Flooding the Zone
There is no doubt that Donald Trump wasn’t just watching television and eating McDonald’s hamburgers while he was living as an outcast at Mar-a-Lago following the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021. Trump must have been planning a full assault on multiple fronts as he met with his advisors between 2021 and his re-election in November 2024.
President Trump seems to have been afflicted with a unique form of ADHD that has him rushing from one Executive Order (EO) to the next, barely pausing while he tries to bring about peace in the Middle East and Ukraine but still focusing on getting sufficient water pressure from showerheads (see EO14264 - Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads)!
As of this date, President Trump has signed 128 EOs and he is not even 100 days into his second term as US President. The US Federal Register has a very helpful website - see this link - which provides details of each of President Trump’s 128 EOs and I will highlight a few of the less know ones below. The most important actions were taken on the afternoon of his inauguration (20 Jan 2025):
Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship(20 Jan 2025)
Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing (20/1/25)
Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Resource Potential (20 Jan 2025)
Withdrawing the United States From the World Health Organization (20 Jan 2025)
Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats (20 Jan 2025)
Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements (20 Jan 2025)
Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public (20 Jan 2025)
Securing Our Borders (20 Jan 2025)
Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (20 Jan 2025)
Reinstating Service Members Discharged Under the Military's COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate (20 Jan 2025)
Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation (28 Jan 2025)
Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling (29 Jan 2025)
Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports (5 Feb 2025)
Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias (6 Feb 2025)
Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council (14 Feb 2025)
Keeping Education Accessible and Ending COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in Schools (14 Feb 2025)
Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders (19 Feb 2025)
Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos (20 Mar 2025)
Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections (25 Mar 2025)
Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History (27 Mar 2025)
Reinvigorating America's Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241 (8 Apr 2025)
Restoring America's Maritime Dominance (9 Apr 2025)
Lowering Drug Prices by Once Again Putting Americans First (15 Apr 2025)
This sample of EOs provides a taste of the policy areas that President Trump has sought to overhaul: the borders, tariffs and trade, the military, energy, education, faith, culture wars, global overreach, freedom of speech, government waste, election integrity and more.
It is notable, reading through all 128 EOs, the simplicity of the title of each EOs, which have considerable detail in them. A feature of President Trump in his communication style is simplicity and clarity.
While Trump may appear to be hyperactive, he has a long way to go to beat President Franklin D Roosevelt who signed 3,721 EOs in his 12 years office. However, Trump will soon overtake his predecessor Joe Biden, who signed a mere 162 EOs (? there are question marks over how many he really knew about and whether a robotic arm signed many of them).
Trump’s opponents appear to have been caught flat-footed and the Democratic Party hardly know where to turn first. Just as they try to combat one area, Trump has moved to fire another 20,000 employees or make Gaza, the Riviera of the Middle East (Make Gaza Great Again?).
The attack by Trump’s opponents is now one that is legal with Democrat judges being selected (more than 70% of those overseeing cases were appointed by Obama or Biden) to hear cases where President Trump’s EOs are being challenged.
Victor Davis Hanson has a short podcast focusing on the idea of President Trump “flooding the zone” and its impact. You can listten to his 7 min podcast by clicking on the link below:
As I was discussing President Trump “flooding the zone” in the last few days, a friend commented that it is far too early to know the impact of Trump’s hyperactivity and particularly the effect of the tariff policy that seems to be changing by the day. He reminded me of the report of a quote from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai when President Nixon went on his visit to China in 1972. Professor Buzkill reports this as follows:
“In 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution. “Too early to say,” he replied. Given that the French Revolution of 1789 had occurred nearly 200 years before, Zhou Enlai was expressing the long view of history in a very witty and Oscar Wildean way. News of this quote flew quickly around the chattering classes in the west, and it was soon used as evidence that the Chinese (especially Chinese intellectuals and leaders) took the long view of things, that they were a patient civilization, and that, when they thought about the future, it was hundreds of years distant.”
It is a wonderful story but unfortunately it appears to be incorrect becuase Professor Buzkill notes (with support from an American Diplomat present) that Zhou Enlai was referring to the student uprising in Paris in 1968 when President de Gaulle’s government was almost brought down.
