Donald Trump unleashed

Well, we are roughly a month into the Trump presidency and the character of the new White House is becoming very clear.

Although I have a track record of sounding the alarm regarding Donald J. Trump, in the New Year of 2025 I was trying to be quite balanced on a number of occasions. In one column I pondered whether we would get ‘Trump unleashed’ or ‘Trump lite’? That I even suggested the latter was a sign that I thought it might be possible: lots of aggressive noise but not the political meltdown that many (myself at times) feared. A few weeks in, I would like to amend that brave optimism on my part. It is ‘Trump unleashed.’

We are seeing what Trump supporter Steve Bannon memorably described as 'flooding the zone.' The full phrase is (readers of an easily distressed disposition may wish to briefly glance away at this point): 'Flood the zone with ****' (Steve Bannon interview with writer Michael Lewis in 2018). Now, Bannon is not the force in ‘MAGA world’ that he once was. He’s lost pole position to tech-bro Elon Musk. But he’s still active in the MAGA ecosystem and his philosophy is rampant within it. The phrase basically means to overwhelm the media and political system with masses of – usually extreme – actions, rhetoric, posts, statements, claims and assertions, in order to overwhelm anyone’s ability to keep up with it, assess it, counter it, respond to it. Well, since January 20th the ‘zone’ has certainly been ‘flooded.’