Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

“The real opposition is the media,” Donald Trump confidant Steve Bannon told Michael Lewis in 2018, “and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”

Somewhat vulgar, perhaps, but a reasonably accurate summation of the Trump campaigns’ and administrations’ political strategy as practice ever since:

Make enough claims and do enough stuff all at once that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of it all, let alone sort out the true from the false from the downright insane.

If everyone’s outraged, about everything, all the time, there’s no single issue or coherent set of issues for a real opposition to coalesce around, leaving Trump (and whichever lickspittles happen to bow and scrape their way into earshot this week) free to do as they like without significant constraints.

That’s been MAGA’s strategy ever since, but Bannon misspoke, probably intentionally. The media are not the real opposition. They’re just the communications channels Bannon, Trump, and friends want to confuse and abuse. Their real target is you.

By “you,” I don’t mean only those who supported a presidential candidate other than Trump, or no candidate at all. I mean “you” as in “everyone.”

If you’re at all capable of gazing across the sh*t-flooded zone, and if you boast more IQ points than the ounce count of a pint of beer or can of creamed corn, you’re aware by now that Trump’s waging a war on you, your wallet, and your rights, even if you voted for him.

He’s used pompous declarations of fake emergencies to among other things, levy the largest tax hike in more than a century and unleash a police state apparatus that doesn’t limit itself to immigrants as victims and soon won’t pretend to. Not to mention …

… well, that’s the problem, see?

I write op-eds.

The fuel for op-eds is whatever’s happening in the “news cycle” — the current events most deserving of, or at least demanding, attention.

And the news cycle has become the aforementioned “zone.”

Three times a week, I wake up knowing I need to write a column.

In normal times, there might be two or three really big stories competing for public mindshare, and maybe one that’s a little offbeat but worth bringing into the competition.

These days, I can open my news feed in the reasonable certainty of finding five court ruling against Trump, two Supreme Court rulings in Trump’s favor, five crazy things the guy said in the last 24 hours, ten human interest stories about his latest victims, and maybe yesterday’s Major League Baseball box scores.

The zone is flooded. I’m always at least knee deep in Dr. Bannon’s prescription-strength fecal matter and flinging a little of it at you doesn’t seem likely to leave you better informed than you were.

Many of MAGA’s supposed opponents say this situation is about “democracy,” but it isn’t.

It’s about reality, and about our ability to clearly discern that reality and act accordingly.

Trump is at war on that ability. Don’t let him win.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On April 4, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged another 2,000 points, the S&P 500 fell another 322 points, the Nasdaq index officially entered “bear market” territory, and global markets continued to react predictably to US president Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war insanity.

On April 4, the bodies of four US soldiers killed in a training exercise on Lithuania’s border with Belarus — part of the US government’s continued posturing in support of Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia that Trump had pledged to end “within 24 hours” of taking office  —  arrived at Dover Air Force Base.

On April 4, Israeli forces, armed with American weapons and enjoying Trump’s support and approval, killed at least 60 Palestinians, most of them civilian women and children, in Gaza.

Trump had more important things to attend to than any of those matters, though. He headed for Trump National Doral Golf Club to enjoy a golf tournament. Not just any golf tournament, mind you: A foreign import (Saudi-owned LIV) that competes with American-made golf (PGA). Naturally, he followed up his day of expensive imported recreation with an appearance at a $1 million dollar per person fundraiser for the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

As always, I strongly approve of presidents leaving the White House to partake of golf and gladhanding. A president focused on such things may be temporarily preoccupied and thus momentarily less able to wreck the American economy, get US troops and foreign civilians killed, etc.

My complaint here isn’t with Trump, really. He is what he is, and I knew he was a snake when you picked him up. It’s with Trump’s enablers, and more specifically with those enablers who’ve been getting on my last nerve lately with a particular five-word chorus heard daily across the fruited plain:

“I didn’t vote for THIS!”

Yes. You. Did.

Nearly three months into Trump’s second presidency and after three consecutive presidential campaigns, none of his supporters have any excuse for not knowing his record of keeping bad promises, breaking good promises, and hitting the links or headlining a “friendly crowd” event whenever putting on a suit and answering tough questions might get embarrassing.

At least the supporters who continue to make excuses for him — “he’s playing 6D chess and you just don’t understand,” “the DEEP STATE is making him do all the bad things he does,” etc. — can be explained:  Half of Americans possess below-median intelligence.

And those who, at any point, have finally admitted to themselves and others that they fell for a scam should be supported, commended, and consoled.

But the “I didn’t vote for THIS!” crowd? They clearly follow current affairs. They clearly know their votes enabled this craziness. Now they want absolution without first accepting responsibility for what they did.

One variant: “The choice was Trump or Harris. I just went for the lesser evil.” Nope. Every state ballot except New York’s (where you could write in) offered AT LEAST three choices … and no one forced you to vote at all.

Own your actions. Then go and sin no more.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Donald Trump’s attempts at “fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past” have a chance to succeed — by spurring the very sort of “revisionist movement” he denounces in his March 27 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Not that Trump’s “solemn and uplifting public monuments” will engender much high-mindedness among the American public, even though they will surely avoid quoting from Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. And Trump’s trumpeting of America’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing” is at odds with his 2017 inaugural address describing a country in which heretofore “there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land,” since “for too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

But the administration’s very heavy-handedness might make Americans think twice about what they think they know about their history.  On April 2, New York Times contributor David W. Blight insisted that what Trump dubs a “revisionist” approach is necessary to “maintain relevance,” and that “many Americans … actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.”

The newspaper wasn’t always so charitable to the revisionists.  In 2007, Howard Zinn responded to Walter Kirn calling his A Young People’s History of the United States less devoted to “telling the truth” than “editing and motivating” in The New York Times Book Review with a letter to the editor insisting that “there is no such thing as a single ‘objective’ truth” independent of “the viewpoint of the historian.”  This year, a contribution by Jeet Heer discerned “a proto-Trumpian politics” in Murray Rothbard viewing America’s rules as “a sham that ripped off ordinary citizens” (“Why We Got Kash Patel and a ‘Gangster Government’,” January 30).

Yet the Rothbard who Heer sees as yearning for rule by real-life equivalents of “the mobster antiheroes of the ‘Godfather’ movies” had no use for the not-so-little “Caesar in the White House” who imposed wage and price controls in his 1971 Times op-ed “The President’s Economic Betrayal,” or Nixonian Republicans who “have forgotten their free enterprise rhetoric and are willing to join in the patriotic hoopla.”

In contrast, the February 1976 issue of Rothbard’s The Libertarian Forum lauded “the Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally” since “to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals” is “a vitally important libertarian service.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Trump Makes History Again? Great…” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 4, 2025