President Donald Trump throws a pen into the crowd after he signed an executive order during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center in Grand Island, Nebraska, on October 5, 2026. —Kent Nishimura-AFP via Getty ImagesOn 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. Trump does the opposite. 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.The Trump distraction machineWe 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. He cited drug interdiction despite the lack of drug trafficking from Venezuela into the U.S. and his release of major drug trafficker from Honduras. He promised regime change to restore democracy, then left the same regime in place. And he pledged to increase U.S. fuel supplies and lower retail gasoline prices, a claim that glossed over the challenges of refining Venezuela’s thick, sour crude. On Jun. 22, 2025, Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer with great fanfare, deploying B-2 stealth bombers and submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles against three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. He declared that the operation had destroyed Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and eliminated the nuclear threat posed by the regime. Iran’s continued nuclear weapons capability punctured the bravado. On Feb. 28, Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, promising to topple the Iranian regime and eliminate its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—within days. Eight months later, the fighting continues on all these fronts, with no resolution in sight. Even military experts who supported the operation questioned its timing: there had been no immediate Iranian provocation, and U.S. naval assets needed for the mission were positioned in the Caribbean and the South China Sea, far from the Middle East. The timing made sense as another desperate attempt by Trump to distract from his failures at home. The racist AI video of the Obamas that Trump shared in a late-night Truth Social post in February was a calculated diversion, timed to coincide with his sagging approval ratings. He faced criticism for his bizarre bigoted humor, the sort that had ended or damaged the careers of earlier politicians, such as Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and Congressman Steve King. But Trump was delighted to have baited the weekend news shows away from his domestic policy setbacks. When that controversy faded, he pivoted again, this time to targeting revered national landmarks. He sought to rename the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, ultimately closing the building and threatening to raze it if he could not put his name on it. He followed that with by false claims of vandalism of the Lincoln Monument’s Reflecting Pool. When his effort to recast America’s 250th anniversary as his own grandiose tribute was outshined by glowing coverage of Taylor Swift’s wedding in Madison Square Garden, he attacked the wedding. He then launched another round of unprovoked legal attacks against universities, law firms, and former public officials, including former FBI director James Comey and former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. And then, Trump returned to a favorite punching bag: Canada. Meanwhile, bond markets were signaling alarm, and U.S. business leaders and American farmers were condemning his tariffs policies and foreign wars for driving up fuel and fertilizer costs and undermining access to foreign markets for American goods. The limits of burying the bad newsEach of these interventions, whether reckless, self-destructive trade barriers, massive military invasions, or offensive divisive speeches, soaks up attention. All of these interventions initially diverted media coverage as intended, even if they ultimately backfired. The provocations and the uproar they generate drown out other serious problems while the ricochet effects magnify Trump’s presence, making him seem everywhere, all the time. That is the point.Indeed, Trump has a unique, almost superhuman ability to bury bad news until supporters and detractors alike are no longer talking about issues and failures that would sink virtually any other politician. Buried under this avalanche of manufactured headlines are his approval ratings, which are the lowest of either of his either term: 32% in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. And there is an affordability crisis compounded by persistent inflation, cratering economic data, plummeting consumer confidence, and weak jobs growth. Even coverage of the war with Iran has been eclipsed by the uproar over Trump’s Los Angeles and San Diego remarks. The conflict has lasted far longer than he expected or intended, with its objectives seemingly stalled and no easy way out.Just this week, the Pentagon confirmed that all 12 B-1B bombers at RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom had been flown home. The British base had hosted American bombers striking Iran since March. The bombers left after British authorities arrested several people over a suspected plot against the base, which Britain's prime minister linked to Iran. And on Tuesday, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut revealed that the Pentagon had denied him access to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The largest U.S. base in the region, it has been struck repeatedly by Iran since the war began in February. The Pentagon also refused to brief him on the war while he was in Qatar, citing a March travel directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Murphy called it an “active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war” from Congress and the public.But the “Wall of Sound” has a structural weakness. It works only while the audience fails to connect the noise to what it is hiding. The answer to a noise machine is discipline: staying focused on facts and demanding accountability, no matter what outrageous diversions are tossed out. Sustained attention to what Trump wants buried is the antidote to his perpetual noise machine. It has become fashionable to trace Trump’s playbook to Roy Cohn, his mentor and his father’s diabolical attorney. But Trump also draws on an older American tradition, articulated by the 19th century showman P.T. Barnum: "The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived." And, “without promotion something terrible happens: nothing!” Sadly for Trump, the Canadians, the Iranians, and his fellow Americans are figuring out his maneuvers and keeping their attention on his faltering domestic policies and imploding global diplomacy. Even Barnum understood that the public can balance a three ring circus and not follow the carnival barking of the ringmaster.