Flooding the zone with shit.” That’s the phrase that Steve Bannon, the right-wing Rasputin and former Trump strategist, coined years ago for the technique we have seen the Trump administration deploy in the last week. The idea, as Bannon conceived it, was to unleash a firehose of disinformation, scandal, and intrigue at such an astonishing rate that neither the public nor the media would be able to remain focused on a single topic or transgression for long. Unfortunately, the first week of the second Trump administration was a masterclass in it: the Nazi salute, the talk of annexing Greenland, the “Gulf of America.”