Alex Massie Alex Massie

Donald Trump throws a dead cat onto the table

Everyone knows how useful a dead cat can be, right? The Australian political strategist – and Tory campaign chief – Lynton Crosby is credited with coming up with the dead cat ploy. It has the great virtue of being as simple as it is colourful. When, Crosby says, you are in a hole or faced with the tricky task of diverting attention away from some unwanted piece of news you should throw a dead cat onto the table. Hey presto! No-one is talking about the bad news; everyone is talking about the dead cat on the table.

Donald Trump deployed the dead cat tactic yesterday. His proclamation – to call it a mere announcement fails to do it justice – that President Trump would ban muslims from entering the United States (with, it should be noted, a generous exception for muslims serving in the US military) is the biggest, deadest, feline anyone has seen in months. If it weren’t so stinking you could almost admire the man’s audacity.

But Trump needed to do something to distract attention away from the fact his campaign is in trouble. Granted it is the kind of trouble to which many of his opponents can only aspire but everything is relative and, like any balloon, Trump’s balloon cannot survive a puncture.

A new poll in Iowa revealed that Trump is losing ground to the almost-equally-improbable Ted Cruz. Before Trump deployed his dead moggy that would have been the story of the day. But Trump, a narcissist even by the standards of the people who seek the American presidency, could not put up with that. Hence the dead cat.

We have been waiting for months, it is true, for Trump to fall and there have been moments when even those of us sure that his campaign will crash eventually have had to cause to wonder if, just perhaps, the madness afflicting the American conservative movement will this time prove ineradicable.

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