Trump's intentional avalanche of garbage

Just because we knew the deluge was coming...doesn't make it any less alarming to behold

One week in…and safe to say that the zone has been flooded by our new president—and yet even the expectation that it was going to happen doesn’t make it any less striking.

We knew that Trump, from the moment he was sworn in, was going to take a hefty chapter from Steve Bannon’s strategy of flooding the zone with nonsense, bogus appointments, absurd claims, and shameful orders. We knew it, but it doesn’t make it any less startling to witness it happening.

Within days of taking office, he’s carried out what effectively amounts to a blitzkrieg of extremism, using Project 2025 as his guiding light. He withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, making us the only country besides Iran, Libya, and Yemen to not appreciate the necessity of being engaged with it. He withdrew the US from the World Health Organization. Bucking the Constitution, not to mention the bedrock principle of what it means to be an American, he tried to end birthright citizenship with a scribble of one of his Sharpies. He rescinded Executive Orders issued by President Biden to lower prescription drug costs—essentially because Biden had lowered them, and Trump wants all the glory. He pardoned violent January 6 criminal insurrectionists and went so far as to welcome some of them back to the Capitol that they treated like it was an uninhabited shack worthy of demolition. He revoked the Equal Employment Opportunity Executive Order of 1965, which prohibited employment discrimination in federal hiring based on race, religion, and gender, essentially rolling back sixty years of progress on civil rights. He has ordered health agencies to stop warning Americans about bird flu and to halt publication of scientific reports. Meanwhile, egg prices are skyrocketing. Most recently, he fired eighteen qualified and distinguished Inspectors General despite it being illegal to do so without cause and without thirty days’ notice to Congress.

Which is all to say….if it feels like an insurmountable amount of garbage and unfathomable cruelty is being dumped on us, that is by design. That’s his intention. The point isn’t just the stuff—it’s also creating such an avalanche of disappointment that the opposition is left feeling disheartened, disillusioned, and discouraged. He wants us to become so numb and so accustomed to injustice that it becomes our new normal.

That’s the strategy: create a deluge, instill some delirious notion of his dominance, and normalize his abuse. But no matter how well we understand what he’s up to, the far more pressing question is: how do we respond? From the minority, there’s very little (practically speaking) that we can do. So our response has to rely on messaging. And by the way, for those who doubt whether we can still be effective messengers from the minority, I’ll gently remind you that the only reason the Affordable Care Act still exists today is because even with a Republican Majority in Congress, voters struck the fear of God into their Representatives and Senators when the prospect of taking away healthcare was on the table. In other words, even with unified control of government, Republicans still weren’t able to repeal Obamacare. Pressure works and persistence yields results, even when our party doesn’t have power.

Now, our job here is a little different, and far more difficult because, in a normal world, we would be talking ad nauseum about exiting the World Health Organization and rolling back civil rights and firing government employees and trying to end birthright citizenship. But by talking about all of it, we risk none of it breaking through.

In the interest of strategy and in not falling victim to Trump’s very obvious, very predictable, nevertheless unthinkable plans, we have to determine what resonates. Personally, I’d argue that what will come across at the highest volume among most of those persuadable Americans out there is the fact that Trump is doing all of this to the exclusion of taking any action whatsoever that would fulfill his reiterated campaign promise of lowering costs. We sat here and – for months, or maybe years – listened to Trump talk about grocery prices and rent prices and housing prices and the price of eggs. He sent his lackey, VP Vance to do a promo video about the soaring prices (which had not soared) at his local grocery store. Trump himself dared to enter a supermarket, and recorded some promo footage that strongly suggested that the man had never stepped foot in one before (remember his whole fable about the woman returning apples to the fridge when she saw the price...because we all know that apples are generally kept in the frozen foods department?)

Point being, what is he doing to take on any of those issues? How is eliminating DEI going to lower your grocery costs? How is a withdrawal from the WHO going to lower your grocery costs? How is ending birthright citizenship going to lower your grocery costs? It’s not. That poor woman will have to leave her apples in the refrigerator…because he couldn’t possibly care less about easing the way for regular Americans.

Trump swept into office in 2017 amid promises of a middle-class tax cut, and of a jobs boom, of a manufacturing renaissance, of an infrastructure upgrade, and of a healthcare plan that’s cheaper and more comprehensive than the world has ever seen. None of that happened. There weren’t even attempts. He passed a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires, and he also…well there was…oh, actually…hmm. Nope. That was it.

And honestly, are we surprised that he’s doing the exact same thing? Having promised Americans lower costs, the moment he’s actually in power he’s apparently reprioritized and decided that he’s going to kick things off by attacking national health and federal employees, while planting the seed for global domination, beginning with getting his minions to introduce a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run for a 3rd term—he’s got time for all of that scorching legislation, but couldn’t care less about lowering costs. Nothing to make groceries cheaper, rent cheaper, housing cheaper, or apples cheaper. In fact, he thought it would be fun to use tariffs, aka consumer tax, on Mexico and Canada—so that everything imported from those companies will be much, much more expensive.

Trump knows he’s not going to be able to lower costs. He’s always known it. I don’t even give him credit for ever being deluded enough to think he might be able to improve lives. That’s not his schtick. He needs to flood the zone because he needs to keep us all so distracted by the horror and the sheer abundance of his desperate lies. He needs us to melt down (for very legitimate reasons, don’t get me wrong) over the fate of WHO and birthright citizenship and the Paris Climate Agreement because that gives him cover. That means we’re ignoring the promises he made to his supporters.

So for all of you asking, what can we do, here’s a start: We can refuse to let that happen. We can keep asking about the price of eggs. We can keep noticing that the price has not dropped. We can remember—and remind those in our community prepared to hear it—that our president only keeps promises to those who are prepared to pay $1,000,000 to go toward his inaugural fund. Trump may have been able to game the media and game the left the first time around, but we’re more attuned to his strategy this time around. We know he doesn’t keep promises. We know he wants us all to see him as a strongman, and we also know that he is nothing of the kind. Look, I acknowledge that he won the popular vote. Believe me, it has taken me some time to fully accept or understand that. I still don’t. But we need to move on now. Let’s stop blaming one another and stop blaming the voters. That energy, while reasonable, is not where our focus needs to be.

Let’s shift our gaze to Donald Trump. He promised his supporters, and all Americans, quite a lot. And just so we’re all clear: he has no interest in delivering on any of those promises. He believes that unlawfully firing hard-working Inspectors General, installing his cronies in his cabinet, and frightening power-hungry lawmakers into submission will keep him from being held accountable.

But Trump forgets about the American people. We’re watching, we’re making our voices heard, and we’re not going anywhere.