Former President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to seize the national narrative backfired this week, as reports revealed that the chaos surrounding his policy shifts isn’t accidental at all. It’s actually the strategy.
Trump and his allies are deliberately flooding the public with nonstop statements, reversals, and inflammatory claims in order to overwhelm Americans and make it harder to tell what’s real and what’s not, according to The Guardian and other reporting.
The pattern was on full display during Trump’s recent threat to send federal troops to San Francisco. First he claimed he had “unquestioned power” to deploy the National Guard into the city according to The Guardian.
Then, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, city officials threatened to sue. And just days later, Trump reversed himself entirely, according to ABC News, saying conversations with tech leaders “changed his mind.”
This wasn’t confusion or incompetence. It was the playbook.
Trump’s strategy, as laid out years ago by his former adviser Steve Bannon, is to “flood the zone” with so much noise that the media can’t keep up and voters eventually stop trying to figure out what’s true.
Bannon openly bragged about this in a PBS Frontline documentary, saying the press is “lazy” and the key to controlling the public conversation is to overwhelm journalists so completely that nothing can be properly fact-checked before the next headline hits.
And it’s working. Psychologists say this nonstop barrage of conflicting claims pushes Americans into what experts now call “media saturation overload,” leaving people unsure what to believe and more likely to distrust institutions across the board.
Once the public stops believing in objective truth itself, the door opens to authoritarian control. The tactic echoes what philosopher Hannah Arendt once described as the “totalitarian strategy” of collapsing the line between truth and fiction so the public becomes easier to manipulate.
A similar disinformation fog clouded Trump’s handling of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Instead of clearly condemning the white supremacists who marched with torches and Nazi flags, Trump insisted there were “very fine people on both sides,” creating confusion and debate over what had been obvious on its face. Newsrooms spent days arguing over what Trump “really meant,” while the white nationalist movement behind the violence largely escaped national scrutiny.
The goal was not persuasion. The goal was paralysis.
Researchers tracking Trump’s rhetoric say his messaging often uses racial coding to divide Americans—like referring to cities with large Black populations as “dirty” or questioning whether Vice President Kamala Harris is “really” Black. These tactics have long been used by white supremacist movements to launder extremist ideology into mainstream discourse.
The outcome is a country drowning in headlines and starved of clarity. And that’s the point.
The more overwhelmed the public becomes, the easier it is for those in power to redefine reality in their own favor. And with a government shutdown growing, soaring prices, and millions at risk of losing food assistance, the stakes have never been higher.
Because if Americans stop believing anything at all, whoever shouts the loudest gets to decide what’s true.
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