If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …
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 — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —
Michael Kirk: What was the word?
Bannon: Muzzle velocity.
Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.
Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.
Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
This is a weaksauce article, with the same energy as "we really got him now boys, he's done for, he's doing everything wrong, wrong election strategy, never work, you see if he really wanted to ....." blah blah blah blah
Trump's DOD pick Pete Hegseth was at the helm of the Pentagon, when for the first time in American history, a US Army Blackhawk Helicopter flew into the descending flight path of a commercial passenger jet airplane over American soil, killing everyone, plunging them into The Potomac River.
I wonder if the families of the dead from the plane crash, or the families of the millions dead from a purposeful and inept global pandemic response should "Believe him". fffs, "don't believe him" as he's litteraly destroying the American economy with a tariff war, after 3 years of unprecedented inflation, so many are now, because of these tariffs, months away from absolutely losing everything.
"don't believe him" jfc, publishing this garbage "chin up" bullshit doesn't help anyone, and neither does posting it as if there's anything of value to be gleaned
Donald Trump is a worldender, and he's ending our world, right now, this minute, shit is breaking that can't easily be repaired. Believe that.
This is the actual quote:
Yes, and that's ridiculous. It's part of the "everything he does is a distraction from the really bad stuff" argument I keep seeing on Lemmy. Except it isn't. He's doing a shit ton of damage right out in the open right after saying he's going to do it.
Don't believe him on firing a ton of government employees? Don't believe him on tariffs? Don't believe him on mass deportations? No, all of that is a distraction. And why don't the people affected realize that when they should be not believing him since this is all a distraction?
"Don't believe him" might as well be "ignore the suffering."
"don't believe him" means don't believe him when he claims he has the authority to do those things.
He has broken the law to fire all those government employees. He has broken the law to arrest and deport all those people. His tariffs will not be popular and won't achieve the goals he's claiming.
We need to call him out and challenge his bluff. Defeatism will just mean he gets to be king.
Unless I kissed something, those people he fired are still fired. The people he deported are still deported. What does my belief, or lack thereof, accomplish? "Don't believe him," might be good advice for the people tasked with announcing or carrying out his illegal orders, but those orders are still real and are still happening. If those people don't believe him and refuse to carry out those orders, then we're getting somewhere. But you and me and everyone else in this thread? I don't see how our beliefs are going to counter the damage being done.
The full article makes more sense. The headline should have been different though.
Completely misunderstanding the article.
Discussion resistance strategies is not "garbage 'chin up' bullshit".
You are encouraging defeatism and claiming that Trump's King rule is inevitable, and that's just false and it plays into the hands of the oligarchs.