The Scene
If you listen to NPR or The Ezra Klein Show, or other liberal-ish outlets trying to understand the dizzying barrage of news from the Trump White House, you’ve probably heard or read a famous line from Steve Bannon in 2019: “All we have to do is flood the zone.”
That was a cleaned up version of something Bannon, Trump’s former guru and now the ringmaster of MAGA media, told Michael Lewis a year earlier: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh**.”
So is that what’s happening right now, as Donald Trump blitzes the country with executive orders, Elon Musk hacks at federal agencies, and controversial appointees sail through the Senate? I visited Bannon Wednesday at his Capitol Hill townhouse to whether this period — he’s been referring to it on his podcast, War Room, as the “Days of Thunder” — is what he had in mind.
“Of course. It’s worked,” he told me. “The media is a complete total meltdown.”
Bannon watches more MSNBC than your average Upper West Side retiree — really, more than anyone else I know — on a giant screen in the front room adjoining the studio where he films War Room every afternoon. That’s where he’s been watching what he sees as the collapse in the power of the mainstream media, as big stories slide quickly out of view, replaced by the next outrage, then the next and then the next.
Take last Wednesday. For a moment, it seemed like a couple of key confirmation hearings were going badly. Health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in particular, had no real explanation for some of his past utterances.
Trump “watches the first hour and he’s seeing it and they’re taking some incoming. So what does he do? He gives the press conference,” Bannon reflected. “He threw out something and everybody took the bait. He’s doing the hands thing, the elevation [of the helicopter]. He keeps doing the DEI thing and then he does the elevation,” he said, referring to Trump’s cheerfully unfounded speculation on the causes of the crash.
“You guys keep saying. ‘He’s not going to do this to us, we did it last time, this is how he wins.’”
“Then he goes all Mort Sahl on you, and he triggered you guys and they never went back to the hearings,” Bannon gloated. “God, he’s such a brilliant strategist.”
Or — Friday:
“Let me give you a perfect example,” Bannon continued. “This is how great it is. On Friday, President Trump, right after [FBI director nominee] Kash [Patel]’s confirmation hearing. … What does he do? He sends these guys over to the FBI to clear out the FBI and clear out the Justice Department, fire half the guys before [Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi] are even voted on.”
“On Sunday we’re sitting here — because we monitor MSNBC and all the time on Sunday — and it’s not in the top half,” he marveled. “It’s in the C block of the MSNBC stuff and they’re all meltdown Friday night and Saturday. He’s doing so much other stuff that time he’s flooded the zone.”
It’s hard to argue with the results.
“I haven’t seen any fight at all, and the confirmation hearing’s where I was stunned,” Bannon said. “Rubio rolls out the end of the post-war international rules-based order. There’s no response to Democrats. There’s some establishment Republicans pushing back. Pete [Hegseth], for all his personal foibles, he lays out a revolution of military affairs, including where the budget is going to go. … The Democrats are all talking about his personal weakness. [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent lays out … a new economic model, including the External Revenue Service, where the cuts are going to come from, how Trump looks at the government. No intellectual pushback, no ideas pushback. It’s almost like surrender.”
Bannon is his movement’s ideas guy, gleefully pulling from his enemies’ jargon. (He had Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato’s optimistic new AI book, Superagency, on the desk in front of him.) The last weeks, he said, prove that Trump is “McLuhanesque,” referring to the late Canadian theorist who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” and wrote in the 1960s of how shifts in the technology of media shaped society.
“Everything is media. Media is the massage, and Trump understands that,” Bannon said. “That’s why the Cabinet is all TV guys. What’s on MSNBC right now is more real than what’s happening in real life, in the analog world. He knows that.”
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Room for Disagreement
The New York Times’ Ezra Klein argued this week that flooding the zone isn’t a sign of strength, but masks the reality of a weak executive with narrow majorities and thin popular support.
“The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness,” Klein argued, urging Democrats: “Don’t believe him.”
Klein floated what he thought would be a more worrisome alternative: if Trump “went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.”
I put that to Bannon, who waved it off. The point, he said, was that Trump has generated “scale, depth, and urgency” with a team of aides who are actually moving policy. Trump is flooding the zone with well-prepared substance, not mere noise, he said — though “you have to have some bullcrap.”
Ben’s view
If the media is actually the opposition party, then Bannon’s right: Trump has seized total control of the narrative. And if this media-centric theory of governance pans out, this will be remembered as the period in which Trump changed the direction of the US government and won a series of victories that will define his tenure and strengthen his hand for the next two years. I frankly find that pretty plausible.
But there’s an alternate possibility. Maybe the weakened mass media is a valuable punching bag and rallying point — but also a bit of a distraction. Maybe Trump’s victories in the day-to-day narrative have cost him control, in the long term, of his own agenda. In six months, national politics could well be defined by an inadvertent decision that he, or Musk, or one of their anonymous deputies made amid the January frenzy. The Democrats, limping back to life, can pick their targets, and as Trump showed, a vibrant opposition party no longer depends on the strength of the media to set the agenda.
Notable
- Back in 2016, Bannon saw “better than almost anyone else how to exploit the vulnerabilities in the modern media landscape,” Michael Borne wrote.
- Bannon’s line is “key to understanding America’s crazy politics,” Brian Stelter wrote in 2021.