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OVERWHELM THE PUBLIC WITH MUZZLE-VELOCITY HEADLINES: A STRATEGY
ROOTED IN RACISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM  
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Angie Chuang
November 7, 2025
The Conversation
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_ The seemingly unending barrage of stressful news is a strategy with
ties to the past. _

Steve Bannon outlined the strategy of overwhelming people with
announcements at what he termed muzzle velocity in a 2019 interview
with “Frontline.”, Frontline/PBS

 

The headlines documenting President Donald Trump’s plan to send
federal troops to San Francisco followed a familiar arc. “Trump
claims ‘unquestioned power’ in vow to send troops to San
Francisco,” The Guardian reported
[[link removed]]
on Oct. 20, 2025. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle blared
[[link removed]]:
“S.F. threatens to sue if Trump brings in National Guard.” Then,
on Oct. 23, “Trump reverses his decision to send troops to San
Francisco,” as ABC News put it
[[link removed]],
after Trump posted that conversations with the city’s mayor and tech
moguls had swayed him
[[link removed]].

It was another example of how Trump’s shifting policy positions
[[link removed]],
racially inflammatory statements
[[link removed]]
and threats
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frequently fuel a flurry of headlines, reflecting what some
psychologists are calling “media saturation overload
[[link removed]]”
or “Trump stress disorder
[[link removed]].”

This barrage of information may seem like overcommunication from a
hyperactive administration. But it is much more than that.

Scholars have found that the constant, often conflicting and at times
false information
[[link removed]]
coming out of the White House and shared via social media posts and
the conventional news media causes members of the public to see truth
and fact as relative [[link removed]]
and makes them more likely to dismiss those who disagree with them as
untruthful. This leaves doubt about what’s real and what isn’t.

This citizen paralysis creates what philosopher Hannah Arendt
described in “The Origins of Totalitarianism
[[link removed]]”
as a general public “for whom the distinction between fact and
fiction … no longer exist.” When lies are truth and truth is
derided as lies, Arendt wrote, ordinary people lose their bearings and
can be manipulated for totalitarian objectives.

Meanwhile, many journalists have openly acknowledged fatigue
[[link removed]]
with the pace and nature of the Trump administrations’ news cycles,
amid frequent newsroom layoffs, mergers and closures
[[link removed]].

I am a longtime journalist
[[link removed]] and now
scholar of journalism
[[link removed]] and
race, trained to see the methods and aims behind political leaders’
press operations. And as I show in my forthcoming book, the Trump
administration’s rhetorical strategies echo the playbooks
[[link removed]]
of authoritarian and white supremacist organizations such as the Third
Reich and some factions of the modern alt-right movement
[[link removed]]. They
are intended to narrow the scope of who belongs as an American.

Headlines at ‘muzzle velocity’

The Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies
[[link removed]] include claiming
victim status [[link removed]] while often
laying blame on immigrants
[[link removed]]
or other scapegoats
[[link removed]]
in ways that I believe betray racist intent. At the same time it has
overwhelmed journalists and the public
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with breaking news.

This strategy was laid out by Steve Bannon, an influential Trump
supporter and strategist in his first administration, during a 2019
PBS “Frontline” interview
[[link removed]], when
he described the media as “the opposition party.”

“They’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing
at a time,” he said. “All we have to do is flood the zone. …
Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never – will never be able to
recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

 Steve Bannon outlined the strategy of overwhelming people with
announcements at what he termed muzzle velocity in a 2019 interview
with “Frontline.”

Bannon has long been
[[link removed]]
associated with the alt-right
[[link removed]],
a movement known for rhetorical tactics
[[link removed]] that minimize and
obfuscate its true aims.

A strategy forged in Trump’s first term

As I detail in my book, “American Otherness in Journalism: News
Media Representations of Identity and Belonging
[[link removed]],”
Trump and his key advisers have been developing, refining and ramping
up their news media manipulation for a long time.

An early example of this is the way the administration used these
tactics through Trump’s public responses to the fatal violence at
the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia
[[link removed]].

The two-day rally
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was organized by a white nationalist blogger
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and attended by members of neo-Nazi
[[link removed]], white
supremacist
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and far-right militias
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protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee
from a Charlottesville park. They marched with tiki torches
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flew Confederate and Nazi flags
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and chanted antisemitic and racist slogans
[[link removed]].

Amid violent clashes with counterprotesters on the second day, a
neo-Nazi sympathizer
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drove into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman
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and injuring many others.

