Flood the Zone: Journalists are Drowning in Trump 2.0

It’s early July in a stuffy, school administration building on Main Street in Bozeman, Montana. Cars are rushing by as a school board, representing more than 7,000 students, meets. The board is made up of university professors, former educators, and small business owners; some have sat in this building for more than a decade, weathering the never-ending buffeting the public education system has experienced.

Not many citizens show up to board meetings now, so there are only two who learn that the school system is experiencing a federal pause on Title funds, which will add an approximately $357,000 burden to a district that broke even by a comparable amount this year. I’m one of the two, taking notes on a ruffled legal pad.

The chapter of funds paused by the federal government supports English learners and professional development, and in Bozeman, both causes are especially important. A population boom since the pandemic has shocked the city’s social services, and the subset of Latino families in public schools often depends on only a small group of teachers who are fluent in Spanish. The Trump Administration’s rationale for the freeze was to eliminate programming purported to “subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”

Two weeks later, I sat in the same room as the district announced Title funds were restored. A letter drafted to Montana’s 4-member Republican Congressional delegation petitioning to restore funding by board trustees was withdrawn.

Nobody really knows that this happened in Bozeman. For the school district, the outcome was their best-case scenario. But in other towns, especially in those even smaller than Bozeman, how many nonprofits, schools, and labs are still caught up in a tornado of federal policy changes, with little media attention?

Abrupt and aplenty, federal policy changes, often decreed through executive orders, are part of the Trump Administration’s explicitly stated strategy known as ‘flooding the zone.’ Americans, especially those in rural areas without access to journalism, are currently experiencing the flood.

In the past 20 years, more than 3,200 American newspapers have closed, according to data from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, leaving about 5,600 in operation. 225 counties are without a newspaper, dividing America–and not just figuratively. There’s a line of red through America’s heartland, creating a schism between the parts of the U.S. that have a paper and those that don’t.

At first glance, our economic system seems to be working without compromising a steady outpouring of information. Independent journalism is popular, especially on social media. Many newspapers are not counted in these studies, only because they’ve pivoted to a digital medium. More broadly, the internet has made government information more accessible. 

But scrutinizing these claims, you’ll find that there was a decrease of 30,000 newsroom jobs from 2008 to 2020, according to the Pew Research Center’s most recent data. Anecdotally, you’ll find that once rigid journalistic ethics are hazy now, as self-identified independent journalists sometimes stray from journalism.

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“I strongly believe in the ‘flood the zone’ theory, which is just [to] overwhelm the opposition,” said Steve Bannon, a pivotal term one Trump advisor, in a Wall Street Journal interview earlier this year. The ‘flood the zone’ strategy has been employed by Trump to overwhelm both Democrats and the press, two groups Bannon merges here as “the opposition.” Mr. Bannon did not respond to an interview request.

Bannon’s syntax shows the deep contempt Washington has cultivated for the press through a two-part process: First, discredit and attack the media. Next, flood the zone with federal changes for the press that’s left to cover them. 

Years of a vilified press and an increasingly biased media landscape driven by ratings have yielded widespread distrust. Gallup polling from late 2024 shows that 69% of Americans have little to no trust in the media. It’s easy to believe that Trump’s attacks have stoked this figure, starting about ten years ago when the then-candidate’s rallies became platforms for critiques of journalists sitting feet away in the press pen.

There is historical precedent, however, for attacks on the free press, characterized by historian Harold Holzer in his book, The Presidents vs. the Press. Holzer, director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, characterizes some presidents of the past as more hostile than Donald Trump. Years ago, the historian believed that Trump didn’t even make the top 5 for “greatest enemy of the First Amendment.”

Holzer, one of America’s highest regarded Lincoln scholars, reminds us that Honest Abe shut down newspapers in his time. His administration, “impeded their delivery, arrested their editors, [and] imprisoned their editors without trial.” 

“It's fearful to think of what [Trump] might do if he believes that we're in the same kind of emergency situation that actually confronted Lincoln in 1861,” said Holzer, pointing out that other historical offenders of the First Amendment (Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR) were wartime presidents.

But since the dawn of a second Trump Administration, Harold has reevaluated his “top 5” list. Holzer points to Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount over a CBS ‘60 Minutes’ Kamala Harris interview as an escalation of attacks against the media. In Holzer’s mind, Trump has now surpassed Nixon in this ranking, a president who cultivated an enemies list containing three journalists’ names and attacked the media during Watergate.

Suits against media companies like Paramount and ABC have gained attention for the corporation’s capitulation in the face of legal arguments deemed dubious by many legal analysts. Floyd Abrams, a lawyer who has argued 13 First Amendment cases at the Supreme Court, commented the following to the Freedom of the Press Foundation regarding a $16 million settlement Paramount paid Trump: “To pay any settlement amount to Donald Trump based on a ‘60 Minutes’ broadcast that was both journalistically responsible and fully protected by the First Amendment is an ominous blow to press freedom in our nation.” 

In today’s White House, pulsing with photo-ops and press conferences, “It’s like Vaudeville. It’s three shows a night,” described Holzer. “And how it does not exhaust Donald Trump, I have no clue.”

Part of Trump’s employment of the ‘flood the zone’ strategy may come from his own personality. Holzer believes “there is some kind of starving hunger that lingers there in his head. And now he's in the most powerful position in the world, where he merely has to walk outside to have 30 cameras from around the world turned on him.”

In Trump’s second administration, this process has increasingly been employed to discredit and shutter local media, the organizations at liberty to educate voters on the impacts of federal policy changes. It’s clear the degradation of smaller organizations is working, diminishing some publications’ ability to cover issues like redistricting, funding freezes, and ICE raids that impact rural areas.

For example, FCC Chair Brendan Carr has agreed with President Trump that ABC and NBC ought to be stripped of broadcast licenses. Action on this front would actually impact local affiliate station licenses, not their parent companies, due to the nature of licensing practices. Many attacks on the media by the second Trump Administration follow this pattern: Find a scapegoat legacy media company and take actions that primarily impact local coverage. 

Take the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for example. $1.1 billion in CPB funding was clawed back by Congress in a move that was marketed to target labelled liberal bias from NPR and PBS. The two organizations, created by Congress in the 1970s, will see a 2% and 15% budget reduction respectively, figures dwarfed by local cuts. 

In rural areas, including on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, some tribal radio stations saw more than half of their funding disappear. Fort Belknap’s KGVA lost 80%. In 2020, 18% of residents on reservations had no internet access, making the threat of closure more damaging to access to news and information.

The administration has also targeted local organizations through federal probes and investigations, including one into a California radio station that broadcast coverage on an ICE raid, reporting on the location of the activity.

Every day, a scrambling, local, yet independent press is drowning after the Trump Administration opened the floodgates. In Holzer’s words: “I don't even think you can call it a flood anymore. It's like a tsunami.”