Steve Bannon is in prison, but Trump is using his ‘flood the zone’ media strategy

Steve Bannon, currently serving a four-month federal prison sentence, once explained Donald Trump’s strategy in the final days of his winning 2016 campaign.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon, the chief strategist for Trump’s 2016 campaign said later. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s–.”

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.

So did his ridiculous claim that Vice President Kamala Harris is “mentally impaired.” With their minds hypnotized by Trump’s spin, reporters dismiss that as a joke, just more of Trump mocking people.

Meanwhile, the news is filled up with headlines generated by Trump’s lie that the Biden-Harris administration diverts money from Hurricane aid to help immigrants.

Finally, President Biden had to scream from the White House. “The last few weeks there’s been a reckless…relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies…” President Biden said last week. “It is harmful to those who need help the most.”

But even President Biden’s truth-telling got only passing attention, as reporters returned to a steady diet of clicks based on Trump’s barrage of strategic garbage.

Elon Musk has turned his social network, “X,” formerly known as Twitter,  into a megaphone to advance Trump’s deluge of lies, fear and hate.

“FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Musk, a Trump donor and now campaigner, posted on X.

In the face that kind of media firepower, the nation’s top newspapers and television stations, claim they are being objective in blindly repeating the lies being spread online.

“There’s a false equivalency going on in the coverage of this race in that Donald Trump can say whatever crazy thing he wants to say, about submarines and sharks and electric batteries…and it is not really covered …[as this ] man is — Trump is — out of his mind,” Mike Barnicle, the columnist said on MSNBC.

Highly respected news outlets even equate Trump’s crass political lies with Vice President Harris changing her position on fracking.

Joe Scarborough, the host of the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” contends that the mainstream media’s claim to “‘objectivity,’ and I put that word in quotes, is actually not objectivity at all… they are so numbed by the hate, the hate speech, that has spewed out of his mouth for the past nine years.”

Trump’s fellow Republicans envy his success in controlling the press.

“Yes, they can control the weather,” Trump Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X, mimicking Trump’s act to get attention by claiming that Democrats cause hurricanes.

Meanwhile, Trump continues his gas-lighting. Last week, he told Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio talk show host, that the Biden-Harris administration has let in “thousands” of migrants who commit crimes because “it’s in their genes.”

That appeal to racism fit with Trump’s claim, during his debate with Harris, that newly arrived Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats belonging to the city’s longtime (mostly white) residents.

News reporters went to Springfield and confirmed Trump was spreading something that had been made up online. The Republican governor of Ohio confirmed it was false. 

Now, with time running out and polls showing a tight race, Trump is engaged in “a slurry of polarizing disinformation, false claims about his opponents cheating in elections and series of unfounded personal attacks on Harris…” the New York Times reported last week.

Trump is once again relying on Bannon’s strategy, hoping to find an edge, shift political momentum in his favor and win one more race. 

One caller to Dan Abrams’ Sirius XM show highlighted the personal toll of this misinformation.

“This situation is actually breaking up our family,” he said. “My father-in-law lives just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, and he was badly damaged by Hurricane Helene. And he has refused all FEMA help because he’s a hardcore Trumper. He literally believes that if he accepts anything from FEMA, they’re going to take his house,” the caller said.

With time running out in this campaign, Trump is willing to stoke racial divisions, exploit tragedies and undermine democratic norms.

Trump has struggled to regain ground after his disastrous debate performance against Vice President Harris. Most national and swing-state polls show him short of 50 percent of the national vote. And conservatives like former Representative Liz Cheney are giving disillusioned Republicans space to consider that it is time to move on from Trump’s bad behavior and chaos.

But Trump’s act, and Bannon’s strategy, is getting old. Americans saw this show in 2016. They saw it during his four years in office.

The question now is how many Americans want to see more of the same old garbage.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.