Ezra Klein: Don't Believe Him

[LessAspin]

New York Times with an op-ed from Ezra Klein about Team Trump flooding the Zone with 💩

Don’t Believe Him

Feb. 2, 2025
By Ezra Klein

Don’t Believe Him

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.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: 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 — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the 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. 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 — no coherent opposition can 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 the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html

[Lulu KC]

1. This is nice

I'm not sure I believe Ezra Klein about not believing DT--or worse, EM. We will see. Week three begins, right? It really only has been two weeks and not the two years it's felt like?

[usonian]

2. Believe him when he says he'll do evil.

As the stock market crashes ...

But much of Wall Street had been hoping Trump’s talk of tariffs through the presidential campaign was just that, talk(AP)

He never jokes about evil deeds, you morans. You fell for his bullshit. FAFO.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219770873

But overall, yes, the flood of shit is there to blitzkrieg everyone and cover his kleptocracy.

Fascist playbook.
By the number and by the letter.

And they ate up his lies.

[Paladin]

3. The NY Times is LATE with this. As usual.

After-the-fact critiques like this don't come close to making up for the easy ride they gave trump during the campaign---while nit-picking everything Kamala Harris did to pieces. No forgetting and no forgiving, NYT and the rest of the mainstream media.