alt Hacker NewsPeople is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.
put another way, they don't care about history because every economic actor in the economy is trying to keep them distracted -- so that they don't learn the history
the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry