'Failure of imagination': How a 'pitiful' resistance is letting Trump’s 'chaos' strategy prevail

10 February

Steve Bannon, "War Room" host and former White House chief strategist in the first Trump Administration, famously said that the MAGA movement's strategy is to "flood the zone with s---." The idea is to overwhelm and wear down opponents by creating chaos as often as possible.

In an article published on February 10, Salon's Chauncey DeVega argues that President Donald Trump is implementing a "strategy" of "chaos" — and it's working.

"President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms," DeVega warns. "Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since January 20, the most in a president's first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law."

DeVega continues, "It has only been three weeks since Trump returned to power; these are the good times compared to what will come next…. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement's strategy is chaos. Moreover, that chaos is in service to their shock and awe strategy to end America's pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright fascism modeled on Viktor Orbán's Hungary or Vladimir Putin's Russia with Trump as de facto leader for life."

The Salon journalist argues that the "resistance" to "American fascism's quick ascendance" is "pitiful" and shows a "profound failure of imagination." During the 2024 election, DeVega notes, Trump and his allies, "were direct, vocal, and public" in expressing their desire to create a country in which "plutocrats and kleptocrats and [w]hite Christian [n]ationalists and other [w]hite racial authoritarians are given free rein over American life."

"In many ways," DeVega laments, "the failure of imagination by the country's 'responsible' political leaders, the mainstream news media and the American public that empowered Trump and MAGA's ascendance is willful and negligent. For years, these so-called responsible voices repeatedly proclaimed that Donald Trump was done for after his first term in office after a coup attempt on January 6, twice impeached, multiple criminal and civil trials, a botched COVID response and an economy left in tatters. That did not happen."

DeVega adds, "These same 'responsible' and 'mainstream' voices also declared that there was no way that the Republican Party would nominate Trump to be its candidate in 2024, he is damaged goods with too much baggage — and the 'adults in the room' would step in and rise to the occasion. Again, this did not happen…. Donald Trump's autocracy is not a hypothetical or possibility far off in the future. It is here and now and very real. America's crisis and failure of imagination has been subsumed by a horrible reality — one that is not going away anytime soon."

Chauncy DeVega's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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