Don't Believe Him
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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. 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, not the way it's defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. 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, it becomes likelier that we'll 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 6th 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. 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. 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.
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