The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

72% : Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he'll take attention in whatever form he can get.
63% : Trump was the attentional sun around which all the other candidates orbited, and they knew it.
63% : In 2024, Trump more or less reprised this model.
63% : But once again his domination of public attention was near total.
60% : Climate activists around the world have taken increasingly desperate measures to produce the kind of spectacle that will focus public attention.
57% : And of course whatever you said about Trump - criticism, sarcasm, praise - it was all just further directing attention to Trump.
56% : At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds - with the size of the word corresponding to the frequency of response - Hillary Clinton's word cloud was entirely dominated by "emails", while Trump's featured "Mexico" and "immigration" among the top responses.
56% : This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory - by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience.
50% : By the 1980s, the dominant mode of political communication was the minute-long ad, and Postman's central point, that it's a long way down from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, where the two challengers for the Illinois state senate squared off in 90-minute speeches, to Reagan's "Morning in America" commercial, seems irrefutable.
49% : Which stories and issues obtain disproportionate public attention will have enormous consequences for how government functions and what choices our elected representatives will make.
49% : There are consequences to where public attention flows.
48% : The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen.
44% : Trump was able to get away with this at least in part because of the sharp decline in the ability of the political press to effectively focus national attention.
43% : Despite being embedded in the attention age, despite our lamentations of its effects, and our phone addictions, and our addled, distracted mental states, I think we all still retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens.
41% : By far the biggest category was mentions of Bush reacting to Trump.
37% : These disruptions are designed to make the same kind of trade that Trump pulled off so successfully.
34% : This was all happening in a presidential election year in which the Republican party already had a de facto nominee in Donald Trump.
33% : You simply cannot write about how the rise of attention as the most valuable resource has changed our politics without writing about Trump.
31% : Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.
26% : Trump wanted to raise the amount of attention paid to the issue, and to that end he was constantly saying wild and hateful things on the topic.
24% : No matter what they did - unveil a new plan for tax policy, give a speech on America's role in the world - the questions they faced were about Donald Trump.
24% : You would think, given those polling numbers, that Trump would not keep hammering the issue.
15% : Trump is a terrible debater in any classical understanding of the term.
14% : It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump.

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