red herring

Johnson pledges his devotion to tropes like cawing ravens and thunderous rainstorms while giving his various red herrings silly nicknames like “the knife robot” and “the clangy clunk.”

The guidebook full of clues that had led him to Switzerland had been nothing but a red herring.

He did this by making an exceedingly long list that was full of red herrings.

Conservative shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately dismissed the digital ID plan as a "distraction and a red herring", saying the scheme would not have stopped the criminal network uncovered by the BBC.

Trumpian rhetoric relies on a rotating arsenal of cognitive traps: Whataboutism to deflect, false equivalence to confuse, red herrings to distract and gaslighting to exhaust.