As possibly the longest-standing public critics of Donald Trump’s dangerous leadership tactics, we have an important warning being missed by the outrage over his racial taunts. Some may wince over the President’s unjustifiable posting of an overtly racist AI-generated video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on Truth Social—during Black History Month, no less—as a shameful racist blunder in a late-night rage. Unconvincingly, the White House’s initial defensive spin blamed the racist post on an unnamed, unaccountable “staffer,” fiddling with Trump’s own social media account at the exact same minute Trump was also on his own account.
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Sure, the demeaning bigotry cannot be ignored, and the post was just after armed federal agents burst into a hotel room to arrest the unarmed Black journalist Don Lemon, and the National Park Service removed a slavery exhibit in Philadelphia. The pattern is stark, including the false birtherism attacks on President Obama, his references to African nations as “s-hole” countries, the new barriers on Black African visas, and false defamatory campaign allegations that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors’ pets, and it is not a coincidence that the Administration is seizing the 2020 Georgia ballots of largely Black voting precincts.
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These reflexes are not simply employing sickening subtle racial dog whistles in cynically coded language, but shouting overtly bigoted tropes at full blast. Yet this post is also emblematic of something beyond racism. It reveals an ever-larger Trumpian technique, which is the diversion of public discourse on topics where he is falling in public support, from inflation and affordability, or the public backlash against murderous secret police ICE raids, to questions over his Administration’s handling of the Epstein files, in which Trump is mentioned 38,000 times.
Rather than an inadvertent mistake, this episode epitomizes Trump’s approach to intentionally creating and layering controversy upon controversy as a continual, never-ending cycle of diversion and distraction, which is one of his favorite, recurring tactics he deploys repeatedly to great effect.
As we detail in our new book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, published by Worth Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster, this is Trump’s “Wall of Sound” technique in practice—borrowing from Phil Spector’s iconic music production technique, characterized by a large, overpowering ensemble of musicians filling the entire sonic spectrum and drowning everything else out. Trump’s Perpetual Distraction Machine is an ever-spinning engine of new headlines, intentionally outrageous statements, and sudden moves designed to overwhelm, scatter, and redirect public attention—especially when he’s intent on driving attention away from bad news.
How Trump does this, however, is different than how any other leader would approach it. Most conventional leaders would try to change the public narrative and discourse by trying to promote good news and create positive examples. Trump, on the other hand, tends to layer on more controversy and bad news on top of other bad news. Although it often appears to be an emotional, impulsive-looking delivery, it can be entirely calculated and intentional as a diversionary tactic to shift attention away from tough news cycles and wipe the slate clean on issues he doesn’t want to talk about, dodging accountability and depth.
This is the part that critics of Trump often misunderstand. For someone who says as many reckless, politically incorrect things as Trump does, seemingly stream of consciousness, it is ironic how completely intentional many of his most controversial statements and actions can be. When a damaging news cycle lingers, Trump is prone to, fully intentionally and knowingly, introducing a new, even more sensational headline of his own making, a distraction that scrambles the media’s focus and divides his critics’ energy.
Few, if any, other leaders share Trump’s inimitable approach to courting controversy intentionally. Trump is prone to knowingly picking fights that nobody else would ever choose to get into, and even sometimes fights where he incurs genuine damage. Yet, for Trump, who always looks at every situation as one to be exploited and manipulated, there is nothing quite like fighting an enemy he chose to provoke, even when he has to shoot himself in the foot to rally his base and create the urgent “us vs. them” mentality crucial to his ability to lead.
The aggregate effect of Trump’s Perpetual Distraction Machine is disorienting for his opponents, who often find it impossible to respond effectively to an overwhelming fusillade of provocations or to effectively shine a spotlight on Trump’s missteps. Moreover, with Trump staying in constant attack mode, it seems futile to try to fight him on any one issue, because he is everywhere, all the time, across all issues, and the overall effect makes him appear an even larger force than he is because of the ricochet effects.
Just consider how Trump’s racist Obama post has diverted attention at a time when his approval ratings are plummeting towards all-time lows, shifting public scrutiny away from issues ranging from ineffectual affordability promises, an increasingly unpopular and stagnating presence in Venezuela with the false premises of the restoration of democracy, and a fizzling of his grandiose Greenland claims with the unified outrage of our allies. So Trump then pivoted to failed efforts to jail perceived political enemies such as the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and special prosecutor Jack Smith or former FBI chief James Comey, his new calls for “Republicans to nationalize elections” with the seizure of repeatedly audited and certified 2020 election ballots and his loss of 64 court cases, to reports of new demands to name a massive New York/New Jersey traffic tunnel after himself or in return for dispersing its continued Congressional funding.
As repugnant as the racist Obama post was, the real story is how and why Trump gets away with what he gets away with, repeatedly and increasingly. Until Trump’s opponents understand the dangerous strategy behind his playbook, they will keep losing the narrative to the Perpetual Distraction Machine of constant, never-ending diversions and red herrings.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at the Yale School of Management. Steven Tian is the Research Director for the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Their new book, “Trump’s Ten Commandments,” is published by Worth Books/Simon & Schuster.
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