all other countries orbit, it has fallen to our nation’s narcissist-in-chief to take us to a level of self-obsession that makes Kanye West look like Thomas Merton. It is not just that Donald Trump is an egomaniac. Most presidents have a pathological need for approval and attention. It’s why they suffer the slings and arrows that come with seeking the country’s top office. Egomania is for Hollywood actors and House committee chairmen who think the rule of law doesn’t apply to them. Trump is a Transcendental Solipsist. It is not just that he has a strong sense of self. His view of the universe does not extend a single inch beyond the boundaries of his own interests. That is why normative concepts like truth or commonly held values or the national interest are completely alien to him. There is Trump world, and then there is oblivion.

The whole piece is here. Have a good afternoon.