Flooding the zone: Inside Trump's tumultuous first 100 days

On the campaign trail, presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would be a dictator for a day.

It was both an absurd and chilling statement that has been quoted repeatedly since he took office a hundred days ago, as millions of Americans try to grapple with the upending of daily norms.

Since inauguration day, Trump has signed more than 140 executive orders, many of which have reversed basic civil rights protections.

He has assembled a cabinet largely filled with loyalists rather than skilled technocrats, overseen the deportations of lawful US residents, encouraged Israel to annex Gaza and upended other diplomatic precedents, and his 2028 presidential campaign already appears to be underway.

“It’s very clear, based on his statements, that he learned in his first term how to craft a plan so that once he gained power he would use the presidency as revenge,” David Frank, a professor of rhetoric and political communication at the University of Oregon, tells The New Arab.

Trump's longtime advisor has described the technique of quick and aggressive policymaking as "flooding the zone" as a way to overwhelm people to the point where there is too much to fight back against.

A return to a great America, but for whom?

Trump’s slogan of Make America Great Again (MAGA) is exactly what it says - the idea that the country was better back in a bygone era, when women and minorities had few legal protections, and when laws explicitly favoured white men.

This is in contrast to the chants heard at Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s rallies of “We’re not going back” in response to her position of protecting abortion rights.

When Trump has been asked when he thought America was great, he said it was in the late 1800s. Often referred to as the Gilded Age, this was a time when oligarchs dominated the westward expansion of the rapidly developing American frontier, when the country was beginning its international imperialism following its victory in the Spanish-American War, and when tariffs were seen as the answer to international competition.

The response to that era in the decades that followed was tougher anti-trust laws to prevent monopolies and unfair trade practices, along with subsequent generations that largely shunned imperialism.

In Trump’s second term, much of his agenda is based on Project 2025, a blueprint for far-right Christian nationalist rule in the US. Though the Heritage Foundation, which authored the report, have been pushing for their policies since the late 1970s, Trump is the first US president to implement such an extreme agenda within his first 100 days.

“I knew he campaigned on tariffs. I didn’t know he was going to follow through. The guy campaigns and does what he says he’ll do,” Richard Groper, a professor of a lecturer in political science at California State University in Los Angeles, told TNA.

“I never studied someone who followed through on most campaign promises. Politicians say things all the time. This guy follows through,” he said, referring to Trump’s fiery rhetoric that many thought was only meant to energise his base.

A culture of fear

For his supporters, Trump’s rhetoric is widely considered a welcome break from the carefully crafted statements that have dominated mainstream politics for decades. For his targets, however, his words cause deep fear.

Trump announced his 2016 presidential run by accusing Mexicans of being rapists and drug dealers, a statement that would have ended most political careers. Instead, he continued to break one taboo after another.

The absurdity of his statements often makes them difficult to differentiate from satirical humour, such as his promotion of a false rumour that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals. However, studies have shown a correlation between these statements and spikes in hate crime.

This has been particularly true for the US Muslim community, which saw a spike in incidents in Trump’s first term and has seen a further spike following the outbreak of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.

Widespread anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias has played out most publicly on US university campuses, where some students protesting US support for Israel’s military assault on Gaza have been arrested and detained without due process.

Many foreign students are now scrubbing their social media accounts of criticism of US foreign policy. Meanwhile, many who were considering studying in the US are looking at other options.

It’s not just student protesters who are feeling fearful of the administration. Foreign travel overall to the US has dropped sharply over the past hundred days, with dozens of countries issuing travel warnings for the US amid news of crackdowns on ordinary tourists at US ports of entry.

A self-destructing power?

Throughout most of its history, the US has been, however imperfect, a country that many have strived to emulate for its democratic ideals, its competitive economy, and its stability.

“Will anyone be able to count on America again? There’s no stability that anyone can count on,” James Zogby, veteran pollster and president of the Arab American Institute, tells The New Arab.

“With polling going back 25 years, there was soft power. They like our values, our education, our products. What we’ve found is that’s all being undone,” he said, referring to a recent AAI poll on the Trump administration.

Moreover, as the world braces for the impending impact of tariffs, some countries are already making contingency plans to prevent overreliance on an unstable US trading partner.

“It will take at least another generation to rebuild,” says Zogby. “They use the word chaos, but one wonders if there’s an intention of doing something one day and undoing it the next day, affecting the stock market. Is it a display of power.”

Fighting back

Many see no other option than to fight back. On any given day, one can find an anti-Trump protest in almost any US city. Increasingly, local activists are banding together to advocate for common causes, such as democracy and free speech, even if they don’t agree with every position of other groups.

In some ways, these frequent protests representing multiple issues could be seen as a counter to Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy of inundating citizens with so many policy changes they won’t be able to keep up. Some, however, are proving they are up for a fight.

“It’s outrageous. We have how many years left? As organisers, we’re trying to catch up with everything,” Nadiah Alyafia, an organiser with the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network, tells TNA.

“Looking forward, it’s one hell of a fight,” she added.

Meanwhile, in a sign that checks and balances still exist, judges across the country are rejecting Trump’s orders (though he has in some cases ignored these decisions).

“The judicial system is more effective than many people thought it would be in stopping executive orders,” says Frank.

Groper, who acknowledges he didn’t expect Trump’s policies to be as extreme as they are, says he is disappointed that Congress is not doing more to enforce the law with Trump.

“Congress has to look at those executive orders. They need to do their job and assert themselves. Republicans are scared of them. The people’s branch is cowering. It’s going to be a battle,” he says.

Still, he isn’t ready to concede that the US has fallen into authoritarianism.

“This is part of our DNA. If democracy dies, we die. It is us,” he says. “You gotta play the long game.”

Brooke Anderson is The New Arab's correspondent in Washington DC, covering US and international politics, business, and culture.

Follow her on Twitter: @Brookethenews