If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, go back and listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s frontline in 2019. The opposition party is the media, and the media can only because they’re dumb and they’re lazy. They can only focus on one thing at a time. All we have to do is flood the zone every day. We hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang bang bang. These guys will never, will never be able to recover. But we got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start. It’s got a hammer. It’s got muzzle velocity. Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight there is real focus is a fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media. So if you overwhelm the media in a record setting number of executive orders, everybody pardons violence, nonviolence, including assaulting police officers, birthright citizenship. We live in unprecedented times right now. If you keep it moving from one thing to the next. So far, so good. Is this legal. If you give it too many places, it needs to look. You’ve never been deported before. You never felt all at once. All federal grants and loans will be halted. Look, there is a purge happening. Frankly, unprecedented in its nature. Guantanamo HINDI the Gulf of America. No coherent opposition can really emerge. It is hard to even think coherently. Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy a script. The flood is a point. The overwhelm is a point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. It is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants, that he is limitless. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, then it’s over. Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, people said, don’t normalize him in a second though. The task, I think, is a little bit clearer. Don’t believe him because Trump knows the power of marketing the power of belief. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. He clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV. He remade himself as a winner after the 2020 election by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office, but Trump has never wanted to be president. What he’s always wanted to be is King, and his plan this time is to first play King on TV. If we believe he is already King, if we believe he already has all that power, we will be likelier to let him govern as a King. We will then give him that power. Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers, but they are the powers of the presidency, the powers Joe Biden had, the powers Barack Obama had. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted. And so he could indeed pardon the January 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch. And so, Yes, Trump could remove protection from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook. This largely unknown former State Department official who’s under threat from Iran, who even donated time to Trump’s transition team. I would be very happy to put President Trump’s record in the Middle East against any other president. All of this. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness. This from a man who nearly died by an Assassin’s bullet months ago. As much as anything ever has been. This to me, this was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul. But it was an act that was within his official power. But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, his birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, by a Reagan appointee who told Trump’s lawyers, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind. Then a judge froze Trump’s spending freeze. He froze it even before it went into full effect. And shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the entire order, in part to avoid a court case that it seemed pretty clear they would lose. What Bannon wanted, what the Trump administration wants is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. Then the impression of Trump’s power remains, and the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him. You can see this a few ways. Is Trump playing a part. Is he making a bet or is he triggering a crisis. Those, I think, are the options, and I’m not certain that even he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser, but if you take it as a bet, a calculation, then here is a bet he’s making. Maybe this Supreme Court stalked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all this becomes legal. Now that he has asserted its legality. It’s not impossible to imagine that Beck paying off for him. So what if the bet fails. What if Trump’s aggregations of power are soundly rejected by the courts. Then comes a question of constitutional crisis. Does he just ignore the court’s ruling. To do that would be to attempt a kind of coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for that. The withdrawal of the OMB order to me suggests they don’t. Because, bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Gallop is Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent That is about 10 points beneath Joe Biden in January of 2021, both in his first and his second terms. He entered office with approval ratings below that of any other president in the modern era. And so I thought these defenses of Trump’s firings were telling. It is the belief of this White House and the White House counsel’s office that the president was within his executive authority to do that. The law says he’s supposed to. 30 days. 30 days notice. He didn’t do that. Do you think he violated the law. Well, technically yeah. Do you believe that it’s legal. By definition, it’s his administration. They work for him at the pleasure of the president. And if it’s illegal, it should be legal. So then ask yourself, why isn’t Trump trying to make it legal. There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders. When submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress, a more powerful executive could convince Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes, or to reform the Civil service to give him the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. And there’s a good reason to do that. To write these changes into legislation would make them both more durable and would allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. He would be reforming the entire system. But Republicans, at the moment, they have only a three seat edge in the house, smallest majority since the Great Depression. They have a 53 seat majority in the Senate. Trump is obviously doing nothing to reach out to Democrats if Trump tried to pass this agenda’s legislation, it would fail and that would make Trump look weak. And Trump. Trump doesn’t want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal. No, Congress is a place where you can lose. That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy. Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders. Trump is acting like a King because he is too weak to govern like a president. With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. This flurry of activity, it’s meant to suggest the existence of a plan. But the closer you look, even at this first two weeks, the less true it seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against each other in the press already. We learn that the OMB directive was drafted, reportedly without the input or oversight of key Trump officials. It didn’t go through the proper approval process. An administration official told the Washington Post. For that to be the process and product of such a sweeping signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term, it’s embarrassing. But it’s not just the spending freeze. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the deep state they believe hampered them in the first term. And a big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. We’re about 20 percent of the original size, so 80 percent left. Yes, he has longtime aides now at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email that got sent out to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent out to Twitter employees after the acquisition. A fork in the road. It’s a kind of bragging. Elon wants you. He wants everybody to know it was him. The email offered millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout, agree to resign and in theory at least can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Washington Post reported that the email blindsided many in the Trump administration, who would normally have consulted on a notice like that. It blindsided many of the people who were going to have to run these agencies that are now going to be dotted by resignations. I suspect Musk thinks of the federal workforce as this huge mass of woke and largely useless ideologues. For most federal workers, they have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of them work in health. These are nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs Department. How many of them does Musk want to lose. How many primary care doctors treating veterans. Is he hoping to take a buyout. Twitter worked terribly after Musk’s takeover ended these frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When VA health care degrades, it is a national scandal. Most of what we’re talking about here is a group text service at scale. Like how many people really need it for that. What Trump wants you to see. And all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself, that it is, in a sense, a replacement for an actual strategy, for thinking and talking things through, for consultation, for planning things out. Don’t believe them. I had a conversation a couple of months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive, and asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. And what he said was that he would worry most if Trump went slowly, if he began his term by doing things that made him more popular, that made his opposition weaker and more confused if he worked by stealth, if he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the state in the places where it was weakest, where people couldn’t really see him doing it, but Trump didn’t do any of that. Instead, muzzle velocity. And so the opposition to Trump, which seems so listless and absent after the election, now it’s beginning to rouse itself. There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads. This non buyout really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell, but now I’m fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible. As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times. And civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment. In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a state Senate seat in a district that Trump had won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support here. He’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition. He’s finally uniting it. This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and that Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting. You have to keep moving. You have to keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear to keep the media and the opposition overwhelmed. But then you overwhelm yourself. They are flooding their own zone. I don’t know that Trump sees his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he’s a power. He is claiming that would be a mistake on his part. It would be a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he convinces the rest of us to believe he has power. He does not have. The first two weeks of his presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off balance. He is trying to convince you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.
