Hearts & Minds: Once again, Trump masters the art of the dead cat

Smart comms is about framing the narrative, selling the message, knowing your audience. In his inimitable fashion, Donald Trump is showing how it is done.

His opponents will say he is setting new lows, behaving as a president like never before. Trump does not care. His ability to put a torch to a situation, to inflame it so that it dominates the news agenda is uncanny. He did it with Volodymyr Zelensky while the cameras were watching, he’s done it numerous times before and since. He’s doing it again, in Los Angeles.

No sooner is he embroiled in a schism with a man who can lay claim to be the richest in the world, who was once hailed as ‘First Buddy’, an architect of a key Trump policy and the Republicans’ biggest donor, than Trump slams back. Critics dwell on the exit of Elon Musk and what it means for the presidency and MAGA, questioning if a deep crack has appeared in a hitherto formidable carapace but then attention is forced elsewhere.

To LA, where raids by ICE immigration officers are blown up into a spectacle that follows the Trumpian agenda of legal versus illegal, upright America against exploitative America, Republican to Democrat. Protest regularly occurs in major US cities as it does across the globe. When crowds gather for a sports event, when a dignitary visits, when a public service is threatened – these are flashpoints and the local police handle them.

Here, Trump raised the temperature. He sent in the troops. Cue the state governor, Gavin Newsom oaccusing him of trying to ‘manufacture a crisis’ for his own ends. Look at those three imperatives above. Trump framed the narrative, he sold his message and he knows the people he wants to reach, those who elected him, who might just be wavering at seeing Musk hit out, totally get what he is doing.

Any doubts post-Musk were canned as the focus returned to a Trump tenet of border control. He may have gone too far; it might spark something bigger and scarring. But for now, he has achieved the ‘dead cat on the table’ - we’re sitting over dinner discussing a damaging issue, when someone throws a dead cat on the table and henceforth, all we talk about is the dead cat. LA is his dead cat.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.