When Donald Trump was inaugurated as US president in January last year, much of the early coverage — including at Capital Brief — was around the strategy of ‘muzzle velocity’, a term coined by former consigliere Steve Bannon.
The logic was simple. After a chaotic first term hampered by bungled hires, hostile media, a scattershot strategy and a bureaucracy resistant to some of Trump’s more out-there schemes, the new administration was going to hit the ground running.
It would “flood the zone”, as Bannon put it, with so much action that a demoralised opposition wouldn’t be able to agree on what was even happening, let alone fight it.
A year later, that frame feels almost quaint. Between the extraordinary military operation in Venezuela, the barely veiled threats against Greenland, and a habit for heterodox economic policy (punitive tariffs, taking ownership stakes in American companies, caps on credit card rates) the administration’s posture looks less like velocity than deliberate disintegration.
