Tom Minear: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s national divorce call is a ’dead cat’ that’s starting to smell

One of Donald Trump’s acolytes is trying to shock the US by calling for a “national divorce”. We should ignore this “dead cat” on the table, Tom Minear argues.

No one throws a dead cat better than Donald Trump.

Not literally, of course. It’s a political strategy, popularly attributed to Australian political strategist Sir Lynton Crosby and perfected by the former president. Throw a dead cat on the table – some kind of outrageous announcement – and everyone will start talking about it.

Crosby’s thinking, in the telling of former British PM Boris Johnson, was that the dead cat would distract people from whatever issue “has been causing you so much grief”.

Trump mastered this in the White House. (The same cannot be said for his daughter-in-law Lara, who claimed in 2020 that dead cats were being sent postal ballots.)

But the former president’s deceased felines – hurled into the public domain with a tweet or a TV sound bite – were sometimes less strategic than Crosby envisioned. Trump seemed less interested in distracting voters than ensuring their attention stayed on him.

Donald Trump mastered the “dead cat” strategy. Picture: Getty Images

It worked, again and again and again, which leads us to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia who appears to think that the job of a politician is to make shocking statements, not for any other reason than to be at the centre of debate.

On last week’s Presidents’ Day holiday, Greene took to Twitter to call for “a national divorce”.

“We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” she said.

A couple of hours later, in case it wasn’t clear, Greene proposed that this would involve “not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union”.

In her grand vision for the United States – united being the operative but forgotten word – red Republican states would ban “all gender lies and confusing theories” in schools, force transgender people to move elsewhere, ditch renewable energy sources because “carbon is not pollution”, and stop sex toys being sold next to children’s toothbrushes.

🧵Thread:

Why the left and right should consider a national divorce, not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union.

Definition of irreconcilable differences:
inability to agree on most… https://t.co/6hko0vnHbd

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

In turn, blue Democrat states would build “government-controlled gender transition schools”, abolish their police departments, make children pledge allegiance to Black Lives Matter instead of singing the national anthem, and give dead people the right to vote.

Like clockwork, talking heads bobbed up on cable TV and columnists burst into print.

“Don’t pretend Greene’s national divorce idea makes any sense,” argued a Washington Post contributor.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene completes her divorce from reality,” an Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer declared.

A columnist in the New York Times went through the history of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to complete his take-down.

On MSNBC’s website, a blogger ripping into Greene’s “ludicrous proposal” also took aim at the media outlets “willing to platform her”, and then linked to at least five other articles and TV clips from MSNBC about the congresswoman’s tweets – all without a hint of irony.

Marjorie Taylor Greene heckles President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address this month. Picture: Getty Images

This column will not waste your time with more hot takes about Greene’s hot take, suffice to say that whatever problems exist in America – be they in education, energy, elections or law enforcement – they will not be fixed by ripping up the federal system of government.

Greene surely knows that too, or otherwise she would have to explain where she would live after a national divorce, given her state is a distinct shade of purple: Georgia also has two Democratic senators and voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

So why are we talking about this? It’s not even the first time Greene has thrown this particular dead cat – she did it in 2021 as well.

Back then, she had been booted off congressional committees for (and this is a highly abridged list) claiming Hillary Clinton murdered her political enemies, suggesting several mass shootings were “false flag” operations, questioning whether a plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, and blaming a wildfire on Jewish laser beams from space.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been touted as a potential vice presidential candidate on a ticket with Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Now, with the Republicans back in charge in the House of Representatives, Greene has become a key ally to Speaker Kevin McCarthy and jagged posts on powerful committees.

The conventional wisdom, therefore, is that greater scrutiny must accompany her new-found influence. But scrutiny does not mean simply falling into Greene’s attention-seeking trap.

US media organisations vowed after Trump was elected to learn from their failure to see it coming. Instead, they appear to have learned a different lesson: that Trump was good for business, and that his acolytes can now be similarly helpful in driving views and clicks.

Treating every harebrained thought bubble so seriously only serves to enable people like Greene. She has been in Congress for two years, she has no notable legislative accomplishments, and yet she is now being touted as a potential vice presidential candidate.

How? Because she has realised that in the US today, and especially in the Republican Party, it’s easier to make a name for yourself by creating controversies rather than resolving them.

The dead cats keep piling up – and it’s starting to smell.