Flood the zone: Trump’s shock and awe game plan to revolutionize America – and keep his enemies on the back foot

The chaos of Trump’s first 100 days is actually the result of a deliberately choreographed plan to damage any institution not explicitly aligned with the MAGA movement, writes Andrew Feinberg

Donald Trump was roughly eight hours into his second term in the White House when he sat down in the Oval Office before an eager pack of reporters, took up his familiar Sharpie-brand pen and opened the floodgates.

Prompted by White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf, Trump began signing a series of executive orders — one to end what he called “the weaponization of the federal government,” another to wipe away large chunks of his predecessor’s work by rescinding dozens of orders signed by Joe Biden, plus more orders upon more orders that re-implemented policies he’d tested out during his first term, or trying out new and aggressive theories of presidential power to accomplish long-held goals that had eluded him over his initial four years in office.

When the cameras stopped rolling after 47 minutes, Trump had put pen to paper 27 times.

He’d ordered several foreign drug cartels and criminal gangs to be designated as foreign terrorist organizations under American law, attempted to redefine the centuries-old right to citizenship for anyone born in the United States, issued sweeping freezes on federal spending, foreign aid and hiring, and unleashed Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to run rampant through the federal bureaucracy, slashing at anything deemed “woke” or “wasteful” by the billionaire and his allies.

Over the next 99 days, Trump would sign yet more orders, proclamations and memoranda to toss out anything associated with the Biden administration, eliminate the independence of federal agencies that Congress had designed to be insulated from the vagaries of presidential whims, and make revenge against his perceived political enemies official government policy – all while upending the global economy and sending America’s stock and bond markets on a roller-coaster that could crash catastrophically and bring a recession, or worse, to America as well as the world.

Since taking office again Donald Trump has signed a blizzard of executive orders (Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

According to numerous people familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations and processes, there has been a method to this madness.

The breakneck speed at which Trump has essentially ruled by decree has been part and parcel of a deliberate strategy to flood the zone with actions meant to maximize presidential power and keep Trump’s enemies — Democrats, the mainstream press, the legal services sector, the judiciary, America’s world-leading institutions of higher education and broad swaths of the federal civil service — off balance and out of kilter.

It’s the brainchild of two of the president’s longest-serving confidantes who occupy two distinct roles in Trump’s orbit: Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.

Miller, the slender immigration hawk and speechwriter who became the subject of widespread mocking in liberal circles for a bombastic 2017 television appearance in which he screamed about Trump’s power being “immense” and “not to be questioned,” has moved beyond the niche migration and communications roles in which he served during the first Trump administration.

Then, he was a senior policy adviser and head of Trump’s speechwriting team but without much in the way of formal operational authority compared with others in the Trump I orbit. Now, Miller occupies two key posts in the new-look Trump White House: Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, and Homeland Security Adviser.

Working with Vince Haley, the veteran GOP operative who now sits atop the White House Domestic Policy Council, Miller played a key role during the post-election transition in ensuring that Trump’s quiver would be stocked with dozens upon dozens of pre-drafted orders and memoranda he could sign — directives to be carried out by ideologically homogenous, politically vetted shock troops who fanned out across the executive branch in the days following the presidential inauguration.

Steven Miller occupies two key posts in the second Trump administration (Getty Images)

These documents were workshopped by what amounted to a Trump government-in-exile that was quickly stood up by the president’s allies around the same time he was waging a doomed effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden.

After Trump fomented a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and left Washington before Biden was sworn into office in January 2021, scores of suddenly unemployed Trump administration officials whose employment prospects were dampened by the revulsion felt by much of the country about what had transpired managed to find themselves well-paying sinecures at new outfits such as the America First Policy Institute, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and Miller’s own America First Legal.

And as Trump prepared to wage his ultimately successful re-election bid in 2024, these groups worked to ensure there was a ready-made playbook for a shock-and-awe opening act.

Bannon, who hasn’t formally been in Trump’s employ since he was fired from his post as White House Chief Strategist just six months into the president’s first term, has nonetheless served as intellectual and strategic godfather of what is now taking place in the government.

The former naval officer turned investment banker turned right-wing firebrand spent the Biden interregnum building an army for the once and future president — the audience of his eponymous podcast, Steve Bannon’s War Room.

