Trump's distraction machine is working

There was a menacing cloud hanging over Chicago as I walked down Michigan Avenue the other day. It slowly descended. At first, I thought the cloud was fog, but the air was not damp. I continued walking. I noticed people were covering their mouths and noses with their shirts or jackets. Some of them were coughing. I chose to breathe deeply. My throat was not itching. My eyes were not burning. I breathed deeply again. I wondered, is the air full of incinerated medical waste? Asbestos or some other poison that will give me cancer? Smoke from a forest fire miles away? Was HARP or some other weather control device that the conspiracy theorists have long been obsessed with malfunctioning? I laughed out loud.

I then asked myself: Given how bad things are in America right now, what is the worst that can possibly happen to me from this bad air? I quickly realized the answer: a lot. So I covered my mouth and nose like everyone else.

Eventually, my phone buzzed with a weather alert. Chicago was experiencing a historic dust storm. In the Middle East, such a storm is called a “haboob.” I walked several more blocks and looked up at Trump Tower. The dust cloud was now hovering below the huge “Trump Tower” sign. I smiled at the absurdity and power of the metaphor that is the Age of Trump and its oppressive toxicity that has confused and disoriented so many Americans.

Donald Trump is a master propagandist and agent of chaos and distraction with power and influence over a vast propaganda and disinformation machine. Trump’s ability to dominate the 24/7 media and this age of spectacle is likely unprecedented in modern (if not all of) American history. He is a defining personality and character of this era.

In a 2023 conversation, Lee McIntyre, author of the book “On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy,” explained to me: "I doubt that Trump has ever taken a course in psyops or that he reads disinformation training manuals in his spare time, but he is nonetheless a master, near-genius-level propagandist. He uses the exact same techniques of disinformation on an American audience that Putin uses on his citizens."

When Donald Trump, his MAGA Republicans and the larger antidemocracy movement encounter difficulties with their "shock and awe" campaign and blitzkrieg against American democracy and society, they amplify the power and reach of their disinformation and propaganda experience machine. The mainstream news media, the Democrats and other members of the responsible political class (and many among the general public) have been conditioned to respond almost like Pavlov’s dogs. They chase the newest outrage or spectacle and react like it is a surprise instead of focusing on the bigger picture and goals that these controversies and “shocking” events are advancing and/or hiding.

In a recent New York Times opinion essay, Ezra Klein explained how disorientation and a lack of focus are the intended outcome of Donald Trump and his agents’ “flooding the zone” strategy and tactic:

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….

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 first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true…

It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump's “big beautiful bill” is set to take trillions of dollars away from the American people and give it to the richest people and corporations. If enacted, it will be one of the largest — if not the largest — transfers of wealth in American history and further gut the social safety net. Trump's "big beautiful bill" is unpopular with the American people and would likely trigger a huge backlash — given any sustained attention.

While the GOP-controlled House passed Trump's bill, the media's attention was mostly focused on Trump's “gifted” 400-million-dollar jetliner, a literal flying palace and king’s court, from the government of Qatar. This is part of a much larger pattern of conflict of interests and corrupt power in apparent violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause and other ethics laws in which Donald Trump, his family and inner circle have leveraged the office of the presidency for personal enrichment.

Meanwhile, the United States Supreme Court has ordered a pause on Trump’s mass deportation program under the Alien Enemies Act. There have been a series of lower court rulings that have also ordered a pause or outright stop to key parts of the Trump administration’s actions and policies. A series of public opinion polls recently showed that Trump’s support at this point in his presidency among the American people has collapsed at a rate not seen in 80 years. However, new public opinion polls show that Trump’s support may have stabilized and is crawling back to his ceiling of approximately 45% to 47%. In total, Donald Trump’s policies and behavior remain widely unpopular.

Donald Trump’s historic global tariff regime has not created a new “golden age” for the United States and the American people. Leading economists and other business leaders continue to warn that the shocks from Trump’s tariffs will cause disruptions to the economy if not a recession (or worse). Last Friday, Moody’s downgraded the credit-rating of the United States from AAA (the highest level).

Donald Trump and his administration’s foreign policy –– and his brand as a “dealmaker” — continues to falter. Most notably, the war in Ukraine continues and the United States’ role as the world’s leading democracy and an indispensable nation has been greatly diminished in just the first four months of Trump’s return to power.

Trump and his agents responded by turning their firehose of distraction, falsehoods and spectacle on full blast. The water is rising very quickly.

In a recent Truth Social post, Donald Trump continued his attacks against singer Taylor Swift ("Has anyone noticed that, since I said 'I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,' she's no longer 'HOT?'"). He also turned his rage against Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono and Oprah Winfrey by accusing them of being part of a vast anti-Trump conspiracy. On Wednesday, Trump shared a video on his Truth Social platform of him hitting Bruce Springsteen with a golf ball that then causes the singer to stumble on stage.

