It literally is a distraction. And your outrage at that is exactly parent poster's point.

The Republican Apparatus (and Conservatives around the world, for that matter) have discovered that they can continuously manufacture new outrage to distract from the actual policies they care about.

With the Tea Party, a couple of decades ago, they mastered weaponized wedge issues to distract. (The "War on Terror" was a manufactured war, and that strategy goes back decades.) But they have since escalated to crimes against humanity.

And it's working. I haven't seen many headlines about ICE or Epstein recently because the average American is bored of hearing about it.

Meanwhile, they are enacting policies to further concentrate wealth and power amongst the 0.1%.