They Flooded the Zone, Now the Zone’s Flooding Back

 

For nearly eight years, I have regularly ridden my bicycle past a house that has faithfully flown a Trump flag, right underneath Old Glory, without interruption in all that time.

The flag has been refreshed over the years — from the original MAGA slogan, to “Keep America Great,” to “Trump 2024”— but the political commitment, and the willingness to proclaim it, have never wavered.

I have frequently speculated about the owner of that house, with its large side yard and wooden privacy fence. In my mind, he’s a middle-aged man with a Webber grill, a riding mower, and grown children who don’t speak to him. He lives in a solid middle-class community, and he’s thinking about retiring someplace warm and gun-friendly. Obviously, this is stereotyping on my part, but let’s stay with it a minute.

Because last week, on Day 94 of the second Trump presidency, I rode past that same house, and the only flag on that pole, waving in the wind, was Old Glory.

I suppose the Trump flag could be at the dry cleaners, in preparation for some hundred-days celebration, so I’ll have to check back. But I can think of at least a dozen other possible explanations for its absence.

Like maybe this guy’s a veteran, or the relative of one, and somehow got wind of the fact that veterans are being fired from federal jobs, and that their benefits are under assault.

Or maybe he does construction on a federal project that just had its funding pulled.

Or maybe he works for a supplier to the auto industry, and his company is getting whipsawed by the on-again-off-again tariffs, and is likely to announce layoffs soon.

Or maybe his employer depends on trade with Canada, just across the Detroit River, and he knows how pissed his Canadian contacts are, and how that story about fentanyl flooding over the border is pure bullshit.

Or maybe he — or his wife or sibling or nephew — works for the government and just got a termination notice, effective immediately. Fired with cause, so there’s no unemployment and no health insurance. Maybe he noticed how easy it was to eliminate a civil service job that was supposed to be permanent, that was supposed to support a family indefinitely?

Or maybe it finally penetrated his dim brain that his 401(k) just took a twenty-percent hit, while Medicare and Social Security are under serious threat. Which means that he, or somebody close to him, could end up in deeper trouble than they’ve ever imagined. And he can kiss that warm-weather retirement good-bye.

I choose to think of this flag-lowering as a sign that things are turning around. That the rubes who voted for Trump — some of them three times — are finally starting to comprehend how comprehensively they’ve been screwed. It won’t be all of them — some true believers will never get it — but if enough Trump flags disappear, it could start mattering.

The ones who are coming around surely include the ones who took a dim view of Trump to begin with, but could never bring themselves to vote for an uppity black lady. There’s a special place in Hell for them. They knew what a dangerous fool Trump had been in his first four years, yet they held their nose and voted for him anyway. Right-wing media spent decades getting them all worked up about made-up nonsense, and now they’re being smacked in the face with reality.

“Flooding the zone” is the phrase used most often to describe the junta’s one big idea, their main strategic thrust.

The idea was to do everything, all at once. Attack every federal agency at the same time. Bombard every department with vicious executive orders. Fire civil servants before they know what hit them. Deport immigrants. Defund institutions. Provoke outrage.

Fear was their main weapon, and they poured it on thick. They convinced us that a dystopian nightmare was descending on us. And for a month or two, it seemed to. We were duly terrified.

But fear only goes so far. What horrified us on Day 5 — to the point where some of us could barely breathe — seems almost ho-hum on Day 95. Maybe we’ve maxed out the fear thing.

Because despite all the shock and awe, it’s become apparent that these clowns have no idea what they’re doing. They have no use for competence, no feel for complexity, and no sense that government exists for a reason.

They’ve been living in an echo chamber so long, they’ve never considered that government might do things people actually need, and don’t want messed with. They never anticipated a backlash, or how fierce it might be. And now that we’re seeing that backlash form in front of our eyes, it emboldens us, makes us less afraid.

The element of surprise is gone. They figured they’d have a turnkey fascist dictatorship up and running by now, but they couldn’t get it done. The institutions they’ve attacked are damaged but holding on, and we’re not seeing any sort of Plan B. The zone seems to be flooding back the other way.

They’re especially being flooded with lawsuits — one for every demented executive order. They weren’t ready for judges to come out swinging. They hadn’t thought that restraining orders might stop them in their tracks.

And as those lawsuits pile up, the lawyers arguing for those executive orders are either incompetent — especially at the top levels of DOJ — or simply unable to find the words to defend the indefensible. A lot of those lawyers are civil servants who’ve devoted their careers to prosecuting crime and corruption — as opposed to enabling it. Not all of them can afford to quit on principle.

But by laying low and sheltering in place, they might be finding they have unexpected power over their incompetent bosses, just by doing their jobs. They can follow orders and present the junta’s legal arguments in court, but they can’t make those arguments any less laughable. It’s not the lawyer’s fault if the case is a loser and no amount of lawyerly wrangling can save it.

I suspect there’s a lot of quiet obstruction going on behind the scenes, probably in every federal agency that’s still standing. As the reality sets in, as the us-versus-them dynamic takes hold within these agencies, a lot of highly capable people are surely seeing opportunities to slow-walk or otherwise choke off bad ideas, without jeopardizing their jobs.

Pushback is happening, with more to come. Right now, it’s the judiciary doing the pushing, but as Trump’s approval numbers continue to plummet, Republican lawmakers will grow increasingly uncomfortable. All it would take is a handful of them to block the junta’s entire agenda.

Flooding the zone does not appear to have worked. It was supposed to create a white-supremacist, Christo-fascist state in the first hundred days. Which could still happen.

But the odds are getting longer. And Trump flags are starting to come down.