“Bannon is right. We are flooded in s— and we are searching for a way to deal with this. These are extraordinarily difficult times,” Carville said Thursday on the “Politics War Room” podcast which he co-hosts with Al Hunt.
Carville was referencing former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s quote from 2018 when he said “the way to deal with [the media] is to flood the zone with s—.”
The long-time Democratic operative, who steered former President Clinton’s campaign, said that Democrats are “getting overwhelmed and that “things that we thought that would kill a political career, would be poisonous for whatever reason, this guy [Trump] keeps chugging along.”
Since Trump’s second White House term started on Jan. 20, Democrats have failed to coalesce around a unified message to effectively oppose the president, who has moved to reshape the government.
They still have not. However, Carville has at least diagnosed the problem, which Fox News host/propagandist Jesse Waters revealed a month ago:
Watters: We are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the left…What you're seeing on the right is asymmetrical… Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it.. and by the time it reaches everybody, millions… pic.twitter.com/EccQutLW0J
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 17, 2025
A Trump supporter says on social media something absurd, which is then retweeted on X, after which Joe Rogan repeats it on his podcast, and Fox thereafter broadcasts it. Millions of voters hear it, and the lie reaches even more people if the fact-based media reports on it, critically or otherwise.
As Mehdi Hasan argued late last month and I noted afterward
Whether it's a celebrity or not a celebrity, whether it's a normal Senator politician, you need Democrats who are not afraid to say wild shit. Focus group bullshit has got to stop. Like, it's got to be- I said this in 2016- Democrats to go on Meet the Press and say "we're going to have a $25 minimum wage" or "we're going to spend a trillion dollars on health care."
"How are you going to pay for it?" "We just will. Trust me."
How are you going to pay for it?" Canada's going to pay for it."
Just say absolute bullshit. Trump has set the bar. Say whatever the hell you want. I'm so fed up with a political system, this assymetric warfare which Donald Trump gets up and says "I'm going to buy Greenland and then we have serious discussions about him buying Greenland. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris produces a 27-page policy document on child care fully costed.
That's assymetric warfare, right? It just seems to be it needs to be apresidential candidate who says "vote for me and I'll make sure $30 minimum wage. I'll make sure everyone has the best health care in the history of the world." Just say wild things because that's apparently what the American public wants and that's what social media is mainly.
Yet, there is a way to counteract this, as Mehdi Hasan argued last month (beginning at 3:32 of the video below) and I noticed a few days afterward.
It's a good prescription issued by Hasan for the problem diagnosed by Carville. As the Trump-Musk Administration hurtles to authoritarianism, it's crystal clear that the Republican Party will do nothing except sit on the sidelines and applaud. Whether the Democratic Party is all in to stop this or prefers to play according to Hoyle and remain polite and gentle is still to be determined.
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