Still - I like the apocryphal story better because it sums up the long arc of history, and a reminder that for God, 1,000 years is as a day (Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 4:8).
Who knows what will happen with President Trump’s extraordinary activity but there is a whole system aligned against him and it is important not to confuse activity with outcome.
As with all “revolutions”, there will be a huge reaction against the Trump policies and the first test will be the US mid-term elections on 3 November 2026. At this time, all 435 House seats and 33 of the 100 Senate seats will be contested. Trump will have to have a lot of wins (we could get tired of him winning!) by that date.
Articles That Caught My Attention This Week
How Did the President Get Power over Tariffs?
I subscribe to a weekly newsletter from Joel Skousen (see this link). This week he had an interesting artricle in relation to President Trump’s power over tariffs:
“Let’s consider how the US got into this mess of giving the president nearly unlimited power to raise or change tariff rates on a whim. The US Constitution (Article I, Section 8) gives Congress the exclusive power of tariffs:
"To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises..." Tariffs are considered “duties” So, while Congress has always had the power of setting trade duties or tariffs, the president’s only role traditionally has been to sign or veto tariff legislation.
Sadly, Congress has now delegated all of that power to the President through various trade laws, which have given Trump the interpretive power to exercise absolute control over tariffs, and Trump isn’t about to sign any legislation changing that. Here are these bad laws:
1) Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gave the President wide powers to change tariff rates under the aegis of “National security.” This law was passed to allow the President to restrict imports if the Secretary of Commerce finds they threaten national security. But nearly anything can be justified under “national security” when not properly defined.
Trump used this power to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018 (25% on steel, 10% on aluminum) but it didn’t improve national security in terms of increased steel or aluminum manufacturing capacity in the US (which is a legitimate concern during wartime), it merely saved about 1,000 union steel worker jobs, and caused about 75,000 other jobs nationwide to be lost related to higher steel and aluminum prices.
2) Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. This was the big one that gave the president the power to penalize other countries over unfair trading practices. This is why Trump has relied on the flawed notion of unfair trade balances. Trump is correct that other countries do engage in some unfair trade practices—just not to the extent he has claimed. The US also does subsidize some US agricultural and industrial products as well.
During his first term, Trump used these laws to impose tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of Chinese goods, but those tariffs didn’t slow down Chinese imports at all, since they were moderate. The new tariffs will cause tremendous dislocation in American’s consumer dependence on cheaper Chinese goods (which will someday happen anyway when war comes).
3). International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)
In this, Congress added to a president’s horrific “emergency powers” which never seem to go away. With this new excuse, Trump didn’t need a national security issue, just an "unusual and extraordinary threat." Trump threatened to use this act against Mexico, over the cartel issue.
So Trump has 3 delegated avenues of powers from Congress, without having to go through a change in the Constitution—and all of this is clearly contrary to the original intent of the Constitution.”
The issue of tariffs is complicated and whether President Trump is purely using tariffs as a negotiating strategy or not is still to be determined. He certainly seems to be attracting billions of dollars of manufacturing capacity back to the US.
The Broken West
Dr Naomi Wolf has been one of the most outspoken voices about the challenges of COVID-19 and the damaging impact of the “vaccines”. I have quoted her writing in various issues of the Sons of Issachar newsletter and have also interviewed her.
Dr Wolf was a doyenne of the political left and was a senior political advisor in the Clinton administration. The overreach by government in relation to COVID-19 brought about a dramatic change in her thinking and her own Jewish heritage, including the importance of the Bible.
She writes a very interesting substack and this week her post was titled A New Map of the World.
The article is well worthwhile reading because she makes the point that once free societies like the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia have fallen into draconian and oppressive ways. Dr Wolf has recently resumed travelling and as she has gone to various countries in the West, makes the point that COVID-19 changed everything:
“It seems as if “lockdown”, and the global bid by the evildoers of 2020-2025 to enslave us all (they really need an historic name, a bit more descriptive than The Cabal), have had the effect either of sharpening citizens’ national will and honing people’s intentions to lead their nations, protect their rights, and defend their cultures, or else, in other nations, a tipping point has been reached: repressions went so far that the citizens were broken, in effect, and most lost the will or understanding even to fight.”
I think that she is right - the overreach by governments during COVID-19 has either woken people up or made them more submisive to government control. My assessment from taking to many people in different walks of life here in Australia is that very few have woken up - perhaps 10%.
