The Muzzle Velocity PR Strategy

This is Steve Bannon’s muzzle velo­city PR strategy.

It seems Donald Trump might be using Steve Bannon’s “muzzle velo­city” PR strategy by “flood­ing the zone” to make news media choke on its own media logic.

How does it work?
Why does it work?

Here we go:

The Muzzle Velocity PR Strategy 

Steve Bannon is a far-right polit­ic­al strategist, media exec­ut­ive, and former chief strategist to Donald Trump. A key archi­tect of Trump’s 2016 pres­id­en­tial vic­tory, Bannon lever­aged pop­u­list, nation­al­ist, and anti-estab­lish­ment rhet­or­ic to mobil­ise dis­af­fected voters. 

Here’s what Steve Bannon told PBSs “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The oppos­i­tion party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time…

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will nev­er — will nev­er be able to recov­er. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velo­city. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to ham­mer, and it’s got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velo­city.

As the exec­ut­ive chair­man of Breitbart News, Bannon helped shape the alt-right’s influ­ence on Republican polit­ics. In the White House, Bannon pushed “America First” policies, clashed with estab­lish­ment Republicans, and was instru­ment­al in Trump’s hard­line immig­ra­tion stance and eco­nom­ic nation­al­ism. However, his ten­ure was short-lived — he was ous­ted in August 2017 fol­low­ing intern­al power struggles. 

Despite fall­ing out with Trump (who later called him “Sloppy Steve”), Bannon remained an influ­en­tial voice in right-wing polit­ics, back­ing nation­al­ist move­ments glob­ally and facing leg­al trouble, includ­ing an indict­ment for fraud related to a bor­der wall fun­drais­ing campaign.

Donald Trump: Flood the Zone

According to Ezra Klein, New York Times colum­nist and  The Ezra Klein Show pod­cast host, Bannon’s muzzle velo­city PR strategy is in full effect for the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term.

“Muzzle velo­city. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fun­da­ment­al sub­stance of demo­cracy. It is par­tic­u­larly the sub­stance of oppos­i­tion. People largely learn of what the gov­ern­ment is doing through the media — be it main­stream media or social media. If you over­whelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it mov­ing from one thing to the next — no coher­ent oppos­i­tion can emerge. It is hard to even think coher­ently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House fol­lowed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The over­whelm is the point. The mes­sage wasn’t in any one exec­ut­ive order or announce­ment. It was in the cumu­lat­ive effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s coun­try now. This is his gov­ern­ment now.“
Source: Inside Story ¹Klein, E. (2025, February 7). Don’t believe him. Inside Story. https://​insidestory​.org​.au/​d​o​n​t​-​b​e​l​i​e​v​e​-​h​im/

An old pub­lish­er adage goes:

“If it bleeds, it leads.“
What, then, if everything bleeds?

According to Clay Shirky, an American writer, con­sult­ant, and teach­er on the social and eco­nom­ic effects of Internet tech­no­lo­gies and journ­al­ism, there is no inform­a­tion over­load—only fil­ter fail­ure. ²Asay, M. (2025). Shirky: Problem is fil­ter fail­ure, not info over­load. CNET. https://​www​.cnet​.com/​c​u​l​t​u​r​e​/​s​h​i​r​k​y​-​p​r​o​b​l​e​m​-​i​s​-​f​i​l​t​e​r​-​f​a​i​l​u​r​e​-​n​o​t​-​i​n​f​o​-​o​v​e​r​l​o​ad/

Can estab­lished media get flooded to the point of failure?

Media Logic and Filter Failure

Classic media logic is hypo­thes­ised to influ­ence the news media in the fol­low­ing ways: ³Nord, L., & Strömbäck, J. (2002, January). Tio dagar som skakade världen. En stud­ie av medi­ernas beskrivningar av ter­ror­at­tack­erna mot USA och kri­get i Afghanistan hösten 2001. … Continue read­ing

In Steve Bannon’s muzzle velo­city PR strategy, flood­ing the news means hav­ing the news media choke on its media logic.

The Triangulation PR Strategy

Donald Trump’s pres­id­ency is an extraordin­ary case study. Few organ­isa­tions could flood the media the way a sit­ting pres­id­ent can. Striving to influ­ence the medi­a’s agenda is a well-known PR strategy, but tor­pedo­ing the entir­ity of the tra­di­tion­al news media must be seen as a fringe case.

A ser­i­ous fringe case, but fringe nonetheless.

As a seasoned PR pro­fes­sion­al, I know sim­il­ar pub­lic affairs strategies, albeit on more minor scales. One such strategy is the tri­an­gu­la­tion PR strategy.

The tri­an­gu­la­tion PR strategy = while the news media and the oppos­i­tion are push­ing their agen­das, a polit­ic­al interest could change the nar­rat­ive by inten­tion­ally leak­ing a “saved” story that will either over­shad­ow com­pet­ing agen­das — or drown out neg­at­ive pub­li­city, even. 

However, as with the muzzle velo­city PR strategy, I would nev­er con­done the tri­an­gu­la­tion PR strategy. Both are card-stack­ing grey-hat tech­niques used to obfus­cate and confuse.

