MAGA Republican Steve Bannon, host of the "War Room" vodcast and former White House Chief strategist in the first Trump Administration, famously described the MAGA movement's strategy as "flood the zone with s---." The idea, according to Bannon, is to keeping opponents feeling overwhelmed by inundating them with nonsense.
"Real Time" host Bill Maher warned Democrats not to fall for it. Democrats, he stressed, need to pick their battles carefully with Trump and not "lose their s---" every time he says something offensive.
In an opinion column published on February 1, the New York Times' Ezra Klein notes that the flood-the-zone strategy is alive and well during Donald Trump's second presidency but points out that Trump and his allies could exhaust themselves in the process.
"The strategy of the Trump Administration over the last year has been to move so fast, to do so much, that the opposition could never find its footing," Klein explains. "This was Bannon's insight, and it was real: Attention is limited. The media, the opposition, the electorate — they can only focus on so much. Overwhelm their capacity for attention, and you overwhelm their capacity to think, organize and oppose. But what you are doing to the opposition, you are also doing to yourself."
A drawback of the flood-the-zone strategy, according to Klein, is that it "forces you into overreach" — and in the process, you "overwhelming yourself."
"The Trump Administration is overwhelmed — by its own violence, its own cruelty, its own lies, its own chaos," Klein argues. "There is nothing unusual about a presidency being overwhelmed by crises. What is unusual about the Trump Administration is that it has created those crises itself."
The Times columnist continues, "The Trump Administration chose to create a regime of ever-shifting tariffs; it chose to threaten to take Greenland through force or through tariffs; it chose to investigate its political enemies, leading up to its effort to intimidate Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve; it chose to alienate our closest allies, encouraging both Canada and Britain to seek closer ties with China; it chose to stage quasi-invasions of blue cities, setting the scene for the horrifying killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And that's just a partial accounting of the disasters and diminishments of the last few weeks and months."
Klein notes that although President Trump "appears to be trying to course-correct," he lacks the "discipline" to "truly change his presidency's direction."
"This administration is a reflection of who the president is and what he wants," Klein writes. "This White House is not beset by crises. This White House is the crisis."
Ezra Klein's full New York Times columnist is available at this link (subscription required).
