One thing Donald Trump is really good at is grabbing all the headlines, even if it comes at the expense of the global economy. Trump’s disastrous tariffs have caused the stock markets to tank, dramatically raised the risk of a recession, and cost American consumers thousands of extra dollars a year.

And that’s just in the first few days following the tariff’s announcement.

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The administration’s destructive policies are already taking a toll in polling, but the damage is already done.

With the stakes so high for American families, workers, and businesses, it’s no wonder that the media is hyper-focused on the fallout from Trump‘s delusional belief that strangling trade will return the U.S. back to 1950s dominance.

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Trump knows how to play the media. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon laid out the plan five years ago. The media, which Bannon called “the opposition party,” is easily manipulated “because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

So, Bannon says, the strategy is simple. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang.”

That’s a warning for what we’re undergoing right now with tariffs. The media is so focused on the financial impact of tariffs that Trump will be able to commit all kinds of other outrages, and most people won’t get to hear about them.

There are already signs that this is happening. Consider the administration’s refusal to respect courts. The administration has openly mocked a judge’s order to bring back a man illegally deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, with the administration’s deportation chief, Stephen Miller, laughing at the judge because she “thinks she’s the president of El Salvador.” That’s just one of a series of actions in which the administration intentionally obfuscates to judges or simply doesn’t pay attention to court orders at all.

Or look at how the administration is targeting Maine for punitive cuts specifically because Gov. Janet Mills (D) told Trump she’d see him in court for his anti-trans policy. Trump has demanded an apology, and not getting one, his lackeys tried to punish all the citizens of Maine, subjecting the state to what the Washington Post called “unusual, overlapping investigations and arbitrary reversals of funding.” For example, Leland Dudek, the head of the Social Security Administration, called Mills “a petulant child” and canceled services to the state, which required intervention by Maine’s senators to overturn.

The administration pumps out so many outrages on a daily basis that many of them simply get overlooked. That’s a bad sign for outrages that target the LGBTQ+ community. Let’s not forget that the administration is only getting going on one of its main goals, which is to redefine sexuality and families to conform to a conservative Christian viewpoint.

“The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far,” says David Graham, who wrote a book about Project 2025, “but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways.” Graham notes that this is a top priority of the right.

For an administration reeling under the all-too-predictable backlash from tariffs, attacking LGBTQ+ people right now is attractive. The media won’t be able to focus on it for long, given the cratering economy. The right will pay close attention to it, distracting them from any worries they have about their 401k’s.

To be clear, it’s not a question of whether the next wave will come. It’s a question of when. Project 2025 has proven to be the clearest possible guide for what the Trump administration has done to date. There’s no reason to date that it’s also the guide to the future.

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