Don’t be shocked or awed. The daily explosion of chaos and confusion emanating from the White House during the first month of the new Trump administration is a political strategy intended to minimize accountability by leaving the president’s critics demoralized, distracted, and disoriented, unable to figure out which battles should be fought.
“It’s a little bit like drinking from a fire hose,” Representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia told the New York Times a week after Trump took office. That’s putting it mildly. Daily reports of federal workers being summarily fired by the thousands are running side by side with tales of businessman Elon Musk and his DOGE team ransacking databases and making wild, unproven, and inaccurate claims of government fraud.
Meanwhile, the administration is openly siding with Russia against Ukraine and actively undermining the NATO alliance; trying to drum transgender warriors out of the military; preparing a purge of FBI agents who investigated the January 6 insurrection; weathering an internal mini-revolt at the Justice Department caused by its attempt to rescue Mayor Eric Adams from corruption charges; and, of course, launching a mass deportation campaign.
All along the way, we’ve seen a steady stream of cheap distractions like Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico, vowing to eliminate the penny, or pretending to take over the U.S. Postal Service. The official White House social accounts recently posted an image of Trump wearing a crown and proclaiming “Long Live the King.”
Separating what’s serious from what’s nonsense has not been easy. Congressional Democrats have their work cut out for them, and so do all of us members of the media, who are a primary target of the chaos strategy. “The Democrats don’t matter,” MAGA operative Steve Bannon told a reporter back in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” In a 2019 Frontline interview, he elaborated: “The opposition party is the media, [and] because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … And 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 be able to recover.”
Every self-respecting journalist should take Bannon’s insult as a professional challenge. Those of us working the political beat — whether in small towns, big cities, remote statehouses, or the White House — regularly encounter efforts at media misdirection cooked up by slimy, amoral operatives, shady politicians, and the bombastic businessmen who fund them. The stakes are higher this time, but the game has never changed. And political journalists, who are (mostly) neither dumb nor lazy, need to rise to the occasion.
That starts with identifying — and downplaying — sucker bait like Trump’s mid–Super Bowl announcement that he had “instructed my Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to stop producing new pennies.” It might be tempting to churn out stories about how each new penny costs 3.7 cents to produce, but there’s no need, because according to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress has the power “to coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof.” So “Trump kills the penny” is a non-story or, at best, a half-story unless it looks like Congress is preparing to take action (they aren’t).
Whenever Trump or his aides start blowing smoke, the question to ask is: What are they trying to hide? In my opinion, the most important story to focus on — the one that they want us all to ignore — is the shocking, open corruption and self-dealing by Musk and the Trump family.
A few days before his inauguration, Trump launched a crypto meme coin, $TRUMP, that has no intrinsic value but quickly soared in price. Trump’s stake, on paper, reached $58 billion for a short time before the price collapsed. That was a hint of things to come.
Trump’s conflicts of interest include his stake in Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent group of Truth Social. It’s the largest source of Trump’s wealth, and as a publicly traded company, notes the Times, “while foreigners are not allowed by law to make campaign contributions to Mr. Trump, there is no limit on their ability to buy large chunks of stock in his company, perhaps in an effort to intentionally push up the stock’s value and further enrich the Trump family.”
Musk’s opportunity for a money grab is even more obvious. His companies have been awarded or promised $21 billion in federal contracts since 2008, including more than $20 billion paid or promised by NASA to Musk’s SpaceX company and $5.6 billion promised by the Department of Defense, with a maximum future payout of $32.8 billion, according to the Independent.
Musk is set to begin probing the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has fined him and Tesla and is investigating alleged wrongdoing connected to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022. The billionaire and his operatives are also scouring data and recommending changes at the USDA and the Labor Department, which have investigated Musk’s companies.
And it was Musk who gleefully announced he had dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which regulates digital payment systems like the one Musk wants to turn X into. He has also challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board, which regulates the right to form unions and previously clashed with the billionaire over his treatment of employees.
All news reports about the Trump-Musk dismantling of our government should include phrases like “the businessman, whose companies currently hold billions of dollars in government contracts from the very agencies he is probing” or “Musk, who stands to make money by weakening the agencies that regulate his private business.” And White House claims that the self-dealing billionaire is engaged in an honest, disinterested search for waste and fraud should be challenged or ignored.
The response to Trump and Musk from every newsroom in the country should be to flood the zone with truth.
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