Still, Steve Bannon, already infam­ous for his role in the Cambridge Analytica scan­dal, is still influ­en­cing the news climate.

If fake news was part one, muzzle velo­city is part two.

Learn more: The Muzzle Velocity PR Strategy

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Cambridge Analytica was foun­ded in 2013. Their busi­ness mod­el was sim­il­ar to Blue State Digital’s, focus­ing on data min­ing, broker­age, and ana­lys­is — and some con­sult­ing. ⁴This is sim­il­ar to the social media intel­li­gence agency Whispr Group, where I served as the COO from 2010 to 2013.

The Cambridge Analytica scan­dal began with Alexsander Kogan, a research­er at the University of Cambridge, who approached Facebook and asked to col­lect data for aca­dem­ic purposes.

For his study, Kogan launched a Facebook app called Your Digital Life. The app was used by 270,000 Americans per­mit­ted to pull data from their friends, which allowed the app to mine data from 87 mil­lion users. ⁵Cambridge Analytica. (2024, May 13). In Wikipedia. https://​en​.wiki​pe​dia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​C​a​m​b​r​i​d​g​e​_​A​n​a​l​y​t​ica

Soon, this data ended up in Cambridge Analytica’s database.

Facebook, Targeted Ads, and Data Mining

It wasn’t only the data-min­ing com­pan­ies that could sense poten­tial. So did the social net­work­ing sites.

Segmenting people based on their com­mu­nic­at­ive beha­viour is more power­ful than tra­di­tion­al demo­graph­ic seg­ment­a­tion. ⁶Silfwer, J. (2015, June 11). The Publics in Public Relations. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​p​u​b​l​i​c​s​-​i​n​-​p​u​b​l​i​c​-​r​e​l​a​t​i​o​ns/

As Facebook went pub­lic in 2012, it took the lead and embarked on an aggress­ive jour­ney to mon­et­ise social media usage.

In short, Facebook went hard for the advert­ising dol­lar. It’s not a mod­ern mon­et­isa­tion mod­el, but with so much user data, Facebook trans­formed the pro­gram­mat­ic ad tar­get­ing industry.

With Facebook mov­ing for­ward aggress­ively with loosely reg­u­lated data min­ing prac­tices, Cambridge Analytica decided to take a shortcut.

Trump’s Presidential Bid in 2016

Among Cambridge Analytica’s founders and investors was the con­ser­vat­ive pun­dit Steve Bannon. Bannon divested his hold­ings in the com­pany in April 2017 when he was appoin­ted White House Chief Strategist. Still, at that point, he had already been work­ing as the CEO for Donald Trump’s pres­id­en­tial bid in August 2016.

And what soft­ware did Trump’s cam­paign use to per­suade the American opin­ion to vote for Trump? Cambridge Analytica, of course.

With large data volumes on vari­ous online beha­viours of US cit­izens, Cambridge Analytica pro­filed voters match­ing their psy­cho­graph­ic behaviours.

To run a US pres­id­en­tial cam­paign on the back of illeg­ally (and uneth­ic­ally) acquired data was, of course, a scan­dal in its own right.

The Power of Psychographic Analysis

Psychographic tools (such as Myers-Briggs and The Big Five Aspects Scale) allow people to be assigned to groups based on their past beha­viour and pre­dicted future activity. 

This could have provided the Trump cam­paign answers on who to tar­get and how to trig­ger them psychologically.

“Cambridge Analytica’s use of data ana­lyt­ics and microtar­get­ing in polit­ic­al cam­paigns, com­bined with psy­cho­lo­gic­al tac­tics, helped secure Donald Trump’s vic­tory in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.“
Source: Proceedings of the 1^st Pedagogika International Conference on Educational Innovation ⁷Gatra, A. (2023). The Power of Data Analytics and Microtargeting in Political Campaigns, Cambridge Analytica Strategy, Donald Trump Victory the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Proceedings of … Continue read­ing

In the end, the whole scan­dal sur­round­ing Cambridge Analytica brought the gen­er­al pub­lic and politi­cians one step closer to under­stand­ing the immense power of big data.

The Cambridge Analytica Aftermath

Using a seem­ingly harm­less per­son­al­ity quiz app, Cambridge Analytica col­lec­ted users’ and friends’ data, exploit­ing Facebook’s lax pri­vacy policies. 

The firm, backed by Steve Bannon and fun­ded by bil­lion­aire Robert Mercer, used this data to craft highly per­son­al­ised, manip­u­lat­ive polit­ic­al ads, not­ably aid­ing Donald Trump’s 2016 cam­paign and the Brexit Leave campaign. 

When whis­tleblower Christopher Wylie exposed these prac­tices, glob­al out­rage over Big Tech’s role in elec­tion manip­u­la­tion grew. 

It led to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testi­fy­ing before Congress, a $5 bil­lion fine for Facebook, and a broad­er reck­on­ing on data pri­vacy and digit­al propaganda.

In the wake of the scan­dal, Cambridge Analytica closed its oper­a­tions in 2018. Several exec­ut­ives moved to Emerdata, which is owned by the same par­ent com­pany and resides in the same build­ing in London.

Learn more: The Cambridge Analytica Scandal

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