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This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic,

produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent. On Wednesday, Donald Trump's administration rescinded the memo that instituted his disastrous

spending freeze in what looks like a surrender in the face of a national outcry.

Soon after, Trump went before the cameras and pushed a bizarre lie about $50 million in U.S. taxpayer money,

supposedly being spent on condoms for Hamas and Gaza.

This kind of thing is often described as a flooding the zone strategy,

in which Trump throws so many lies and abuses of power at us that we can't keep up.

Checkmate, Libs, Trump wins.

But what if this chaos strategy actually isn't all that clever after all?

What if it's more likely to backfire?

Today we're talking about this with the New Republic's Timothy Noah,

author of a good new piece, arguing that Trump's chaos strategy is all

about creating a pretext to consolidate power. Tim, thanks for coming back on. Thanks for having me.

So let's start with Trump's lie about condoms. Here's what Trump said on Wednesday about the

process of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse that his government is supposedly

...