The goal is to rile the base and distract from the fact that there is no improvement in cost of living, healthcare, education, etc... tourism is down, farmers are losing their farms en masse, etc... It was trans people yesterday, Somalians today, and it will be someone else tomorrow. If that wasn't bad enough, it's clear the president and other powerful men (of both parties) were engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring. It's all a distraction and there are enough hateful Americans for it to work for now.

It's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town.

If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.

We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.