I have heard the now-oft-repeated maxim of Donald Trump’s politically ruthless ally, Steve Bannon, that the surest way to consolidate power is to “flood the zone.”
Flooding the zone refers to a strategy in which one’s abhorrent behaviors happen so rapidly, and in such profusion, that the people who might be adversely effected by those abhorrent behaviors are unable to recognize the extent of the damage until it is too late. This is because they are trying to process, sequentially, the million other affronts that were promulgated simultaneously on the same day.
So today, we are going to take a breath. Not so much a Buddhist breath as a swimmer’s breath, because when the zone is flooded with the sort of roiling effluent currently gushing from the White House, we are called to don our swim fins and snorkels in order to stay afloat and see beneath the surface. Our survival depends on being able to breathe—and navigate—as we are engulfed in thoroughly contaminated waters.
Let us first try to locate, beneath the surface, the assaults on the Constitution and the rule of law that have already occurred:
Roughly 1,500 January 6 seditionists were released within 24 hours of Trump taking office, without regard to the severity of their involvement in the invasion of the Capitol, and because it is not untypical for criminals to do what criminals do best, a number of them have already been rearrested and charged with new, unrelated crimes. One of the recently released insurrectionists has already died in a separate shoot-out with police. They are neither “very fine people” nor “patriots.” They are sociopaths who have served, and will likely serve again, as Donald Trump’s personal militia.
Mr. Trump has stuffed his administration with completely unqualified individuals who don’t give a rip about what becomes of the citizens of this country. In fact, their mission is contrary to the wellbeing of average Americans: Their job is to eviscerate the agencies they have been appointed to lead, in service to their strongman. Tulsi Gabbard, for instance, has a documented history of parroting Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. She is now Trump’s director of national intelligence for precisely that reason.
The Associated Press (AP) has been banned from the White House press pool. The AP is a venerable American nonprofit news agency that has exemplified truth in reporting since 1849, and their reporting is distributed to every major newspaper in the country. They are the gold standard for journalistic integrity, which explains why they have earned 59 Pulitzer Prizes. Consider the AP a canary in the coal mine, since elimination of the free press is one of the cornerstones of autocracy.
An emergency has been declared at the southern border, even though border crossings had slowed to a virtual standstill once Joe Biden finally decided to get tough. There is no emergency, and the Trump administration has now been rounding up both documented and undocumented migrants under the guise of taking dangerous career criminals out of our communities. They are being whisked off to Guantanamo and random Panamanian detention centers whether or not they have committed crimes, while the biggest career criminal in America, Donald Trump, remains free to roam the streets of our country with impunity.
In order to facilitate his deportation blitz, Trump has actively co-opted the sleazy mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, to engage in violating the migrant sanctuary laws of that city, in exchange for the Department of Justice dropping credible criminal charges of graft, corruption, and evidence tampering, “without prejudice,” meaning that if the mayor’s cooperation in mass deportations isn’t quite fulsome enough, the charges can be restored. This is what happens when someone who is more mob boss than statesman wins a presidential election.
The Trump administration also declared a national energy emergency, even though U.S. energy production is at an all-time high. The price of gas has little to do with the supply of oil available to Americans; it has everything to do with price gouging. Under the guise of the nonsensical energy emergency, Trump will be able to gut environmental protections so that he can “drill, baby, drill.” He has already yanked us, again, out of the Paris Climate Accords, shrugging off the climate crisis that is destroying the lives of ordinary Americans.
And speaking of climate crises, Trump intends to gut the agency that comes to the rescue of his less fortunate neighbors in Florida when their homes are swept away in yet another tsunami, because as we all know, FEMA is a nefarious, weaponized tool of the Deep State, just like the EPA.
It is important to consider, here, that declaring fake emergencies is a favorite tool of dictators and tyrants. It provides cover for violating the rights of citizens. I predict that Trump will attempt to declare an electoral emergency in 2026 so that he can invoke martial law and prevent the citizens of this country from voting his enablers out of office.
Other dark objects lurking beneath the surface of the cesspool include the decimation of the Department of Education (goodbye to special education services for your disabled children) and withholding funding from school districts that choose to offer an unvarnished examination of the history of racism in America, instead of caving to the demand that they white-wash, literally, their curricula. At the same time, DEI initiatives have been deep-sixed because the phrase “All men are created equal” appears to apply only to actual men… or, more accurately, white men.
