Bannon’s playbook is in use right now.
Don’t fall for it. Do the work. GOTV.
While watching the news coverage of Steve Bannon’s initial appearance in federal court on Monday, I kept thinking about his 2018 confession to the acclaimed writer Michael Lewis. His quote is like a compass that orients this crazy era of American politics. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
False polls. Do the work. www.cnn.com/...
Speed lying works for Trump, Vance, & most of today’s GOP. Until it doesn’t.
It worked for Trump for 70+ years. Was “eating the cats and eating the dogs” finally the big dumb lie that he can’t jump over, under, or around?
Attention is limited, and unevenly distributed. That creates bottlenecks that can be
overwhelmed and exploited. For example a $100,000 bulk purchase by the Republican National Committee was enough to land Donald Trump’s book on the New York Times Bestseller List. In 2020, 17 books on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list scored their spots by dint of bulk buys. Quality is a relative measure and largely perceived based on accolades that come from achieving quantity. If you understand this mechanism, you know if you produce enough volume you can crowd out competing ideas. Advertisers call this the “mere exposure” effect: simply showing your ad with more frequency is enough to convince people of its message. Familiarity breeds trust. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, famously called this strategy “flooding the zone with shit.”
This technique clearly worked for Trump, as news organizations gave him billions of dollars are free airtime. This strategy is insidious as it implores your enemy to do you a favor: complain about the latest crazy thing Trump said or did, and you’re playing into his hands by continuing the news cycle. Avoid commenting and others fill the void, making you quickly irrelevant. This is also a technique that works in digital PR, where flooding the search results page with lots of positive or neutral stories can bury a negative story off the first page.
The vast majority of people who search will only see the top few results, and less than 6% click to the second page: as they say “The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google”. This is true of every media channel: all it takes to kill a story is to knock it out of the limelight. The same effect explains why companies tend to bury bad earnings reports by releasing them late on a Friday afternoon, or during a holiday or other important event, when most analysts and reporters have their attention turned elsewhere. [My bolding.] marketingmemetics.com/...
Steve Bannon is in prison, but Trump is using his ‘flood the zone’ media strategy
We are now watching Bannon’s 2016 strategy in action with 21 days to go before the 2024 election.
Trump is flooding the American media with so much “s—” that there is little mention that he once tried to overturn a lawful election by stopping certification of the 2020 presidential race.
The same media often fail to mention that Trump, a man running for president, was
found liable by a jury for sexual assault.
How about his threats to prosecute political rivals and even Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, as an “election fraudster”? These became non-stories for a press corps drowning in a flood zone of dreck. thehill.com/...
From Simon Rosenberg with the Hopium Chronicles
“In the last few weeks Republicans have dropped more than 60 polls into the polling averages to make it look like Donald Trump is winning an election he isn’t. They would only be going to these extraordinary lengths to game the polling averages if they believed he wasn’t winning. In a Twitter thread a few days back, I wrote this:
So, a short thread about why it is so important to Trump that it be perceived that he is leading in the polls when he isn't. In sum - it’s his campaign's primary strategy to obscure his historic ugliness.
Trump may be a rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon but he is leading in the polls and is strong. Trump may be a dangerous extremist, a bigot, misogynist and a racist but he is leading in the polls and is strong.
Trump may want to end the global economy which has made us prosperous, end the Western alliance which has kept us safe, end American democracy which has kept us free but he is leading in the polls and is strong.
Trump is leading in the polls and is strong is a way to make all his ugliness disappear. Which is why his campaign is working so hard to create a false impression that he's ahead. To Trump it is arguably the most important "issue" in the election
Their flooding the zone with these right wing polls is a sign of weakness, not strength, my friends. It is a tactic to help obscure his ugliness and extremism, and we should prepared for far more of it this week. “
Remainder of the top tweet that was cut off— “If you look at the SENATE polls in swing states, you'll see that Trump is probably cooked.”
Even the old guard GOPers know it.
Tomorrow, Early voting starts in NC! Yay!
Hallelujah!
I’m so excited. And I just can’t hide it.
