Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Mixing by Isaac Jones. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Aaron Retica. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. 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 be able to recover. But we've got to start with muzzle velocity.
So it's got to start. It's got to hammer.
What does it work?
Muzzle velocity. You've got to, when you get anything in line.
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, be it mainstream media or social media. So if you overwhelm the media...
if you give it too many places it needs to look all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next to the next, faster, faster, faster, 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 like 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 speed with which things were happening and changing. 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 Trump tells a state to stop spending money, then the money stops.
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.
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