Dr Wolfe notes that with COVID-19 came the collapse of British democracy. I read two UK newspapers every night and note the move toward autocracy and government overreach with a collapse of the health and policing systems most evident. Dr Wolfe writes:
“Britain is now a showcase of collapsing democracy. New initiatives are killing British liberties on all sides, starting with speech; it’s clear that the path for the population to accept this, was paved by the 2020-2022 “lockdowns” that were so Draconian that at one point Britons were allowed outside for one hour a day. More than six people at another time, during UK’s “lockdowns”, were forbidden to meet together, in one of the more nonsensical iteration of magical thinking, designed not to make any epidemiological sense but to habituate the British public to arbitrary, restrictive State decisions.”
A very similar situation occurred in Australia, particularly in the southern state of Victoria. Extraordinarily, the government propaganda was so effective that most people in the state felt grateful for the way the government had “protected” them.
In the UK, rather than arresting robbers or protecting young women from rape gangs, police are focused on “offesive speech” (called a “non-crime hate incident”) with 30 arrests being made per day. How could this have happened?
Canada has also fallen apart with government overreach and intrustion. Canada now also welcomes illegal immigrants, fleeing from Trump’s America. Dr Wolf writes about her experience with a cab driver from Toronto airport. Surveillance cameras were everywhere and the driver explained that all the surveillance was good because “it keeps insurance costs down”. She notes that:
“In March of 2025, the Canadian government added ten additional “internet of things” forms of tracking or surveillance to citizens’ automobiles, including smartphone- based biometrics, in a pilot program “to deter theft”; these are a set of technologies which will also track citizens’ vehicles.”
The government overreach in Canada (as in the UK and Australia) related to COVID-19 has had a massive impact on people and Dr Wolf writes about atttending an event in Canada where many people told stories about losing friends and jobs, being ostracised and falling out with family members. She writes:
“…these people saw that the forces massed against them and their values in Canada were now so immense, and so institutionalized, that it was extremely unlikely that they would win their nation back in their lifetimes.
But they kept speaking and joining together and fighting, simply because that is what decent people — decent Canadians who love and remember their country and won’t, can’t, give up on it, even if it seems all but gone — must do”.
Canada is now trying to pass an Online Harms Act similar to that of the United Kingdom. It is clear that people’s freedom of speech is being curtailed day-by-day. This is what we are facing in the “enlightened” West, and Australia is going down the same path. Dr Wolf concludes as follows:
“Canada and Australia were the Globalists’ test cases for killing democracies. Canada is so nearly extinguished now, and that, in so short a time, that history will make note of it as an object lesson.
May I be proven wrong.
I’ll pray for Canada, and for my brave Canadian friends; lone and shaken and isolated as they are, diligent and decent and committed; told they are crazy, fighting great odds.
You pray, too, if you would, for damaged Canada, hooked up as she is on life support; — and also, please, pray — for the nations that are still in the midst of the fight.”
We all need to pray for our nations.
Genetically Engineered Super Horses Being Created in the Lab
As an equine veterinarian, I could not resist sharing this story that was brought to my attention by Patrick Wood.. Maria Ortega and Tom Sunderland, writing for the Daily Star, reported a story from Argentina where a bioengineering laboratory had reported that the first “super horses” had been created after modifying the horses’ DNA. The reporters wrote:
“Kheiron Biotech is a South America-based lab looking to produce the most elite horses in the world by hand-picking the best traits of a horse genome and passing them on to new foals. And the company has confirmed the first five genetically modified horses under its stable arrived in early December….The foals were created using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, which "allows direct intervention on DNA to correct genetic mutations or enhance specific traits." This gives scientists the opportunity to select which parts of a horse's genetic make-up they would like to alter - or improve.
Specifically in the case of Kheiron, scientists modified the MSTN gene, which is responsible for regulating muscle growth. By taking the reins off this part of the horse's genome, it will change the amount and quality of muscle the horse in questions develops, in theory producing a faster, more powerful specimen.
"These horses are the first in the world to be genetically edited," said Kheiron's co-founder and scientific director, Gabriel Vichera. It's hypothesised gene-editing could also be used to drastically transform the way people live in harsher climates.”
