I was watching an interview on TV the other evening where respected newsman Bob Schieffer was asked about Donald Trump’s relentless creation of conflict-driven chaos and all the hand grenades Trump keeps lodging to change the national dialogue. Schieffer said something very interesting about how Trump does it and why it works.
Trump is not a reader, waves off briefings, and knows little about anything he governs because the topics tend to bore him. He watches TV, which is hardly the fountain of knowledge for any learned man or woman. Trump is an old school salesman from a generation gone by, a carnival barker, an expert at hype and 3-card monte misdirection. Given that is his style and what the nation has to deal with, how in the world does Trump keep escaping being accountable for his daily mistruths and uneducated blunders?
Paraphrasing Schieffer, “Suppose you are at a dinner party engrossed in deep discussion. Everyone is listening, everyone is contributing, everyone is engaged. Suddenly someone else comes up and tosses a dead cat in the middle of the table. What happens to the discussion?
“It changes,” he said. “Everyone immediately stops talking about what they were talking about and starts discussing the dead cat. That’s what he (Trump) does. He tosses dead cats. And he does it all the time.”
This, of course, is deflection. If you can direct your audience from an area of weakness to something unexpected, the audience stops drilling where you are vulnerable and must move on. Move and keep moving. He does this each morning with his loutish Tweets and again throughout the day. This is Trump’s modus operandi and there is nothing in his behavioral history to indicate this strategy will ever change. He preys on the historically slothlike process of American government, which shackles progress. innovation, and expediency but is how the game has long been played on Capitol Hill. If Trump outruns his pursuers like a stag in the forest being chased by a pack of basset hounds who insist on waiting for the slowest hound to catch up, he will dance through the trees and never get caught.
This “deflection by design” works for Trump because he controls access and dialogue. Depending when happens when special investigator Bob Mueller wraps up unraveling how deep the Russians were in Trump’s pockets leading up to his shocking election electoral win, Trump may or may not keep getting away with it all the way to re-election. Mueller is a wild card, because Mueller is working at his own pace, blocked from the distractions of the carnival barker, and sifting through complexities while hunting for facts. Those facts will exonerate Trump or take him down.
Regardless how things play out, the moment Mueller’s press conference arrives, a dead cat shall sail onto Trump’s dinner plate. The dialogue will change.