MSNBC’s Steven Benen sorts through Trump’s conspiracy theories and warns:

To the extent that reality still has any meaning in situations like this, let’s just briefly note that there’s literally no evidence of Harris or her campaign paying anyone for endorsements; there was nothing “unlawful” or “corrupt” about the support the then-Democratic nominee received from celebrities during the 2024 campaign; Beyoncé did not face “loud booing” after she endorsed Harris; and there’s nothing “illegal” about public figures publicly backing a presidential candidate.

It’s also probably worth mentioning in passing that Trump’s hysterical online communications don’t do any favors to his “very stable genius” description of himself.

But of particular interest was the president’s interest in “a major investigation into this matter.”

All things considered, there’s no reason to get too worked up about every Trump tantrum, his rage toward celebrities who’ve dared to criticize him, his weird approach to pop culture, or his use of the word “illegal” as a synonym for “stuff I don’t like.” What I do care about, however, is the president’s willingness to use the power of the state to pursue critics in authoritarian-style fashion.

This is especially true now with the Justice Department led by an attorney general who apparently sees herself as an extension of the White House and its political agenda — which raises the prospect of a federal investigator actually initiating a probe into celebrities that Trump doesn’t like.

Trump also shared an AI-generated video of himself as a member of the rock band Journey playing their iconic song “Don’t Stop Believing” before a huge crowd of his MAGA people. In keeping with his drive for unlimited power, Trump also recently shared a series of AI-generated images of himself as the new Pope and a Sith Lord or other supremely powerful evil Jedi from George Lucas’ “Star Wars” universe.

Relatedly, former FBI director James Comey posted an image on the social media platform Instagram of the numbers “86 47” formed from seashells on a beach. Trump responded that Comey was making a coded threat against his life (“Eighty-six” is slang for “replace” or “get rid of”; Donald Trump is the 47^th president of the United States). The MAGA chorus dutifully amplified Trump’s paranoid conclusions. The Secret Service is now investigating Comey’s alleged threat against Donald Trump. Comey has responded that this is all so much nonsense, and he was just sharing an image of seashells on the beach.

In her newsletter, historian Heather Cox Richardson offered this context for Donald Trump and his forces’ coordinated distraction campaign and attempts to dominate the information space:

[R]etired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”

Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.

The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”

Richardson adds:

Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government.

Donald Trump and his forces’ ability to “flood the zone” as part of their larger propaganda and disinformation campaign is not some “unknown unknown,” a mystery, an impenetrable black box, a form of magic or a supernatural power. Information about how to effectively counter such strategies and tactics is readily available to almost anyone who wants to seek it out.

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For example, a free 2016 report from the Rand organization offers this advice:

We are not optimistic about the effectiveness of traditional counterpropaganda efforts. Certainly, some effort must be made to point out falsehoods and inconsistencies, but the same psychological evidence that shows how falsehood and inconsistency gain traction also tells us that retractions and refutations are seldom effective. Especially after a significant amount of time has passed, people will have trouble recalling which information they have received is the disinformation and which is the truth. Put simply, our first suggestion is don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.

The Rand report continues:

Our second suggestion is to find ways to help put raincoats on those at whom the firehose of falsehood is being directed.

Don't expect to counter Russia's firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed. [My emphasis added]

Another possibility is to focus on countering the effects of Russian propaganda, rather than the propaganda itself. The propagandists are working to accomplish something. The goal may be a change in attitudes, behaviors, or both. Identify those desired effects and then work to counter the effects that run contrary to your goals…

That metaphor and mindset leads us to our fourth suggestion for responding to Russian propaganda: Compete! If Russian propaganda aims to achieve certain effects, it can be countered by preventing or diminishing those effects.

In our 2023 conversation, Lee McIntyre offered this additional advice about how to resist and win an information war:

[D]isinformation has three goals. First is to try to get you to believe a falsehood. Second is to polarize you around a factual issue so that you begin to distrust, and even hate, the people who do not also believe this same falsehood. But finally comes the third and in some ways the most insidious goal of all they want you to give up. I think one message people get from disinformation is that everyone is biased, and that all speech is political. Or that things are so confusing — and there are so many voices out there who disagree — that it's just impossible to know the truth. People become confused and then cynical. They begin to feel helpless. And that is precisely the type of person that an authoritarian wants you to be.

They want you to give up. The easiest way to control a population is to control their information source. But you are not powerless. There is something you can do to fight back against disinformation. That's why I wrote the book.

But even before you read the book, I want you to know this: the most important step in winning an information war is first to admit that you are in one. [My emphasis added]

In the end, howling and complaining that “the other side is not playing fair” instead of adapting and overcoming is no real defense and a path to defeat.

Unfortunately for the American people and the future of their democracy and freedom, throughout the long Age of Trump, the Democratic Party, the so-called Resistance, the mainstream news media and other supposed defenders of democracy and "the institutions" have not learned and internalized that lesson.