I heard the term deadcatting for the first time today.1 It means employing a shocking distraction to pull peoples' eyes away from what matters. Why a dead cat? Imagine throwing one on a table at which people are engaged in a heated discussion. Their focus will be pulled to the cat instead of lingering on whatever difficulty is before them. This dead cat strategy can overlap with scapegoating and the politics of division, as when Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors' cats and dogs.2

  1. Jason Pack uses it on the Disorder podcast, late in ep. 107, March 18, 2025. ↩︎

  2. See Heather Digby Parton, “Donald Trump’s Dead Cat Strategy Puts the Pressure on JD Vance,” Salon, September 16, 2024. ↩︎