This is not your grandfather’s attention. It is not a passive thing, an article read or a news report digested. This attention — via smartphones — seizes you. It energises and angers you. It may change your view of life, of politics, of yourself. The algorithm is the message. Gaining any attention wins elections; that’s why the Democrats lost.
To many in the US, it’s the Democrats who are the extremists, not the new president. While his style is to keep ’em guessing, don’t ignore the political substance
This is why he won. This is how he will govern. Late in the evening on Monday came a moment that captured the political genius of Donald J Trump. He can grab attention out of a tin can.
The new president had made it to his desk in the Oval Office and was signing executive orders —which in theory lead to immediate action — in front of an assembled group of reporters. One of them, Fox News’s Peter Doocy, a friendly voice, asked him if Joe Biden had left the traditional letter to his successor.
The response was pure Trump: “He may have. Don’t they leave it in the desk? I don’t know.” With that, the new president rummaged in the drawers of the desk and discovered the letter. “Thank you, Peter. It could have been years before we found this thing.”
President Trump with his predecessor’s letter. AP
Performative, possibly even planned, yet unscripted. Made for TV, made for YouTube clips. Made, indeed, for TikTok. Jokey, inclusive, reactive.
And then on to signing something else: leaving the World Health Organisation (“This is a big one”) or ending birthright citizenship; the first easily done, the second probably impossible but what the heck, both signed and dispatched.
The point everyone made after the immediate fun was that the contrast with the humourless, semi-moribund end to the Biden years was so extreme as to be psychologically, almost physically, shocking to the nation.
Violent criminals pardoned, Panama threatened, sex and gender sorted; it carried on long after midnight and, like the Spanish Inquisition, could strike without warning.
Trump takes a victory lap in Las Vegas on Saturday, focused on his plan to exempt tips from taxes MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
One can imagine Brian Hook, a trustee of the Wilson Center for Scholars at the end of a long diplomatic career, watching all this along with other Americans on the TV then going to bed, before waking to discover that Trump had not forgotten even him: in the middle of the night, via Truth Social, Hook was told “YOU’RE FIRED!”
For those of us dashing through the frigid Washington night from event to event, what was the story? We dared not sleep lest we, like Hook, woke up to a new world that had left us behind.
Ah yes, the conventional wisdom went, he was indeed energetic but wait till the hurdles come. Wait till it all gets tricky, with the courts rendering some of the orders void, with the immigration ambition — get rid of all those without proper papers — coming up against the fact that many of them are living decent American lives vital to the economy and to keeping inflation low. Ditto for tariffs, if they are imposed: muscular but self-defeating.
But this, perhaps, is a misunderstanding of the second age of Trump. The hurdles? Bring them on. And crash into them. Jump some, dump some. Pretend they weren’t there. Swerve round them even if the course is now a new one.
The phrase of the moment is this: “Attention is the new money in American politics.”
It is a profound truth. A truth with consequences for America — perhaps for us too — that are only now beginning to take shape. The net worth of the billionaires sitting around Trump at the inauguration caught the attention of many, but the more important point is that they hold the keys to attention itself in the modern world.
Why does Trump like TikTok all of a sudden? Perhaps because Elon Musk tells him that the $44 billion he paid for Twitter made no financial sense but a whole lot of attention sense. Gather in the attention; the money and the power come later.
Shou Zi Chew, chief executive of TikTok, at Trump’s inauguration
What Trump understands is that the attention does not need to be soft and fuzzy and positive, which was the aim in the old days when attention was a passive thing bought by money. Look at what happened last week. The insults, the coarseness, the firings, alongside the promises to bring world peace and harmony and lead a unified nation. A BBC interviewer pointed out to me that there seemed to be intellectual incoherence in some of Trump’s first week. Ya don’t say!
As the Democrats lick their wounds and wonder about what their future might be, there are two vital takeaways for the more thoughtful of them. The first is that their approach to attention during the election, cautious and defensive, was 100 per cent wrong. As influential left-wing journalist Ezra Klein describes that approach: “If your choice is between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention.”
But going for no attention was a disaster and was proved to be so by the winners in 2024. As Klein adds: “The Trump side of the Republican Party believes that the volume, the sum total of attention, is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention: not only fine — maybe great, right? Because there’s so much attentional energy and conflict.”
This is not your grandfather’s attention. It is not a passive thing, an article read or a news report digested. This attention — via smartphones — seizes you. It energises and angers you. It may change your view of life, of politics, of yourself. The algorithm is the message.
Trump campaigned with this insight and will govern with it too: that’s why Hook lost his job in the middle of the night. It is also why Vladimir Putin is reading at one minute that Trump says Ukraine was wrong to fight back against the invasion and the next that Russia is losing and ought to sue for peace.
It’s keep-’em-guessing elevated to high political style. In fact more; it is actually substance. It is what Trumpism is.
But this time you get the sense as well that things might change. To regard it all as a hot mess and nothing more is to miss the effectiveness of Trump. He was consequential in his first term largely because his Supreme Court picks paved the way for the end of Roe v Wade. This time there may well be cultural changes that last, because Trump is pushing at a door which — to the distress of progressive Democrats — seems to be wide open.
Immigration is top of this category. Already Democrats are beginning a long, painful conversation about whether they want to oppose the deportation of criminals: a deportation bill named after Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, has already passed both houses of Congress and done so with the backing of Democratic politicians.
The same is likely to happen with bills mandating promotions in government based on merit rather than skin colour.
But the biggest of the Trump open doors is on sex and gender. His executive order on the subject was tightly written and clearly focused. He has not (yet) waded into the rights and wrongs of childhood gender transition, but he has expressed very clearly a desire to see trans women out of female sport and out of female prisons. Both are, according to opinion polls, popular policies. Do the Democrats want to fight to keep biological males in prisons with women?
The trans woman and Democratic activist Brianna Wu made an interesting early intervention in the debate that her party must have. She calls Trump cruel; she does not want him to attack her or other trans people. But speaking to Bari Weiss of the Free Press, she adds: “There is some good stuff in the order. There has been a fringe effort to legislate sex out of existence. I don’t want an America where women as a biological class cannot get the rights and protections they need.”
The problem — whisper it — is that for many Americans, including a fair swathe of Democratic party voters, their party has become the extremists.
Polls taken during Trump’s first week suggest some enthusiasm for the new world. A CBS poll finds nearly a quarter of Kamala Harris voters declaring themselves optimistic about the next four years. To this cross-party group, Trump is not making America great again. He is making it normal again.
They don’t want to buy Greenland, according to CBS. But the threat has their attention. At the start of the wild ride ahead, they are engaged and holding on tight.
Justin Webb, Saturday January 25 2025, 6.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times