Sign of unity outside 2019 Democratic debate

Are you reading or hearing about the “fireworks” or “clashes” at last night’s Democratic presidential debate aired on CNN? If so, that’s part of the problem. This year, the televised Democratic debates have shown more about the failure of the TV debate format than about the success or substance of the candidates.

First, CNN (along with the New York Times, which co-sponsored the debate) brought together the 12 qualifying candidates on one stage, on one night, instead of splitting the event into two debates with six candidates each. Right off the bat, this caused the candidates to be given inadequate time to answer most questions, and to be cut off just when getting to the substance of most of their answers.

Everyone is in a tizzy this week because Donald Trump wrote racist tweets. The story is all over every type of media, from TV news to Twitter to Facebook to news media websites, and more. However, this has to be one of the biggest non-news events of the year. Trump already has a well-known history of public racism dating back at least to the 1970s with housing discrimination, continuing through the 1980s and beyond with the Central Park Five case, and which was on full display in Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign announcement speech, where he came out of the gate attacking immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

If you’re still wondering why Trump deliberately creates distractions with shiny objects regarding immigration and race, here are a few things that Trump has been distracting us from while the whole country obsesses over his racist tweets:

Satirical image of Ivanka Trump and Vladimir Putin

Donald Trump went to the G20 international economic forum in Osaka, Japan last week, and took his daughter Ivanka along. The result was an absolute train wreck, wherein Ivanka repeatedly embarrassed herself and the United States of America, by photobombing and intruding into numerous meetings, conversations and photo ops. One especially cringeworthy moment was caught on video, as Ivanka tried to interrupt a serious conversation between leaders of France, Canada, England and the International Monetary Fund, and their reactions were priceless. Here’s the video, which was posted by the French government:

However, out of this Ivanka train wreck came one of the funniest and most devastating internet memes to come along in quite some time. Check out #unwantedIvanka hasthtag on Twitter and elsewhere, and you’ll see Ivanka Trump, like Woody Allen‘s movie character Zelig, inserting herself into all kinds of famous historical scenes. A sampling of some of the best #unwantedIvanka photo creations on Twitter can be found after the jump: