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The United States is at war with Iran. A missile hit a school full of little girls and killed 165 of them. Three American service members are dead, and the president says there will likely be more. And while we process that, while every camera in the country points at the Middle East, ten other things are happening that would have each dominated a full news cycle in any previous administration. An agency gets gutted. A court order gets ignored. An inspector general gets fired. A database gets deleted. A thousand contracts get canceled. By the time the sun goes down, the war has swallowed all the oxygen, and everything else just happened in the dark. Tomorrow there will be ten more. A gish-gallop of horrible events have flooded our news feeds for over a year now.
We all know what this feels like. We live in it. But knowing what it feels like and understanding why it works are two very different things, and the difference matters right now more than it ever has, because the autocratic flood zone just entered a new phase.
The flood zone has always been a two-part machine. The blueprint comes from Viktor Orban. The delivery system comes from Steve Bannon. Understanding both parts, and how they interact, is how we understand what we are actually up against.
Orban’s Hungary is the template. CPAC brought him to Dallas as a keynote speaker in August 2022, where he told the crowd that Hungary is the place where conservatives “didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn” but “actually did it.”¹ Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts was so taken with the model that he told Hungarian Conservative magazine Hungary was “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model,” and the Heritage Foundation signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank funded directly by Orban’s government.² When Princeton constitutional law scholar Kim Lane Scheppele read Project 2025, her first thought, before she even knew about the Danube Institute connection, was that it read like Orban’s playbook: concentrate executive power, weaponize the national budget to defund your opponents, strip the civil service and replace it with loyalists.³ The people who wrote Project 2025 did not hide where the ideas came from. They bragged about it.
Orban needed roughly a decade to dismantle Hungarian democracy, because he had to move carefully enough that each step looked semi-legitimate before he took the next one. He captured courts methodically. He rewrote election laws over years. He consolidated media slowly enough that each individual step could be rationalized. That patience was necessary in Hungary, a small country with an engaged European Union watching over its shoulder.
The American version has no such patience, because it has Steve Bannon’s delivery mechanism. In 2018, while watching Trump’s State of the Union address, Bannon told writer Michael Lewis, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”⁴ As writer Sean Illing explained, the strategy is not about persuasion. It is about disorientation.⁵ If we saturate the information ecosystem with so much chaos that nobody can process any single event before ten more land, we break the public’s ability to hold anyone accountable for anything.
So the Orban blueprint tells them what to do. The Bannon strategy tells them how fast to do it. Together, they produce the speed run: a decade’s worth of democratic dismantlement compressed into months. That is what we have been living through.
But something changed.
During the first term, the flood zone was a media strategy. Bannon’s people did too many things for the press to cover, too many things for courts to adjudicate, too many things for Congress to investigate. But the system, slow and creaking, still functioned. Courts issued orders and the administration complied with them. Agencies pushed back and sometimes won. Inspectors general filed reports that mattered. The guardrails bent, but they held. The flood zone in those years was about speed: move fast enough that the damage becomes permanent before the system catches up.
This term dropped the guardrails on day one, because they spent the four years out of power doing the homework they never did the first time around. They built the personnel lists. They wrote the legal strategies. They produced a 900-page instruction manual and staffed every agency with people who had read it. They came in already ignoring courts, already gutting agencies, already firing anyone who might say no. A federal judge in California, Sunshine Sykes, accused the government of terrorizing immigrants and extending its violence to its own citizens, citing the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.⁶ In the District of Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schiltz documented 96 violations of court orders in January 2026.⁷ In New Jersey, federal prosecutors admitted their own government had violated 72 court orders since December in cases of detained immigrants challenging their imprisonment.¹¹ Just Security found that immigration-related cases accounted for 24 of 42 instances where judges found officials had actively misled the courts.⁸ A DOJ whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, reported that a senior department official repeatedly told colleagues to ignore court orders. Reuveni was fired for telling the truth in a courtroom. The attorney general said he failed to “zealously advocate” the administration’s position, which is a polished way of saying he refused to lie to a judge.¹⁰
Those are the individual horrors. The systemic picture is worse. A Washington Post analysis of 337 lawsuits found the administration defied or frustrated court oversight in roughly 35 percent of rulings made against them.⁹ A ProPublica analysis found that more than 18,000 habeas corpus petitions were filed in the first 13 months of the second term, more people challenging their detention in court than under the last three administrations combined.¹⁸ Politico’s Kyle Cheney tracked the rulings in those cases and found roughly 2,600 where judges rejected the administration’s position, ordering bond hearings or outright freeing detainees. Three hundred and eighty-six federal judges ruled against the administration. Thirty-three sided with it.¹⁹ That is the judiciary speaking with near-unanimity, and it has changed nothing.
