Nel secondo numero della rubrica Fatto Bene analizziamo Flood The Zone, la strategia comunicativa formulata da Steve Bannon nel 2018, che ha rivoluzionato la comunicazione del Trump Bis.
Before going any further in this article, it is important to make one point clear.
The article that follows analyses a communication strategy, and does so with the same method Bliss uses to analyse any other phenomenon. The endorsement here is purely technical. No political positions are therefore expressed.
With that clarified, let us begin.
In 2018 Steve Bannon said, in an interview with Michael Lewis:
“The media are the real opposition. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone.”
The zone is public attention. The method is saturation.
A few years later, this simple concept would be applied in the most effective and most studied communication strategy of the last twenty years.
It is called Flood the Zone. Bliss has analysed it, and here we document it.
Trump’s first term: a prototype
To be fair, Donald Trump had already been using media saturation since 2016. It was just that in his first term it was still a partial system. Statements piled up, the news cycle was distorted, the opposition struggled to build a coherent narrative.
In short, it worked, but not yet as an organised system.
Simply put, in 2017 the Trump administration was not yet ready. Many of its staff came from the corporate or academic world, with no experience of government. Executive orders were signed and then blocked by the courts because they had been drafted in haste. The saturation strategy existed, but only on paper, because the infrastructure could not sustain its own pace.
In 2019, Bannon said again:
It was theory, but Trump’s second term would soon turn it into practice.
Trump’s second term: the system
On 20 January 2025 Donald Trump returns to the White House.
What happens over the following twenty days is astonishing. A genuine phenomenon, without precedent in American history.
230 executive orders in one year. By comparison, Biden had signed fewer than a third of that number.
By the end of January, Trump had already signed 25% of the total executive orders of his first term.
This time the administration was prepared. Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, had spent the months between November 2024 and January 2025 drafting all the executive orders. More than two thirds of the first week’s measures mirrored the blueprint of Project 2025, a 922-page document prepared by the Heritage Foundation in the preceding years. The speed looked like chaos. It was architecture.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that Trump was “steamrolling” his critics with the zone strategy. The New York Times called it “bigger, broader and more brutally efficient” than in his first term. A Pew researcher documented in December 2025 that 52% of Americans said they were worn out by the amount of news. In August 2025, only 36% of Americans followed the news regularly, compared with 51% in 2016.
The strategy worked because it did not produce disinformation. It produced overload.
The Expert’s View
Luca Maletta, Head of Copywriting Bliss
This time it falls to me to analyse the strategic structure of Flood the Zone. Its strengths, its limits, and what every communications professional should recognise in this system.
Semiotic Analysis
Let us start from a premise. Flood the Zone is a strategy of attention governance.
Traditional communication works on the quality of the signal. The Flood the Zone strategy works on the recipient’s processing capacity. In other words, meaning versus context. What Bannon had understood, and what the second term has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate (albeit to a different extent, in these last months of war), is that human attention is a resource.
And as such, it can come to an end. The media system is built to process one story at a time: agenda setting has always revolved around this, namely creating a hierarchy among stories and giving greater prominence, space and reach to those deemed most interesting.
The fewer stories there are, the better agenda setting can regulate itself. The problem arises when, instead of three stories, ten, a hundred, a thousand arrive. As soon as this happens, both the agenda and the human capacity to process break down. And this leads to disorientation and confusion.
The result is plain to see. NPR counted 46 statements from the White House in four days in the third week of February 2025. During that period, an executive order reintroducing restrictions on birthright citizenship, definitively blocked by the courts, received minimal coverage. Attention was already elsewhere: attention was everywhere and nowhere at once.
That is the whole of the system’s technical merit, and it must be acknowledged. Flood the Zone delivers a real advantage in managing the news cycle, and subsequently in dealing with the opposition. When there is too much information, there is nothing to hold on to. Newspapers struggle to keep up; rival politicians cannot build a coherent narrative. A genuine sensory overload, which went on unabated for several months.
The limits
Naturally, the strategy has its limits. The first is the cost of indifference. A strategy based on saturation produces, over time, an audience that stops paying attention. Only 36% of Americans follow the news regularly today. In 2016 the figure was 51%.
Then again, I wonder: is it really a bad thing for them? Amid general indifference, a government can work more effectively. Yet an exhausted public is not a loyal public. And in the long run, this will show.
Trump knows he cannot (legally) run for a third term. If he could, his strategy would not exactly be ideal for building a lasting presidency.
The second limit concerns, precisely, narrative coherence over the long term.
Flood the Zone excels at managing the present. It governs the news cycle and the relationship with the opposition. But every saturation system produces noise; and when everything is urgent, nothing seems important.
The presidential brand, like any brand, is built on the ability to leave a mark. More than a mark, Trump’s second term is leaving controversy. This was probably by design, but again: here we are judging his communication strategy rather than Trump himself, and that needs to be stated.
The third limit is dependence on volume. A system that works through saturation requires continuous saturation. The moment the volume drops, the mechanism reverses. Attention becomes available again. Earlier news gets processed again. By opposing the press, you thus become dependent on it.
What Communication Done (All Too) Well Teaches Us
The lesson every communications professional should take from this case is not (obviously) political.
Rather, it concerns the relationship between speed and structure. Flood the Zone shows that it is possible to govern public attention with a coherent, disciplined system built in advance. It also shows that communication treated as architecture produces results that communication treated as execution will never achieve.
At the same time, however, it shows (to those with the courage to look further) that a system built to win the present consumes the future.
Building a narrative is harder than destroying one. It takes more time, more consistency, more oversight.
But it may be the only investment that does not need ever-growing volume to hold up.
New Connections (FAQ)
Does Flood the Zone only work in politics?
The mechanism applies to any context in which attention is contested. In the corporate world, some organisations use variants of this logic to manage reputational crises, saturating the news cycle with statements and initiatives before a negative narrative takes hold. The principle is identical. The scale is different. The structural limits remain the same.
What is the difference between a saturation strategy and a positioning strategy?
Saturation governs the present. Positioning builds the future. A saturation strategy optimises for preventing opposition from forming. A positioning strategy optimises for building a lasting mental structure in the target audience. The two logics are not incompatible, but they require different resources and deliver results over different time horizons. Those who rely on saturation alone win the cycles and lose the war.
What sets the execution of the second term apart from that of the first?
The infrastructure. In 2017 the strategy existed, but the underlying organisation could not keep up the pace. In 2025, the executive orders had been drafted in the preceding months, the blueprint was ready, the staff had already been selected. The speed looked like improvisation. It was preparation. This is the point the communications sector should study more closely: saturation that works is never accidental. It is always the result of governance built in advance.