Spinning wheels

I’ve been reading the news, and like the Pope’s endafticle, there’s a lot of really emphatic articles, but I just don’t feel they are getting any traction with the rest of the media, the public or politicians.
I was trying to think what it reminded me of, and I’ve now worked it out: it’s like getting caught in the snow – and some idiot putting their foot down and the wheel spinning and spinning. Far from going faster forward, the car just gets more and more bogged down.
The general advice in such a situation is always to “ease off the accelerator” (gas) so as to regain traction.
What that means in terms of this scam, is that when the publicity and political rhetoric is so far out of kilter with the everyday experience of people, all that happens by upping the rhetoric is to cause people to be even more sceptical.