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Why is Trump "Flooding the Zone?"
Fri, 07 Feb
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Have you been dodging the news lately? Feeling a familiar sense of info fatigue creeping in? You're not alone. This week, Brittany is joined by NPR's White House reporter Danielle Kurtzleben and The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire to unpack the Trump administration's "Flood the Zone" strategy - and how listeners can stay afloat. Support public media and receive ad-free listening. Join NPR+ today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the 'Flood the Zone' strategy?
Always happy to be here. Would you rather be caught up in a tornado or a hurricane? Hurricane.
Also a hurricane.
Interesting. I choose tornado. Maybe that's just because of where I'm from, you know, the Midwest. And I would just go down into the basement and stick there as long as I can. But I think we can all agree that the past few weeks have felt almost as overwhelming as natural disaster with the amount of news there has been to cover and follow. Sometimes it feels like I am drowning in information.
Chapter 2: How does Trump's executive order strategy impact information overload?
And that feeling might be by design. Let's get into it. We are a little over two weeks into the new administration and President Trump has signed at least 45 executive orders with a stroke of his pen addressing all manner of American life and government from the military to K-12 education. And it's happening kind of rapid fire.
Before you could understand what one executive order means and how it might impact you, bam, another three decisions have been made and you are stuck between Googling what tariffs are and making sure you can still access your health care. But what if I told you that this strategy had a name that's been circling since before Trump 2.0?
Back in 2019, former chief strategist for the first Trump administration, Steve Bannon, told Frontline PBS that Trump's real opposition wasn't the Democrats, it was the media.
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. Flood the zone.
As in, hit the American people with such an overwhelming barrage of government action that we don't know where to look or what to address first. We got a taste of this strategy in the first Trump presidency, but this time it seems to be in overdrive. And let me just say, it's working on me. I am overwhelmed. But will this strategy work at getting the president's agenda accomplished?
So first, I want to know, what's the immediate effect of flooding the zone? And why does it feel so different this time? Danielle, we'll start with you.
To me, the immediate effect from the standpoint of the media is creating a massive amount of confusion and sometimes decision paralysis, I think, in newsrooms about not just what to cover, but how much to cover it. Think about, for example, what Trump just said about the U.S. taking over Gaza.
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it.
Or think about something that's maybe a little less of a volatile thing, like the idea for the U.S. to buy Greenland. Are those things seriously going to happen? It's hard to see how, but if he says something that big, you have to cover it to some degree. The big question is how much to cover it. That is very, very difficult.
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Chapter 3: Why does flooding the zone feel different in 2025?
Chapter 4: What are the immediate effects of overwhelming media content?
In part because it is just so overwhelming. Right now, he is just generating so much, and I hate to use the word content, but so much content and news, much of it very consequential, that it's hard to sift through for the media, for citizens, and for Democrats.
Yeah. I would add a bit about Democrats. I was listening in on a call from the group Indivisible earlier this week. And the kind of people who sign on to that call are highly informed, highly motivated Democratic or at the very least progressive voters. Mm hmm. And it is very clear that among the left right now, among liberals, progressives, there is that feeling of despondency.
When, first of all, they don't see Democratic leadership having an effective strategy to counter this. And also, when Trump is doing unprecedented things that no one seems quite sure how to fight, for example, Elon Musk and the Treasury payment system, that very much, like both the quality and quantity of what he's doing, has very much left Democrats going, what? we feel paralyzed.
Hmm. What you witnessed on that call, that indivisible call, kind of, it seems like it matches with what some voters are experiencing on the other end of things, feeling like there's like a lack of Democratic action or lack of action from the Democrats. I wonder, does this strategy work from a policy perspective?
Like, I know some of Trump's executive orders, like the challenge to birthright citizenship, have already been stopped in the courts. So how effective is this at actually accomplishing his agenda?
We do know that, first of all, this administration has had a lot of windup for what they want to do. I mean, first of all, he was in office way back when, 2017 to 2021. There were things he tried to do back then that he couldn't. He was unsuccessful, that the court stopped, etc., And in that interim four years where he was not president, there was that thing called Project 2025.
There were people at the Heritage Foundation and other conservative places mapping out, here's what we would like to do under a Trump or some other sort of conservative presidency project. Now, to my mind, how effective is this policy-wise? It depends on the thing that he's signed. Birthright citizenship? Yeah, that's going to get a lot of legal challenges.
There is flat out a constitutional amendment saying birthright citizenship is a thing, right? So there's going to be fighting over that. What is going to be interesting is what does play out in the courts.
