On Monday night in Grand Island, Nebraska, defending the price Americans are paying for his war with Iran, President Donald Trump bragged to a cheering crowd: “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” It was, he added, “a very small price to pay.” An American president describing the potential destruction of major American cities and the deaths of millions of citizens as “a very small price” to pay in a war is dangerous and callous. Unsurprisingly, political leaders and media commentators piled on in outrage.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, called him “deranged and dangerous.” Todd Gloria, the mayor of San Diego, reminded Trump that his city “is not collateral damage.” Even Jim Desmond, a Navy veteran and San Diego County supervisor, who is running for the House seat representing California’s 48th Congressional District, “vehemently” disagreed with Trump, arguing that “America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our Commander in Chief is to protect the American people and our homeland.” Cable television spent a day parsing what Trump really meant, giving him precisely what he wanted: a distraction from his declining poll numbers, rising inflation, falling employment, his inability to protect U.S. military installations in the Middle East and the United Kingdom, and the refusal of his friend, President Vladimir Putin, to explain the suspected spread of a plague virus in Russia. Having known Trump for 30 years, it is wrong and dangerous to write off his grotesque capers as delirious tantrums or creeping dementia. He has always been this way by choice.Some call this diversionary maneuver the hypnotic effect of a “shiny new object.” Mass communication scholars of the 1940s called this the Wurlitzer Effect, drawing on the power of the booming organs accompanying carnival carousels to command attention.
In our New York Times bestselling book, _Trump’s Ten Commandments_, we call this the “Wall of Sound,” after the scandalous Phil Spector’s famous attention-controlling production technique of layering so many instruments that the music fills every frequency and drowns out everything else. What most political analysts presume to be impulsive chaos is often a deliberate, calibrated churn of provocations. When a conventional leader faces a damaging story, they try to change the subject with good news.
He buries bad news under louder, more outrageous news of his own making. He is the only leader who will shoot himself in the left foot if it keeps you from looking at his right. We have watched him run this play many times before.
In January, Trump escalated his threats against Greenland, invoking an unsupported, even hallucinatory danger to U.S. national security. He put reserve units on alert, threatened an unprovoked military invasion and trade sanctions against Denmark. He renewed his taunts about making Canada the 51st state.
The European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada mobilized to curb his bluster. The military raid Trump ordered to capture and extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January was deceptively justified with a flurry of explanations. He invoked national security despite the absence of risk of foreign attacks.
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