President Donald Trump's transition team and outside allies have been signaling for weeks that they were planning to "flood the zone" in the first 100 days of the new administration. Former senior adviser and activist Steve Bannon had pushed this idea during Trump's first term, telling author and journalist Michael Lewis that "the Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s**t.” He called it "shock and awe," which was described by historian Douglas Brinkley as "bizarre, rapid-fire presidential policy making."
"[E]very day there’s a new, radical initiative, and it doesn’t give journalists or the public a chance to get a grip on what just happened."
Current senior adviser Stephen Miller has refined the idea for the second term. He recently told the New York Times that he believes that "those he regards as Mr. Trump's enemies — Democrats, the media, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and portions of the federal bureaucracy — are depleted and only have so much bandwidth for outrage and opposition." Miller, the Times reports, "has told people that the goal is to overwhelm them with a blitz of activity."
Russell Vought, Project 2025 author of the first 180 days memorandum and Trump's pick for the Office of Management and Budget, has described the political opposition as “enemy fire that’s coming over the target,” while urging allies to be “fearless at the point of attack” and calling his policy proposals “battle plans.”
Bannon, for his part, has recently said that "shock and awe" is "so 2017." So now he's calling it "Rolling Thunder."
I think you're getting the picture from all these military terms. These guys are all cosplaying Clausewitz. It seems to make them feel very strong and manly.
In turn, Trump signed a huge pile of executive orders on day one but they're as substandard as MAGA legal work always is. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick writes, "We saw some shoddy, shoddy lawyering in some of these new executive orders":
And I want to note that the one promise, for at least the last six months, as I understand it, was that these Project 2025 jobs were going to be ready from Day 1. That the greatest minds in the conservative legal movement were beavering away for months to make sure that when all of this went into effect on Day 1, or Week 1, it would be bulletproof. And this is not bulletproof. Some of it looks like it was written by A.I. or by a first-grader using A.I. And I just want to flag that one of the reasons Donald Trump lost a whole lot in the first four years of Trumpism was because of crap lawyering by crap lawyers cutting corners and doing a bad job. It seems to me that would’ve been the one lesson they learned.
Maybe none of that matters if the whole point of the exercise is to "flood the zone" with you-know-what and rain down shock and awe on the American people — but I have to wonder if maybe people are on to them this time.
Rather than confusing and overwhelming everyone with their flurry of sloppy executive orders, there was one specific action Trump took on Tuesday that got everyone's attention, almost to the exclusion of everything else — his shocking pardons of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants and commutations of the handful who were convicted of sedition. On top of that, he completely went back on his promise that he would not interfere with the workings of the Department of Justice by ordering it to drop all pending Jan. 6 cases.
Everyone knew that Trump was planning to pardon some of the convicted prisoners but nobody expected this full sweep. Polling before and after the election has shown that, of all Trump's proposals, from the ridiculous to the bizarre, this one is the most unpopular. A Scripps-Ipsos poll before the election found that 68% of Americans disapproved of Trump's plan to pardon the J6 rioters. Likewise, a recent AP-NORC poll from this month showed that 60% disapproved.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance was asked about the possibility and said, "If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 ... you should be pardoned, if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned." Trump's nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said just the other day in her confirmation hearing that if she was asked to advise the president on the pardons (as is the usual process) she would take those on a case-by-case basis but added, "Let me be very clear in speaking to you, I condemn any violence on a law enforcement officer in this country."
Trump pardoned people who were convicted of literally attempting to murder police officers that day. He was asked about it yesterday and his pathetic response was that he didn't know anything about that and would "take a look at it," as if that means anything, and went on to say that murderers get away with it all the time in cities around the country:
BREAKING: In a stunning moment of incompetence, Donald Trump just completely failed to answer why he pardoned someone who used a stun gun to assault a police officer. This is insane. pic.twitter.com/VE2yZBZHOm
— Democratic Wins Media (@DemocraticWins) January 21, 2025
That officer had a heart attack from the stun and suffered a brain injury. More than 140 officers were injured that day, which was the worst single day for law enforcement since 9/11.
Trump had the chutzpah to call himself a "friend of police":
Q: “Aren’t you sending the message that assaulting officers is okay with these pardons?”
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) January 21, 2025
Trump: “No, the opposite…I am the friend of police more than any president that has ever been in this office.” pic.twitter.com/XeYaxE34eF
As it happens (in a proverbial leopards eating faces moment), the Fraternal Order of Police, which enthusiastically endorsed Trump last November, begged to differ, putting out this statement:
Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety — they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families.
It went on to say that, contrary to Trump's deplorable excuses, his pardons sent a dangerous message, potentially "emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”
But then, that may be a feature, not a bug. At the same press conference, Trump virtually invited the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to rejoin the MAGA cause, saying that "they love our country" One of the leaders whose sentence Trump commuted, Enrique Tarrio, told Alex Jones yesterday that he wants the people who prosecuted him to "feel the heat" and be put in prison.
There is no mistaking the messages Trump sent with his sweeping pardons yesterday. He told his followers that if they commit crimes, violent or otherwise, on his behalf, he has their backs. The immunity the Supreme Court gave him is therefore conferred on anyone who does his bidding. He has also told his political opponents, and any official protection they might have, that they are not safe from political violence.
He means it. Yesterday he revoked Secret Service protection from his nemesis, former national security adviser John Bolton, who has reportedly been threatened by Iranian agents:
News: BOLTON, in phone interview with me, says Secret Service called him at 11:30pm last night to say his protective detail ended today. It ended at noon. He said threat from Iran on his life and lives of other Americans continues nonetheless.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) January 21, 2025
The new Trump administration may have miscalculated the effects of its "shock and awe" strategy. Pardoning even the violent criminals who attacked police officers has broken through the fog of war; people can see exactly what they're up to. The "law and order" president is acting exactly like someone who's been convicted of multiple crimes. After all, that's what he is.
