Flooding the Zone
How a football strategy is threatening to overwhelm American politics
Flooding the zone in American politics
The term “flooding the zone” used to have a particular meaning. In football parlance, for instance, it refers to a strategy for pressuring an opponent, typically by putting multiple receivers on one side of the field and forcing defenses to make quick decisions about which players to cover.
The term has also been used in journalism or politics, but in this case flooding the zone has meant to push for a story to appear in as many places as possible: newspapers, television, radio, social media. The thinking here is that the more a story is reported, the more chances it has of breaking through to public consciousness.
In recent years, though, “flooding the zone” has taken on a new meaning in American politics. These days, the term also describes a way of overwhelming the media-political environment … not as a way to drive a narrative, but rather as a means of disorienting the system.
Consider for instance, what happens when you inundate the media and the public with a deluge of controversial and/or contradictory statements. For starters, the media can’t keep up and eventually stops trying to cover every controversy. Or, if they do try to keep up, candidates can then blame the media for alleged bias because of the sheer number of negative stories.
Meanwhile, voters no longer know what to believe. In many cases then, they just blame the entire political system for being dysfunctional. Finally, the controversies become normalized and a good number of people stop paying attention. Which, let’s be honest, is perfect if you want to run an autocracy but is dangerous for democracy.
Few people understand this better than Steve Bannon, the former strategist for Donald Trump and now a podcast host. In an interview a few years ago, he was open about the tactics he and Trump used in the 2016 campaign. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon said at the time. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Yup, flood the zone with excrement. Disorient the system. Make it so that no one knows what to believe. And then, when voters become disgusted with the whole debacle, perhaps they’ll look for a strongman to lead them out of the mess.
Eight years after Trump’s first campaign, the strategy of flooding the zone with controversy after controversy is threatening to overwhelm American politics, which so far hasn’t found a way to counter it.
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How Donald Trump flooded the zone in May
This post is about Donald Trump because he is the preeminent practitioner in U.S. politics of creating disorientation by overwhelming the media and the public with controversies. The times we live in may be particularly suited to this strategy, but I also can’t think of another politician in American history who has successfully executed such an approach. Whether the tactic lives on past Trump is a question that may determine the future state of democracy in our country.
For purposes of this post, let’s consider a few things Trump has said in just the past month, much of which hasn’t fully penetrated the public consciousness. These comments are drawn from an interview Trump gave to Time Magazine on his plans for a second term, and from speeches he gave at rallies in New Jersey and in the Bronx, at an NRA meeting, and at the Libertarian Party convention.
Trump refused to discount the possibility of violence after this year’s election if Republicans don’t win. “I think we’re going to win. And if we don’t win, you know, it depends.”
In states where abortion is illegal, Trump said, not only should women be prosecuted and punished for an abortion but the state should be able to monitor any woman who is pregnant to ensure they don’t try to get an abortion.
Trump will most likely not hire any Republican for his administration who believes President Biden won the 2020 election.
Trump will seriously consider pardoning all the Jan. 6 prisoners who stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, and tried to overturn the results of an election. “It will be my great honor to pardon the peaceful January 6 protesters or as I often call them the hostages.”
Trump accused the FBI of making up fake numbers to show that incidents of violent crime and murders have fallen dramatically this year. He also thinks the job numbers “are rigged” because they show the lowest unemployment in a half-century.
He said he would send in the National Guard to crush the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
At a rally in the Bronx, Trump enthusiastically invited to the stage two rappers who wanted to endorse him and who also happen to under indictment over an alleged conspiracy to commit murder.
He accused President Biden of being on drugs during his State of the Union address and said he would call for drug tests prior to the presidential debates.
In a private meeting, he also asked leading oil executives to raise $1 billion for his re-election campaign. This would be a great deal for the oil industry, he told them, because he’d “reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules” and because of “the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.”
And then he posted a video to social media of a man screaming at Joe Scarborough that when Trump wins he is going to “get rid of all you fucking liberals.” Trump isn’t saying this directly, of course, but when you repost something on social media it generally means you agree with the sentiment, no?
How would we react if another politician made these statements?
There is much more, but you get the idea. The question is why there isn’t more controversy or outrage about some of these statements. Because this isn’t normal political discourse. And if we’ve started to become inured to all of it, perhaps we should consider what the reaction would be if some other politician had said any one of these things, never mind all of them.
What if President Obama had posted a video suggesting he might “get rid of all you fucking conservatives?”
What if President Biden said he would pardon prisoners who were convicted of attacking police officers?
What if Mitt Romney had said that state governments should be able to monitor the pregnancies of all women in their states?
What if Hillary Clinton had suggested there might be violence in the streets if she didn’t win the election?
What if Obama had threatened to use the National Guard to put down the Tea Party protests during his presidency?
The truth is, any one of these things would have consumed that candidate’s campaign. The media would announce it in banner headlines, reporters would pepper the campaigns with persistent questions, outrage would be everywhere.
But now? We yawn. We don’t know what to take seriously and what to ignore. That’s “flooding the zone with shit.” The whole system goes on tilt. We give up, we stop paying attention.
And then, we also get something like this …
“You know, FDR 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”
That’s Donald Trump, also last week, suggesting that he might stay in office for more than two terms, constitution be damned.
Oh sure, Trump is joking, right? He’s trolling us, he’s ginning up outrage for fun, he really doesn’t mean any of it.
Yeah, I think that too sometimes. But then I also remember, back in 2016, when Trump first suggested he might not accept the results of an election if he lost. One night, I was sitting at my son’s Little League game, talking to another parent. He was a great guy and though we differed somewhat on politics we always had very interesting and respectful conversations. So I brought up some of Trump’s statements about not accepting the election results, just curious to know his thoughts.
He looked at me with something approaching pity in his eyes and told me not to take Trump so seriously. “There is no way — no way! — that Trump would ever not accept an election result,” he said.
Then, four years later:
So what do we believe? What do we take seriously? There are so many controversies, so many falsehoods, so many misdirections, that it’s hard to know anymore. Which, again, is the whole point.
More important, how do we combat all of this? It’s not that the media isn’t reporting these things, but more that these statements are now mostly treated as normal political discourse. And even in those instances when something is treated as a big deal, many people never hear about it because of the fragmentation of the media and the different tribal bubbles that now exist.
So this is partly on the media, and partly on voters — on all of us. Because if we don’t find a way to combat it, well, it’s going to be freaking dangerous for democracy.
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Thanks for your insights, Bob. Looking forward to reading more. ♥️