And for years, he has counseled the MAGA faithful that the key to victory consists of a relatively simple approach to governance, namely to “flood the zone with s***.”

That phrase first appeared in his lexicon during an interview with journalist Michael Lewis back in 2018, in which he posited that just such a scatological deluge was the proper way to overwhelm the press, which in ordinary times functions as a key institutional guardrail against government abuse or overreach.

Steve Bannon has not been recalled to the White House but remains a powerful voice in the MAGA movement (AP)

In an interview with the PBS show Frontline the following year, Bannon elaborated on the strategy by explaining how to “flood the zone” properly means to take so many simultaneous actions that Trump’s opponents can’t keep up.

“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 be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocities,” he said.

While both Miller and Bannon both function as key ideological influencers in the current-day MAGA movement, the two men have taken very different paths to that influence.

Where Miller has been focused on the details as he’s remained a constant presence by Trump’s side during his political exile at Mar-a-Lago, Bannon never really faded from the spotlight.

The oft-unshaven populist pied piper has used his twice-daily show — which is simulcast on the right-wing Real America’s Voice network — to preach a gospel of delegitimization and revenge against pretty much any institution not explicitly aligned with the Trump-era GOP.

The aim has been retribution — and it’s been personal. Bannon, who received a last-minute pardon from Trump in 2021 related to a federal fraud case stemming from a failed effort to build a private border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, has since found himself a defendant in two criminal cases. One, a set of state charges in New York related to the border wall fraud, was resolved with a recent plea deal that will see him serve no time in custody.

The other — a criminal contempt of Congress case brought after he refused to give evidence before the House select committee charged with investigating the January 6 riot — ended with guilty verdicts against him. After exhausting his appeals, Bannon reported to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut for a four-month stay ending days before the November 2024 election.

He has since used his platform to call for wholesale purges of the Justice Department that once prosecuted him — and Trump — and for using presidential powers to exact vengeance on institutions both in and out of government that have, in his view, been captured by “the left.”

It’s his influence, along with other key Trump aides such as Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and self-styled “DOGEfather” Musk, that has led to a series of Trump decrees targeting some of America’s biggest law firms, the country’s most prestigious universities, and other entities that an administration source described to The Independent as “the infrastructure of the modern left.”

That’s where Vought and Musk have come in, according to people familiar with internal administration deliberations and strategy discussions.

When Musk and his DOGE staffers spent a weekend in February dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, it was ostensibly done in service of an Inauguration Day executive order severely limiting foreign aid and refugee programs.

The administration has claimed that the shuttering of USAID was done in the name of reorganizing how America manages foreign aid programs by relocating them under the auspices of the State Department.

But Musk’s own hyperbolic rhetoric about the former agency gives away a different game. The billionaire has called it a “criminal organization” that was rife with fraud and “needed to die.” He has cast it as part of a broad and bizarre conspiracy in which aid workers and organizations that help people in war-torn parts of the world and assist migrants do so in service of Democratic Party efforts to bring throngs of nonwhite people to the U.S. and get them hooked on government services while having them illegally vote.

It’s nonsense. But a Trumpworld source told The Independent that the shuttering of USAID, as well as other government agencies such as the Voice of America and government-aligned nonprofits like the U.S. Institute for Peace and the Wilson Center serves to undermine the Democratic Party by removing instruments of government that support anti-authoritarian movements seen by the Trump-era GOP as part of a liberal democratic order at odds with their “nationalist-populist” worldview.

So, too, are the august white shoe law firms being subjected to executive orders stripping their employees of security clearances and threatening their ability to represent clients in dealings with federal agencies — unless they agree to contribute legal aid to conservative causes. There are also the universities seeing their funding targeted unless they agree to draconian demands that fly in the face of traditional notions of academic freedom and appear to run afoul of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and free association.

Thus far, many of the “retribution” orders signed by Trump have been enjoined by the courts while legal challenges move forward. Harvard is suing the administration to stop the attacks on higher education.

Judges have ordered the government to resume Voice of America broadcasts and have pared back some of the cuts made by Musk’s DOGE and Vought’s OMB at agencies disfavored by Republicans.

But the source said the administration views these retaliatory efforts as successful because they tie up their enemies’ resources in court fights and give Trump another foil in the scores of federal judges who’ve enjoined his orders.

“Even when we lose, we win,” they said.