From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, go back and listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS's frontline in 2019.

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.

Pang, bang, bang.

These guys will never, we'll never be able to recover.

But we've got to start with muzzle velocity.

So it's got to start and it's got a hammer.

What is it word?

Muscle velocity.

When you get anything in life.

Muzzzzle velocity. Bannon's insight there is real. Focus is a 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. So 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 to the next faster, faster,

faster, no coherent opposition can really 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 a 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 speed with

which things were happening and changing, the sense that this is

Trump's country now. It is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants.

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