President Donald Trump on Sunday appeared to suggest that New Mexico should be called “New America,” posting a photo of the state with the new name days after he signed an executive order to change Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”
The strategy has been attributed to U.S. President Donald Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon.[4][5][6]
The strategy came to public light after Bannon told Michael Lewis in 2018 that “The Democrats don’t matter… The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”.[7] Trump adopted the strategy during the 2016 presidential election,[3][8] followed by other right-wing political figures such as Éric Zemmour and Elon Musk.[9][10][1][11]
That article should really reference the dead cat strategy. It’s not the same thing exactly, but it’s close. I don’t think that Bannon likely deserves credit for originating the idea.
The dead cat strategy, also known as deadcatting, is the political strategy of deliberately making a shocking announcement to divert media attention away from problems or failures in other areas.[1][2] The term is popularly associated with political strategist Lynton Crosby’s work on the successful London mayoral campaigns of Boris Johnson.
In 2013, while he was mayor of London, Boris Johnson wrote a column for The Telegraph in which he described a political manoeuvre known as “throwing a dead cat on the table”:
To understand what has happened in Europe in the last week, we must borrow from the rich and fruity vocabulary of Australian political analysis. Let us suppose you are losing an argument. The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as “throwing a dead cat on the table, mate”.
That is because there is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!”; in other words they 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.[3]
That article should really reference the dead cat strategy. It’s not the same thing exactly, but it’s close. I don’t think that Bannon likely deserves credit for originating the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
Thank you for staring this. I always kinda knew it was a distraction technique but I didn’t know there was actual context for it.