Donald Trump has insulted our biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, by levying 25 percent tariffs on goods from those countries, in addition to insulting Canadians by referring to them as the “51st state” and insulting Latinos as “drug dealers, rapists, and lunatics.” When you revile and alienate your closest neighbors, don’t be surprised when they decline to come to your defense in the event of a war.
Apart from his preposterous threats to annex Greenland, annex Canada, and claw back control of the Panama Canal, Trump has demonstrated his gratitude for the votes of the Palestinian Americans living in Dearborn, Mich., by announcing his plan to forcibly deport their brethren from Gaza so that he can build a Trump-themed seaside resort atop the rubble of their former homes.
Last weekend, there were mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control, including the firing of CDC and USDA inspectors who were responsible for tracking and responding to outbreaks of bird flu. Trump has been aided and abetted by anti-vaxxing HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who represents the greatest threat to public health since his boss dismissed the effects of COVID-19 as “just like the flu” and then promoted unmasked, super-spreader events and junk therapies that accelerated contagion and hastened the deaths of more than 1 million Americans.
Since Kennedy is an anti-science conspiracy theorist who has made it his mission to convince parents that vaccines are more harmful to their children than the diseases they prevent, the current national outbreak of measles is only the beginning of the return of preventable, potentially fatal childhood illness. It shouldn’t be long before American children can look forward to contracting polio, too.
Trump has created the nonsensical-yet-dangerous Department of Government Efficiency which, under the direction of the richest, most entitled person on the planet, is hard at work firing tens of thousands of federal employees and attempting to capture the extremely sensitive personal data of every United States citizen. The pretext for this is Trump’s stated determination to weed out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” It is therefore curious that Trump has kneecapped the Office of the Inspector General, whose soul mission is to root out actual waste, fraud, and abuse. Elon Musk and his crackerjack squad of swaggering college students are now attempting to pry open the computers at the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration in which your most confidential and personal information is stored.
But that is not all. DOGE has now destabilized the national security of the United States by firing a group of nuclear safety inspectors. All of the contact information for those employees was deleted the day they were dismissed, and now that the government is trying, frantically, to rehire them, they can’t be found. It would not surprise me if those former employees don’t want to be found, and chances are good that they have no interest in returning to work for a government so careless with its nuclear stockpile and so unappreciative of the individuals who risk their lives to protect it, and us.
Our new improved government has further destabilized national security by eliminating soft-power humanitarian programs like PEPFAR and USAID and is in the process of insulting and abandoning Ukraine and our NATO allies.
I would venture to say that the only real beneficiary of the “slash, burn, and abandon” ethos of Trump’s second term is Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin has for decades cultivated Donald Trump as a Russian asset and is cheering the systematic and voluntary degradation of American influence worldwide; the demise of the rule of law here at home; the dismantling of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA; the rapid corruption of the institutions that support and defend democracy; and the political persecutions of individuals who tried to prevent Trump from doing during his first administration exactly what he is doing in his second.
Once Trump has ceded Ukraine and the rest of Europe to Putin, make no mistake about it: We are next.
Principled public servants are standing in the breach, but they are being jettisoned at warp speed. We must now rely on the judiciary to prevent our rapid slide into oblivion, and if they fail to defend us from the tyrants, the maniacs, and the goons, America will be finished.
Looking beneath the surface at the shipwreck that used to be American exceptionalism helps us to be informed and clear-eyed about the state of our faltering democracy. Half the electorate has understood for at least 10 years the danger that Donald Trump, in league with Vladimir Putin, poses to our country. I still harbor hope that the other half of the electorate will get the memo before it is too late.
When the zone is flooded, it is not enough to tread water; we must swim for all we are worth and unite in opposition to the wholesale destruction of the American experiment.
Be relentless. We can flood the zone, too, not with toxicity but with iron resolve. We can flood the zone with calls and letters to every member of Congress, all day, every day. We can flood the zone by contributing to the American Civil Liberties Union. We can flood the zone by boycotting anything affiliated with Elon Musk and Donald Trump, including Truth Social, X, Trump-branded properties, Trump-branded products, and Tesla. We can purchase subscriptions to news organizations that fact-check their content. We can stand in the streets in opposition to the wholesale destruction of our republic.
I was heartened by the spontaneous protests that took place throughout the country on Presidents’ Day. That is exactly how good citizens flood the zone, so get out there and do it again. We don’t have to drown in this toxic pond; we can swim toward the shore with every ounce of strength within us.
