‘Flood the Zone’ And See What Sticks, a Trumpian Playbook Of Lies
Flood the zone is how trump’s strategy is explained.
In football, it means sending multiple receivers to the same zone to overwhelm and trick defenders. Trump is no Patrick Mahomes. He’s more like Jack Thompson, the “Throwin’ Samoan” who lasted six long years in the NFL and never won more than two games in a season.
In trump world, flood the zone means issuing non-stop directives, some important, some trivial, some true but most are a fiction from the recesses of trump’s mind. It’s also called throwing stuff against a wall and seeing if anything sticks and then exaggerating it beyond belief.
If anything is certain, it is that trump will continue to constantly blitz America with lies, contradictions and reversals, hoping to wear us all down into subservience. It won’t work because above all things, most Americans will rebound and always remember that the light always returns.
Trump explains that the basis of his decisions come from his uncanny power of common sense.
For example, without any evidence, trump said that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives under President Joe Biden led to the deadly crash over the Potomac River when an American Airlines plane collided in midair with an Army Black Hawk helicopter. How did he know? Common sense, he said.
There has been no proof whatsoever of minority hiring having anything to do with the crash. But trump has, you know, common sense.
Trump also said air traffic control systems have not been built properly, blaming Biden and President Barack Obama but curiously not naming himself for not acting during his first years in office.
“They spent a lot of money renovating a system, spending much more money than they would have spent if they bought a new system for air traffic controllers, meaning the computerized systems. There are certain companies that do a very good job. They didn’t use those companies,” trump said.
Trump rejected any suggestion that his decisions make him racist. He drew on common sense to tout his announcement of honors for Black History Month, lead with a tribute to, of all people, Tiger Woods.
“We will also never forget the achievements of American greats like Tiger Woods, who have pushed the boundaries of excellence in their respective fields, paving the way for others to follow,” trump said.
Unfortunately, trump’s comments were in complete contradiction with his earlier order that Defense Department’s intelligence agency and the Pentagon cease observances of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Pride Month and Holocaust Days of Remembrance as part of trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal workplace. Nobody can figure out trump’s common sense.
Trump traveled to the fire-ravaged areas of California and used common sense when he hinted that the fires were intentionally set by something unknown, maybe by a directed-energy weapon (DEW) that damages its target with highly focused energy without a solid projectile, including lasers, microwaves, particle beams, and sound beams.
The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Air Force Research Laboratory, U.S. Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center, and the Naval Research Laboratory are researching directed-energy weapons to counter ballistic missiles, hypersonic cruise missiles, and hypersonic glide vehicles. The systems of missile defense are expected to come online no sooner than the mid to late-2020s.
“It looks like…I don’t want to say what it looks like. You know what I am going to say. It looks like something hit it. We won’t talk about what hit it. But it is a bad situation,” trump told reporters, evidently drawing on his well of common sense.
Experts, who evidently lack the power of trumpian common sense, said the fires were not by any DEW but rather, caused by a combination of factors, including severe winds, dry vegetation and climate change. The fires were fueled by prolonged drought, an exceptionally dry winter and the powerful Santa Ana winds.
Leave it to trump’s common sense to fix it so the fires don’t repeat. While tens of thousands of people suffered when their homes burned down, Trump blamed the fires on Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s failure to provide enough water to fight the fires. In a gesture that could only be called POLITICAL, trump ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to release water from two dams in California’s Central Valley and send it downstream for fire protection.
The water was released and was sent toward low-lying land in the Central Valley but none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said. Trump’s common sense insisted that the release of water would have prevented the Los Angeles wildfires on the other side of mountain ranges over which the water has no way of traveling.
“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” trump boasted and posted on social media. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”
Trump repeatedly charged, falsely, that Newsom could solve water shortages in Southern California with the turn of a valve if California were less concerned about endangered fish species. Trump had his facts back asswords in claiming that California has access to great amounts of water from the Pacific Northwest and Canada, because there is no pipeline that flows from the state’s northern neighbors.
Water is released from dams before storms to make room for incoming flows, and when moderate precipitation is expected in the region over the next 72 hours. But water managers try to release as little water as possible to ensure there will be enough supplies for farmers and residents later in the year. They also need to ensure that communities below the dams are not overwhelmed by water.
Guided by common sense, trump also has signed an executive order moving toward designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, opening the way for possible U.S. military intervention against a sovereign state on our southern border and risking retaliation.
Using his trademark braggadocio, trump thinks that a show of force will stop the drug flow into the U.S. It’s just common sense.
