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“Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!”
— former British prime minister Boris Johnson quoting right-wing campaign strategist Sir Lynton Crosby
All over the planet, but especially in the United States, politicians are floating loony ideas. Are they really losing their political minds, or are they just trying to distract us from what’s really going on?
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In the last month alone, United States President Donald Trump has invaded Venezuela and apprehended its president while promising to “run” another sovereign country, posted a map on social media that showed an American flag covering both Greenland and Canada, denounced the entire concept of peace because he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and proposed a new global “Board of Peace” to replace the United Nations where select nations could join if they pay him US$1 billion and grant the U.S. executive veto power on any decisions.
What is Trump’s master plan? The frequency of his mad outbursts, the lack of any practical or political logic, and the incendiary hyperbole that accompanies his proposals do not seem to have any discernable purpose. Save for perhaps convincing people he is a leader bereft of viable, discernable purpose.
U.S. President Donald Trump (Julia Demaree Nikhinson / The Associated Press files)
And what if that is the master plan? To create so many wild and zany headlines that people forget about the issue that is tearing the MAGA-verse apart?
Trump’s failure to extinguish interest in the extent of his relationship with the late and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein has rocked Trump’s political support and loosened the iron grip that he had on the Republican Party. Trump campaigned in 2024 on a full release of all FBI files on Epstein, then tried to backtrack, then was forced to backtrack on his backtrack after Congress — supported by a small but significant number of Republicans — passed a law demanding the files.
A month after a late December deadline to release all the files, Epstein victim advocates within and without Congress are still waiting for all the files.
There is no getting away from the fact that Venezuela, Denmark and the Board of Peace have effectively pushed the Epstein files further down the line up of the daily news cycle. And that has prompted some of those advocates to engineer a mad counter-stunt to draw eyeballs back to the Epstein files.
On Sunday night just passed, a protest group called “The Secret Handshake” went to Washington D.C’s famed National Mall and installed a three-metre-high replica of a profane birthday card widely believed to have been sent by Trump to Epstein on his 50th birthday.
Although Trump has denied authoring the card, it carries his signature and a crude drawing of a naked woman. In a hand-written message, Trump wishes for Epstein that “every day be another wonderful secret.”
If Trump is using Venezuela and Denmark as a diversion, he would be following a tried-and-true political strategy labelled the “Dead Cat Strategy.”
The term is widely attributed to Australian strategist Sir Lynton Crosby who earned a reputation for successful conservative campaigns in Australia and England, and not-so-successful Tory campaigns in other countries including former Canadian prime pinister and Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s 2015 implosion.
Former U.K. prime Minister Boris Johnson, who worked with Crosby both in national elections and in two races for the London mayoralty, wrote about the Dead Cat Strategy in a 2013 column for the Daily Telegraph: “The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will … be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”
Two notes of caution about the Dead Cat Strategy. First, it’s hardly unique; long before the term entered the political lexicon, generations of political leaders have declared small wars in large part to distract their citizens and boost their population.
And second, although the Trumpian madness may be somewhat unique in its magnitude, the U.S. is hardly the only jurisdiction where political leaders are threatening to do nutty stuff.
In Canada, both Quebec and Alberta are threatening to hold referendums on possible separation from Canada, despite the fact that opinion polls show little support for the idea.
In Alberta, the wind that Premier Danielle Smith is trying to blow into the sails of the separatist movement is definitely, according to the Free Press’s own Niigaan Sinclair, a deliberate strategy to distract voters from various scandals plaguing her government.
Whether it’s Trump or Danielle Smith or some other political leader, there is still great peril in the Dead Cat Strategy.
Sometimes it’s just bluster. But sometimes, the authors of the diversion become trapped by it and have to actually follow through on their zany promises. Let’s hope that isn’t where Trump finds himself.
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