Right. The Trump team knows that not everything is going to work, and they're fine with that. I was talking to Trump aides last week and over the weekend about a variety of things that they've been doing, and they all acknowledge that some of this is going to get defeated. We mentioned birthright citizenship already taking a defeat in the courts. The
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Chapter 5: How are Democrats responding to Trump's strategy?
The payment freezes already has now been blocked by two federal judges. But some things will get through. And look, he's not the first president to want to hit the ground running. President uses his first hundred days to push as much of his agenda as he can when his political capital is at its highest. But we've never quite seen something like this once. where it's just an avalanche, a fire hose.
And even if, as one of his aides told me, 25, 30, 40 percent of it, that's it, gets done. That's still going to be consequential for the nation.
One thing I really want to add to what Jonathan said is it's not just the number of the executive orders, it's how central they are. I was at Capital One Arena on the day of inauguration and there was a desk on that stage where he signed executive orders in front of a crowd of 20,000 screaming Trump fans.
The first is the rescissions of 78 Biden-era EOs and presidential memoranda. Do you want to call it out? Do you want to say it? Do you want to say it?
Oh, if you want me to, sir. Why don't you say what I'm saying?
Sure. The first item that President Trump is signing is the rescission of 78 Biden-era executive actions, executive orders, presidential memoranda, and others.
Oh, my gosh.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do Trump's policies face in the courts?
As Jonathan said, the point is to show them, look, I'm doing stuff. And he he has made that so central. Optics is everything with this guy. And that really just kind of puts an exclamation point on it.
And that's a great image, just very briefly, because it's it's not only action. It is executive action. Those those orders mean something.
Yeah.
But it's also the show. It's also the show. And that's so essential.
Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of theater in that. It reminds me, different, but it reminds me of this fast food chain in North Carolina called Biscuitville. There's like this plexiglass room or part of the kitchen where somebody is always making biscuits by hand, hand cutting these biscuits. I mean, they taste fine, but there's a little bit of theater added into the mix.
Like, it goes without saying that if you're a president, we expect that you're going to be sitting at your desk signing things. To put yourself in the middle of an arena doing it, that is a very, it's a very deliberate choice. It's definitely meant to communicate something very baldly to your constituents.
You know, among those who oppose these policies, there seems to be two major camps of thought. Camp one seems to be, you know, this is all bluster and Trump has no plan. And camp two seems to be, there is a very organized plan. perhaps a la Project 2025, and this is the execution of it. How much would you say of one or the other are we experiencing right now?
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Chapter 7: How does the administration's rapid action affect public perception?
Are we kind of in a planless moment with Trump? Or is all of this kind of going according to plan?
More than not this time around, it is a plan. Not everything. Donald Trump still takes the truth social in the middle of the night. But most of this has been in the works. I can't be overstated how this isn't their first time at this. In 2017, they were very slow in rolling out the transition. They were playing catch up.
And he was surrounded by sort of the grownups in the room who acted as guardrails, who sort of pushed him away from some of his more incendiary impulses. None of that is true this time. He has veterans in there who served him in the first term. He has staffers who have spent four years at Project 2025 and other places, other projects to get ready for this moment.
And even more than the first time around, he is a very compliant Republican Congress, House and Senate, small majorities to be sure, but they're still there. And to this point, they have shown no impetus to tell him no.
So, you know, I think it's fair to say that the zone has been flooded. And so I wonder, what can we do to stay afloat in the flood? Like, what can we as everyday people, as news consumers, as constituents, as voters, do to kind of stay afloat in this overwhelm of information?
Personally, I realize there is an inclination among many people, especially those who oppose Trump, to tune out, to just kind of hunker down in a bubble and, you know, read fantasy novels. And I get it. I do. But it is part of being in a democracy to be an informed citizen.
I do think, though, that there is at a certain point a cutoff between being usefully informed and getting addicted to outrage. And I think it's worth it for people to think about at what point are you learning about what's going on in the world so you can engage with the world? And at what point are you scrolling
blue sky Twitter Facebook whatever and just getting real mad and almost enjoying that feeling I think that those are very different things so that is one thing I think about a lot
Yeah, all of that is correct. I agree with. We're definitely seeing a lot of the nation is just fatigued, tired of this last election, tired of following the news, frankly, still burned out and dealing with the after effects of the COVID pandemic, which is a topic that needs much more exploration in the years and the years ahead. And we are seeing a lot of people simply tune out.
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