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Use a Wide Focus to Fight Trump: He Breaks Things [1]
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Date: 2025-04-28
Donald Trump is a master at a few things. One of them is a technique Steve Bannon described as "flood the zone" — he does so many awful things so fast that while we are busy denouncing one, he’s committed ten more. When we focus on each individual outrage, we are falling into his trap of scattering our energies rather than mustering them for the main fight.
I suggest that a better way to deal with Trump is to take a wider focus, paint a bigger picture (choose your own metaphor) and get the country to pay attention to the overall impact of his actions. One way to do this is to sum up his actions in simple terms, like this one:
Trump WANTS to break things.
Trump wants to break the law.
Trump wants to break the parts of government we depend on.
Trump wants to break our spirit.
I’m calling for the use of the KISS principle — Keep It Simple, Stupid — that James Carville used to good effect in helping Bill Clinton get elected: "It's the economy, stupid." Here it should be “Trump breaks things, stupid” or something like that.
Example: When Trump kidnaps people off the street and sends condemns them to life in a foreign hellhole, don’t try to defend the individual victim or get into the weeds of “due process”; say that he’s “throwing people into prison without giving them a chance to defend themselves — it could happen to you next!” This both keeps it simple and makes it clear that everyone is vulnerable.
When he shuts down government agencies, focus on the overall picture: He is killing off the parts of government that help people live, from weather reports to cancer research to food aid. Trump is making Americans die.
When he withholds funds that Congress mandated that he spend, tell the world that he is breaking contracts that We the People made, and doing it without our consent. Say that he is destroying trust in our country — the trust that makes America great.
Trump is also breaking the economy, though in this case I’m not so sure it’s because he wants to (unless it’s what Putin wants). He’s doing it because he doesn’t knowing what he’s doing — and yes, that is another line of attack with wide focus.
Karl Rove had a very successful political tactic of turning his opponents’ greatest asset against them. He did it with John Kerry’s Vietnam war service, for example. Yes, it was nasty, but it worked. And we have an advantage: Where Rove had to make up stories, we have the truth.
This is war, and war is never nice.
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