Jane McAlevey writes in Alternet that there is method to Trump’s seeming madness. Whenever things get rough, he changes the subject.

This past week, as the media was roasting Jeff Sessions for lying to Congress under oath, Trump changed the subject by tweeting that Obama was wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower. The Sessions matter was dropped, and all the weekend talk shows were obsessed with Trump’s tweet about Obama.

Every tweet Trump bangs out has three primary purposes: 1) to lure most media and pundit discussion away from critical news Americans desperately need; 2) to embolden his base; and 3) to make ordinary people throw their hands up and say, “Just turn it off, I can’t watch it anymore,” or a key variant, “Just turn it off, who even knows who is telling the truth? They are all liars.”

People casually, dismissively or angrily refer to Trump as a pathological liar. That seems clearly to be true. But more dangerous is that he’s a strategic liar. And in the twisted calculations of his handlers, including Steve Bannon, it doesn’t matter one iota if anyone calls Trump a liar, as long as they also come to think of all media and anyone linked to the media—such as journalists, pundits, academics, experts, and think tanks—as liars too.

Trump and Bannon’s objective is to undermine experts and scientists defending successful social policy and the role of government, just as their allies successfully undercut scientists’ ability to explain climate change by relentless efforts, using highly paid fossil industry experts, to plant seeds of doubt….

As with its depressingly successful strategy of debunking climate science, the new administration’s real goal is to get everyone distracted, doubting everything, all the time, and ultimately disengaging completely because even to try to discuss serious matters with someone who doesn’t already agree with you 1,000 percent feels intimidating, or worse, futile….

Jeff Sessions is a lynchpin to the planned, systematic undermining of the right to vote, as demographic changes further threaten white supremacy. When the extreme free marketers in the corporate class team up with the cultural right-wing in war-room planning sessions, “Get the attorney general’s office 100 percent on our side” is top on their flip-chart lists. The attorney general’s office is crucial to undermine if not destroy voting rights, clean air and water, labor, civil rights, and other equally critical laws.

The attorney general also acts as the defender of the administration, and as such, will play a crucial role in protecting and defending Trump and the crooks and thieves being positioned into key agencies so they can, per Steve Bannon’s words at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “deconstruct the administrative state.” Trump and Bannon truly need Sessions, a racist, homophobic misogynist, in the position at the helm of law enforcement, as attorney general. He covers all their asses.

Crazy. Like a fox.