Why Trump’s 'chaotic' strategy to 'flood the zone' will 'blow up' in his face: expert

President Donald Trump's "flood the zone" strategy — a push to do everything at once to overwhelm — "involves a lot of mopping up," writes Bloomberg's Wes Kosova.

Noting that Trump signed 205 executive orders between January 20 and September 20, Kosova notes "you’d have to go back to the 261 executive orders Franklin D. Roosevelt signed in the first eight months of his third term to find a president who was quicker with a Sharpie."

While Trump's is doing "everything everywhere all at once so Democrats in Congress, and federal judges, couldn’t possibly stay on top of the changes, let alone stop them," there also seems to be a "hitch in his plan."

That hitch, Kosova says, is that Trump has done too much, and his ever-shifting priorities are hard to keep up with.

"Trump and his lieutenants are themselves struggling to manage the torrent of tariffs, deportations, lawsuits, countersuits, hirings, firings, troop deployments and emergency declarations they’ve unleashed," he writes.

The president's "contradictory orders have resulted in an ongoing right-hand, left-hand problem within the administration, where one part of Trump’s team — or the president himself — inadvertently makes a mess that another must then clean up," Kosova says.

Although Trump at first was "delighted" by Elon Musk's slashing of government agencies via his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), after Musk "fell out of love" with Trump, "departments that DOGE stripped bare are quietly trying to refill many of those jobs," explains Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Kamarck and her colleagues, reports Bloomberg, "scoured federal job postings and matched them to positions eliminated in Musk’s purge" and found that the government is looking to backfill about 17,000 jobs.

"The firing was done in such a chaotic way,” Kamarck says, that Musk made little distinction between necessary and expendable jobs. “You can’t get the government to a point where it’s completely nonfunctional. And if you do, it will blow up in your face.”

Despite this, the White House is still conducting mass firings, and, in some cases, they're now trying to rehire those who were fired, including those who were "mistakenly laid off" at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This, Kamarck says, sends "a very odd message."

Trump's message on immigration, Kosova says, is also a mess of contradictions. "Trump campaigned on deporting 'criminals' and the 'worst of the worst,'" he writes, but "instead, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have dispatched teams of masked agents to grab workers at stores, restaurants, construction sites, factories and farms."

Trump's immigration crackdown "has diminished farmers’ pool of workers," and those farmers, Kosova says, "have stood steadfastily by the president" — for now.

The United States has become "paralyzed by indecision," says author Marc Dunkleman, "because progressive reforms meant to stop abuses of power in the last century eventually grew into a 'vetocracy,' where any number of stakeholders can delay or block decisions with endless demands for studies, hearings and consensus."