Whether rewriting the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol from violent insurrection to what the White House website describes as “nearly 1,600 patriotic Americans prosecuted for their presence at the Capitol — many mere trespassers or peaceful protesters treated as insurrectionists by a weaponized Biden DOJ”; or President Donald Trump’s DOJ announcing that they still had millions of documents related to the Epstein scandal to review, despite a December 19 deadline from Congress to release all files; or the extrajudicial abduction of Venezuela’s president and his wife to a) stop the flow of drugs into the U.S. or b) take a cut of that country’s oil riches (both rationales have been advanced by Trump); or moving jurisdiction to investigate the killing of a U.S. citizen by masked ICE agents from local Minneapolis authorities to the FBI, the Trump administration is clearly following the strategy famously proclaimed in 2018 by Trump advocate Steve Bannon: To distract, exhaust, and confuse the populace, to “flood the zone with shit.”
New Yorkers, however, long ago had their bullshit detectors redlined by the always self-promoting, self-dealing, and responsibility-dodging POTUS — he lost the city 70% to 30% in 2024 — and have never lessened their opposition, as demonstrated by passionate protests over the savage ICE presence in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities.
We are living through a dangerous age of BS on steroids, but New Yorkers continue to prove they are determined to pull on their metaphorical waders and keep slogging through Trump’s ever-spreading swamp. ❖