Long read: The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.

This transformation has been a long time in the making. Before the digital age there was the TV age. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, the author Neil Postman argued that for its first 150 years the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium – pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons – structured not only public discourse but the institutions of democracy itself. TV destroyed all that, Postman argued, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was literally meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.””

Imagine, Saunders says, being at a cocktail party, with the normal give-and-take of conversation between generally genial, informed people. And then “a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well:

“Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general (‘We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!’), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking (‘Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?’), the gossipy (‘Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!’), and the trivial (‘Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?’).””

Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing. In that race to become the Republican nominee, his competitors found the entire spectacle infuriating. 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. Tim Miller, who worked on Jeb Bush’s campaign, recounts that he had a staff member track in a spreadsheet all of the media mentions of Bush. By far the biggest category was mentions of Bush reacting to Trump. Trump was the attentional sun around which all the other candidates orbited, and they knew it. There was no way to escape the gravitational pull, no matter what they did. And of course whatever you said about Trump – criticism, sarcasm, praise – it was all just further directing attention to Trump.”

But that is not at all what’s happening. Trump is a terrible debater in any classical understanding of the term. He doesn’t engage, he doesn’t construct logical refutations and rebuttals. In fact, it’s striking when you transcribe anything he says how syntactically odd it is, full of ellipses and self-interruptions. Often at the sentence level, what he is saying is nearly devoid of propositional content. What he does is shtick, salesman patter, Borscht Belt insult comedy and ad slogans. What he wants more than anything is for you to pay attention to him.