Friday, January 31, 2025

SojoMail - Trump wants us to feel powerless. Don’t let him

This week: Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy, returning to a humane stance on immigration, and five ways churches can support the trans community.

Trump Wants Us to Feel Powerless. Don't Let Him

Adam Russell Taylor writes that President Trump’s “flood the zone” style of policy decisions is designed to create helplessness, but Christians can choose a different way to respond:

The first week of the second Trump administration felt like a year. By his team’s own admission, they used a strategy of shock and awe to “flood the zone” with executive orders and policy decisions.

I’ll admit that the sheer volume of his actions — ranging from cruel and immoral to outrageous — has often left me reeling, unsure how best to respond. Some of these actions, while discouraging, are well within his power as president; others represent a stretch of democratic norms — or an abuse of his authority.

This chaos is, of course, a core feature of his governing style, not a glitch. As top Trump ally and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon put it: “It’s working. It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much. They’re overwhelming the system.”

And it is overwhelming. As we know, these actions have dire and far-reaching consequences: We saw aid organizations, schools, state governments, hospitals, and nonprofits in turmoil as they tried to figure out what to do when their funding was frozen. We see the fear in members of migrant and LGBTQ+ communities. Resisting the urge to panic is hard.

But here’s the thing: Provoking a sense of disorientation, paralysis, numbness, fear, grief, or despair is the goal of the “flood the zone” strategy. We know that authoritarian movements of the past and present thrive on people feeling despair.

And we don’t have to respond in the way Trump and his allies hope.

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