Debate or Distraction? Donald’s Interest Group Interpretations

Yet again, last night brought a range of questions about this year’s presidential election: Is this actually a reality show? Are we all being Punk’d? Who the heck is Ken Bone? Will I vote in the next primaries? Despite the second debate evoking a plethora of moral panics from increases in gun violence to Russian hackers, one moral panic came out especially early and eagerly.

The first question from the moderators was directed to Donald Trump. Anderson Cooper asked about the recent tapes that were released in which he is documented making lewd remarks about women that describe non-consensual actions toward women:

The most obvious part of this response is Trump’s deflection from the original question to an issue he finds more pressing–ISIS. The average American is far more likely to be a victim of sexual assault than to be decapitated or drowned in a steel cage by ISIS. However, Trump’s evocation of ISIS as an urgent, moral panic can be understood as a political strategy of distraction. This strategy is also part of a larger interest-group approach to conceptualizing moral panics. According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, “the interest group model enables us to see how this raw material [fear] is mobilized and intensified” (168).Furthermore, the authors argue that interest groups (religious groups, unions, the media, etc.) play a role in creating and maintaining moral panics; thus, it is not necessarily only elites determining these panics (165).

Even though he is an economic, political, and social elite, Donald Trump is not engineering an ISIS moral panic, but he is attempting to appeal to this panic that is largely driven by interest groups. This is not to say ISIS is not a international issue deserving of attention, yet Trump is appropriating this panic for his own interests over actual morality. While ISIS certainly does immoral things, so does Donald Trump according to these tapes, but he only wants you to be concerned with one of them.