How Trump wields and uses attention.He’s a master at it.

And I’d say he has a disciple, an ally, in Elon Musk.

Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly

Chris Hayes just wrote a great book called “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”

Attention; the world’s most valuable resource. 

The notion now is that at every single moment when you are competing for someone’s attention, you are competing against literally every piece of content ever produced.

Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter at $44 billion. It is not a business, as he has said himself, worth $44 billion. On the other hand, the amount of attention that he is capable of controlling and amassing

Volodymyr Zelensky is a great example of this. The president of Ukraine understands that attention on Ukraine’s plight is essentially the engine for securing the weaponry and resources his country needs to defend itself.

Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention.

And you saw this with the Harris campaign. They raised a ton of money, and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and before them, Joe Biden — before the changeover, they were just terrified of an interview going badly. And Trump and Vance — they were all over the place, including in places very hostile to them.

Vance had a ton of interviews that went badly.

But they were everywhere. Because they cared about the volume of attention and were completely fine with the energy that negative attention could unlock.

I  /Chris Hayes/ think this is the key transformational insight of Donald Trump to politics.

Ezra Klein New York Times 17 January 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html

Tillbaka till Rolfs länktips 19 januari 2025

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/01/rolfs-lanktips-19-januari-2025.html