Historically, a president-elect starts announcing their cabinet nominees by the end of November. But Donald Trump has already announced most of his nominees and plans to finish by next week. Steve Bannon and Sen. Tuberville exposed the game plan recently.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville tells Steve Bannon that Republican senators have a plan in place to confirm Trump's key nominations (including Gaetz and Hegseth) before Trump is sworn in pic.twitter.com/nB15SvDZIa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 20, 2024
The new congress will be sworn in on January 3rd and MAGA senators plan to start their confirmation hearings right away - more than two weeks before Trump's inauguration.
What's the rush? Bannon answers that question in the clip up above when he talks about "flooding the zone." He explained what that meant back in 2018 when he told Michael Lewis that "the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
But the shit isn't going to stop with the nomination/confirmation process. About a year ago Stephen Miller talked to Charlie Kirk about how Trump's plan to deport 10-15 million immigrants was going to work. Here's how the conversation ended:
You go in so many different directions that they can't fight you. You do the deportations, you're simultaneously shutting down the FBI headquarters, you're firing bureaucrats, you go nine different places at once methodically...you have to spread the media thin.
So that's the plan. But rushing through enormous projects like this with the level of incompetence we're seeing in Trump's nominees is a recipe for chaos at best and disaster at worst.
With this plan to "flood the zone with shit," I'm thinking that it might be best to pick an area of concern and focus my response rather than try to cover everything. For now, I'm most interested in following the implementation of their mass deportation efforts.
First of all, I'm interested in where they'll start. Paul Krugman pointed out that the whole process will likely be ripe for corruption.
[D]eportations will also become a way to reward friends and punish enemies. Whatever he says, Trump won't be able to round up 15 million people and put them in camps right away. What we'll see instead, at least initially, are scattershot raids on businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants. So which businesses will be targeted, and which will be left alone, perhaps for years? If you think choices of who gets raided and who doesn't will be unrelated to political connections and probably financial payoffs, I have a degree from Trump University you may want to buy.There's also the fact that one of the states with this largest number of undocumented immigrants - 1.6 million according to Pew Research - is Texas. Writing for the Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera recently noted that "If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater. "
Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
Screaming about all of the dangers posed by "illegals" has been good fodder for politicians like Trump and Abbott on the campaign trail. But when the rubber of mass deportation actually meets the road, the choice will be to (1) devastate the Texas economy, or (2) skip over a state that has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants.
You can bet that I'll be watching to see which one they chose.
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