This is not an administration that occasionally pushes the boundaries of executive authority. This is an administration that treats court orders the way the rest of us treat spam email. And that was the baseline before the first bomb fell on Iran.
Now we enter the new phase. Because the war changes everything.
Every leader facing accountability has understood what a war provides. It is the oldest move in the history of power: when the walls close in, find an enemy abroad. A shooting war restructures the entire political landscape. Opposition becomes unpatriotic. Criticism becomes dangerous. Emergency powers that were already being stretched past recognition suddenly have the one justification that has historically silenced opposition in every democracy that ever fell: wartime necessity. And the emergency never ends, because ending it means facing consequences.
A wartime administration that was already stripping Clean Water Act protections from millions of acres of wetlands, already opening 40 million acres of national forest to logging and drilling, already letting coal plants dump toxic ash into groundwater, already withdrawing limits on forever chemicals in drinking water now does all of it behind a wall of smoke and patriotic obligation. “Support the troops” becomes the shield behind which everything else gets done. They are generating attacks on the constitutional order faster than any existing institution is processing them, and they know it. And the ten months between now and the midterms just became ten months of a wartime presidency operating without constraints, with a proven willingness to ignore the judiciary, and with every incentive to keep the emergency going as long as possible.
Everything that was predictable has happened. Everything we warned about has arrived. The Orban blueprint, executed at Bannon speed, now shielded by a war. And the official opposition response is still: let’s win enough seats in November.
So what do we do?
We use the ten months. Not to wait for the midterms. To build the capacity that makes us dangerous regardless of what happens in November.
The people of Minneapolis already showed us what this looks like. On January 23, 2026, in temperatures that dropped to twenty below zero, over fifty thousand people marched through downtown. Seven hundred businesses closed in solidarity. Unions, faith leaders, community organizations, and ordinary people who had simply had enough created the first general strike in the United States in nearly 80 years.¹² Solidarity actions spread to at least 300 cities.¹³ Polling afterward found roughly one in four Minnesota voters either participated directly or had a close family member who did.¹⁴ That did not happen overnight. It happened because people had been organizing, building networks, and showing up in smaller numbers for months before January 23. When the moment arrived, the capacity was already there.
That is the model. We do not build a general strike the week we need one. We build it now, in the months before whatever crisis comes next, so that when an election gets stolen or a court gets packed or an emergency declaration suspends something we thought could never be suspended, we already have fifty thousand people who know how to shut down a city because they have been practicing.
No Kings III is March 28, with the flagship event in Minneapolis.¹⁵ After that, May Day Strong and General Strike US are building toward May 1.¹⁶ The UAW is aligning contract expirations for May Day 2028.¹⁷ The infrastructure for sustained economic disruption is being built right now, and the only thing it needs is more people inside it.
The ask is simple enough that nobody gets to say they didn’t know what to do. Join one of these actions. Show up visibly. Bring one person who was not there last time. Then do it again the following month. Pick a public space, city hall or a park or a town square, and be there with signs and flyers and one more person than came last time. No committee meetings about committee meetings. Just people, in public, visible and growing, building the thing we will need when the next crisis hits. Because the next crisis will hit. And the one after that. And the one after that. The only variable is whether we have built something strong enough to meet it.
If the election is free and fair, we win it with organized power already standing behind the candidates. If it is not, we already have the infrastructure to make the country ungovernable for the people who stole it. Either way, we are stronger for having built it.
The people who are speed-running the Orban playbook are betting that the opposition peaks in marches and dissipates between them. Ten months is not a countdown. It is a window. Every person we bring in now is a person who is already standing when the next crisis hits.