Trump’s order highlighted Mexican drug cartels and other Latin American criminal groups like Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). The order says they “threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.”
How does trump know that his bluster will work while past presidents, including trump himself, have been unable to stop the violent cartels? Common sense.
He has eliminated any worries over climate change with the stroke of a pen, barring any mention of climate change on U.S. Department of Agriculture websites, much like he used a sharpie to falsely show that Hurricane Doria was on track to hit Alabama in 2019.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees were ordered to delete pages discussing climate change across agency websites and document climate change references. The directive could eliminate information across dozens of programs including climate-smart agriculture initiatives, USDA climate hubs and Forest Service information regarding wildfires, the frequency and severity of which scientists have linked to hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change.
Under former President Biden’s Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the USDA spent $3.1 billion on the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, working with private food companies, nonprofits and universities to research ways for farmers to reduce their carbon footprint, develop more resilient crops and restore land.
Nobody really likes trump so it is no surprise that he is always on the attack. But in world affairs, being on the attack can be counterproductive, negating trump’s self-famous common sense. Soft power is not in trump’s vocabulary; it’s all macho, macho, macho, attack, attack, attack.
On his first day back in office, trump signed an executive order suspending all foreign aid for 90 days, pending a review. Amounting to $68 billion in fiscal 2023, foreign aid is only about 1 percent of the federal budget.
The “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” trump said in explaining how common sense led to his decision to endanger millions of people around the planet.
U.S. aid to foreign government is valuable in fighting disease but it also demonstrates America’s good will, which translates into solidifying allies. But to trump that is so not common sense.
Trump called on his power of common sense when he ordered the website of the U.S. Agency for International Development to go offline as thousands of furloughs, layoffs and program shutdowns continued amid trump’s freeze on US-funded foreign aid and development worldwide.
Democrats say Trump has no legal authority to eliminate a congressionally funded independent agency, and that the work of USAID is vital to national security.
Trump said it’s just common sense.
Then there was trump’s short but booming outburst against that world superpower, Colombia, a nation of 52 million people, after the nation refused to accept U.S. military flights of deported migrants. Rather than negotiate with the U.S. ally, trump stomped his feet and threatened a trade war if Columbia did not treat him with more “dignity.”
Colombia blinked and allowed the flights, though the decision will be long remembered in Columbia as bullying by the U.S. In other words, it’s just common sense.
Trump has channeled President Theodore Roosevelt’s mantra of “speak softly and carry a big stick” but trump has modified it to say, “carry a big stick” and if that fails, “carry a bigger stick.” It’s all common sense.
Hours after trump imposed stiff tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said his country would place retaliatory 25 percent tariffs on more than $100 billion worth of U.S. goods. That will undoubtedly jack up consumer prices in the U.S., something that would not seem to be common sense.
China’s commerce ministry said it would file a legal case against the U.S. at the World Trade Organization, and vowed to take unexplained, “corresponding countermeasures.” President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said her country would take retaliatory “tariff and nontariff measures.”
Trump said he was imposing the tariffs until the flow of migrants and illegal fentanyl into the United States was alleviated. It is well known to all but trump that all three countries have not played a major role in the fentanyl crisis. Trudeau presented data showing that only about 1 percent of fentanyl in the United States originates in Canada, and Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum described the U.S. accusation that Mexico collaborates with drug traffickers as “slander.”
Trump’s common sense did not consider that General Motors and a few other companies make as much as 40 percent of their North American cars and trucks in Canada and Mexico. Increased tariffs will mean higher costs. One expert estimated that the tariffs could add $10,000 or more to trucks and other larger vehicles that are shipped into the United States from Canada and Mexico.
And anyone with trump’s common sense would support his plan to deport tens of thousands of immigrants to the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The military prison has been associated with severe human rights abuses.
Trump had no evidence, beyond his common sense, when he said the migrant detention facility at the naval base has the capacity to hold up to 30,000 people undergoing deportation.
Protests erupted at Guantánamo Bay over indefinite detention and abysmal conditions in the early 1990s resulted in large protests after President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton each authorized the detention of thousands of migrants fleeing a violent coup in Haiti. At one point, 12,000 asylum seekers were stuck at a makeshift camp as officials raced to process claims and anti-migrant backlash grew within the United States. The vast majority of asylum claims were denied, and by June 1992 only 300 people remained at the camp
Hundreds of Muslim men were incarcerated indefinitely and secretly tortured for years at the prison as part of the so-called “war on terror.” Only 15 detainees remain at the military prison out of the 780 men and boys originally arrested in a global dragnet. Hundreds were released after years of incarceration and byzantine military trials.