The various Thoroughbred regulatory organisations will never accept this type of genetic maniupulation and, in any case, it is a long way from the gene editing to superior performance.
I spent my scientific life trying to elucidate the secrets of racehorse performance and ultimately realised that it was an art rather than a science. This new genetic maniiupation project looks like a very expensive exercise that is unlikely to produce the results hoped for. It is alarming from first principles, for scientists to think that they can simply manipulate the genome and get a successful outcome. Undoubtedly, these scientists have a very wealthy backer and an arrogance:ability ratio well above unity.
Military News
Joel Skousen has an interesting short series of articles about the US military or implications for the military in this week’s World Affairs Brief. I share these articles below with the reminder that we live in dangerous times and it would not take much to start a major conflagration.
A few days ago the New York Times reported that President Trump had “waved off” an Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The articles are a reminder that we live in challenging times and any miscalculation could result in a range of unintended consequences. We need to remember that President Putin anticipated a quick victory, in weeks, when he invaded Ukraine. Here is an extract from worldaffairsbrief.com with some relevant military information:
Russia to Station Long Range Aircraft in Indonesia
“Russia has formally requested permission from Indonesia to station long-range military aircraft at Manuhua Air Force Base in Biak Numfor, Papua, a mere 1,200 kilometers from Darwin, Australia. [Bulgarian Military]”
US Cutting Troops in Syria by Half
“The US is moving out about one thousand of the troops in Syria, not because they recognize it’s illegal to be there, but because of other Middle East priorities. The Pentagon tells Trump the troops in northern Syria are there to keep ISIS from resurging but this is false. The US long ago claimed ISIS was defeated, so how is that true if an ISIS affiliate now runs the Syrian government? US troops are there to keep Syrian oil out of Syrian hands so the US can continue to ship it through Turkey to Israel.
There is also a base in southern Syria (Al-Tanf), which is on the borders of Jordan and Iraq. This base regularly gets rockets directed at them by Iraq and Iranian-backed militias. These troops are kept there to act as a trigger event with the upcoming war with Iran.
As I covered in past briefs, the new Syrian government, led by HTS head President Ahmed al-Sharaa, is nothing more than a branch of ISIS. Now we find out that al Sharaa has been working closely with officials from US Central Command on several matters, which give more evidence to the claim that ISIS has long been a US Deep State creation for conflict creation purposes. The US is now openly supporting this new Syrian regime because it helps Israel by not allowing arms shipments from Iran through Syria into Lebanon.”
B-2 Bombers Forward-Deployed in Diego Garcia
“I have covered this tactical move before, but now we know that while they are there in preparation for a war with Iran, they have flown missions targeting the Houthis. The War Zone website says this:
The exact mix of munitions B-2s dropped on Yemen during the strikes last year remains unknown. It is also worth noting here that, the US has NOT used their massive bunker busting bomb on the Houthis.
I suspect they are saving those for Iran’s secret deep nuclear facilities. In a related story, the NY Times reported that Trump rejected the go-ahead for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities because secret talks with Iran are still ongoing. When Israel is finally unleashed to do this attack, the war with Iran will start, and the US will be drawn in.”
Hegseth Admits China Now has the Upper Hand in a War
“In a recent interview, Hegseth said that China’s 15 hypersonic missiles “can take out 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of the conflict.” Hegseth said that the US “loses to China in every war game” run by the Pentagon. “China is building an army specifically designed to destroy the US.” He blamed the military industrial complex for being too slow and costly to compete with China. [Mehr News]”
Conclusion
There are so many potential areas for international conflict that it seems extraordinary that the world hasn’t descended into more chaos than we could anticipate. It does seem to me that there is only a thin veneer of civility and that with President Trump upennding the international order, anything could happen.
I always keep my eyes on what is happening in Jerusalem, the City of God, because at some stage we can anticipate another major conflict involving this city.
As I thought about the issues facing the world, my mind turned to Psalm 46, and I will quote just a few verses to end my newsletter today.
“There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God,
The holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved;
God shall help her, just at the break of dawn.
6 The nations raged, the kingdoms were moved;
He uttered His voice, the earth melted.”
Although everything looks chaotic, God is in control. Remember that:
“With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” (2 Peter 3:8)