Opinion | Dont Believe Him

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.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.The sense that this is Trump’s country now.

This is his government now.It follows his will.

It does what he wants.If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops.

If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.Or so he wants you to think.In Trump’s ...