[Rescue personnel working on someone on a stretcher in a street crowd]
[[link removed]]Emergency
workers help people after a car drove into a large group of
counterprotesters in the aftermath of a white nationalist rally in
Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017, killing one and injuring 19.
AP Photo/Steve Helber
[[link removed]]

My study of television news coverage of Unite the Right
[[link removed]] found that the majority of
news reports focused on the contradictory and inflammatory statements
[[link removed]]
that Trump made about the antisemitic and racist protesters. Trump’s
Aug. 15, 2017, press conference
[[link removed]]
remark about blame on both sides after what happened garnered the most
news media attention: “I think there is blame on both sides,” he
said. “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some
very fine people on both sides.”

Exploiting chaos

The uncertainty surrounding what he meant created a cycle of news
stories implying and denying that he sympathizes with white
supremacists.

This is-he-or-isn’t-he intrigue spurred a surge of what fits the
description of Bannon’s “muzzle-velocity
[[link removed]]” news
headlines: “Trump declares ‘racism is evil’ amid pressure over
Charlottesville
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followed closely by “Trump defends White-nationalist protesters
[[link removed]]”
and “Why Trump can’t get his story straight on Charlottesville
[[link removed]].”

With the focus on Trump’s comments and what he might have really
meant, the news media ultimately missed
[[link removed]] covering at the time
[[link removed]] the long-term threat posed
by these white supremacist and other extremist groups.

Echoing a playbook from the past

Scholars have identified the fascist roots
[[link removed]] of these “post-truth”
strategies: strongmen leaders uninterested in establishing leadership
through honesty and transparency.

A recent scholarly analysis of Trump’s leadership concludes that the
second-term president is overwhelming the public
[[link removed]] into “organized
despair” by pitting races against each other while targeting
minority groups as scapegoats, a tactic that hearkens back to 1930s
Germany.

A 2019 analysis of Trump’s narrative style describes how he presents
himself as a “strongman
[[link removed]]” fighting invisible
forces of censorship and suppression. It also points out that this was
part of the appeal of fascist leaders
[[link removed]] such as Mussolini and
Hitler.

Researchers of Nazi propaganda identified key tactics
[[link removed]] in the German press such as
name-calling and lumping together groups seen as opposition –
communists, liberals and Jews – until public understanding of those
groups blur into phrases like “enemies of Germany.” The messaging
was constant and immersive, carried in local and national newspapers
[[link removed]],
radio
[[link removed]],
film
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and posters
[[link removed]].

A key part of Trump’s rhetorical strategy is using race without
directly referring to it. For example, Trump has described cities with
large nonwhite populations such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago as
“out of control
[[link removed]]”
or “dirty
[[link removed]],”
contrary to actual crime statistics. He’s also questioned Kamala
Harris’ racial identity
[[link removed]],
suggesting she “happened to turn Black.” And referring to Black
football players who had been protesting systemic racism by kneeling
during the national anthem, Trump said, “Get that son of a bitch off
the field right now,” which many observers interpreted
[[link removed]]
as racist
[[link removed]] because
he was insulting people of color for the act of protesting racism.

This racial coding has been used by white supremacist groups to mask
their true intent
[[link removed]].
They also use less overt labels such as “alt-right” or
“pro-white” as a “rhetorical bridge
[[link removed]]”
to the mainstream public.

In the case of the NFL protesters, the plausible deniability
[[link removed]]
became an actual denial. Trump perfected this move when, during a 2020
debate with Joe Biden, he said, “Proud Boys – stand back and stand
by
[[link removed]],”
referencing another group accused of thinly veiled racism.

Drowning in headlines

I believe that the endgame for this strategy is authoritarian power
that greatly narrows the scope of who truly belongs and has rights in
this country as an American.

This media saturation – drowning the public with a thousand
Trump-generated headlines – allows his administration to keep
dominating and controlling national attention
[[link removed]].

But the media-consuming public can use the tools they have
[[link removed]]
to encourage news outlets to better inform the public by identifying
the media saturation strategy and reporting on why leaders are using
it.

Otherwise, if news consumers let the headline overload do what it’s
intended to do, and become overwhelmed and paralyzed, they become
pawns in what I consider a ploy to make America less egalitarian and
less democratic.[The Conversation]

Angie Chuang
[[link removed]], Associate
Professor of Journalism, _University of Colorado Boulder_
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This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

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