Andrew MacDougall: Trump and Elon both know how to fight attention wars
In the modern political economy, the point is to be seen. And it works. We can't look away.
By: Andrew MacDougall
Even though we live in a time where each day produces a thousand fresh outrages, the sight of Donald Trump and Elon Musk duking it out last week in full view of the public still managed to stun. What began as an offhand Musk critique of Trump’s budget, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” quickly went thermonuclear.
“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’” Trump tweeted. “I asked (Musk) to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months that I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY.”
In response, Musk called the tweet “sad,” before pulling a more box-office response out of his locker:
“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realdonaldtrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
By the end of the evening, Trump was calling Musk a drug addict and promising to cut all of Musk’s government contracts — an act that would, among other things, strand the astronauts on the International Space Station — and Musk was calling on Congress to impeach Trump and elevate Vice President J.D. Vance to the White House. It’s insane behaviour.
The scary thing for those of us doomscrolling along at home is that the sight of the president of the United States and his leading oligarch warring on social media is closer to a new normal than it is an aberration. Welcome to politics in the age where attention is the world’s most valuable resource.
At its best, politics is a battle of ideas. And while politics is also about power and the application of power, the application of power first requires the attainment of power. This used to be a competition based (mostly) on vision and policy; it was about working through a party and media structure that (mostly) screened out unserious people and ideas.
Now, politics — or, at least, political communication — is about commanding attention. It is the logical conclusion of our information economy now being dominated by powerful tech companies whose platforms offer no challenge function prior to publication and whose business models are predicated on the mass harvesting of human attention so we can, in turn, be sold to advertisers. We are all living in an Attention Economy.
To stand out in this environment as a politician (or anyone), you have to: 1) Understand the incentives and imperatives of the Attention Economy (heavy on emotion, not reason; post early and often on everything); and 2) Be comfortable violating norms. After all, you can’t stand out in a crowd by being reasonable. You don’t have a hope in hell of standing out in the online crowd if you’re reasonable. And if you can — like Donald Trump — operate entirely without shame, then the Attention Economy is your oyster. You, too, can hijack a U.S. political party and turn it into a cult.
And yet, the practice of government requires more than the commanding of attention. While politics can be done by meme, governing requires hard work applied consistently over time to solve complex problems on behalf of those who don’t have power. Government simply doesn’t move at the pace of the Attention Economy. Oh no. It is far, far more slow and painful and boring than that. And unless we move to preserve our attention, the race for it will end up corroding our politics to the point where good government becomes impossible.
The most dispiriting thing about the Trump-Musk bust-up is that the two men fell out over a very serious issue: the medium-to-long term affordability of government spending. Trump’s budget lards yet more trillions of dollars of debt onto America’s books, a move it can hardly afford as Trump conducts his various tariff wars and the Boomers prepare to withdraw en masse from the workforce. Musk is not wrong to worry about it, even if his suite of companies is no stranger to government dosh.
But instead of debating the relative policy merits of Trump vs. Musk on budget affordability, we’re stuck watching the two men slag each other off via platforms they each own. And we can’t get enough. We’re addicted to the attention game of cheap insults because our brains prefer it to the hard work of thinking about serious issues. If someone doesn’t force us to work through the serious stuff we won’t do it. It’s like putting candies and vegetables on a plate and asking a child which they’d prefer.
As the legendary investor Charlie Munger once said: “If you have a dumb incentive, you get dumb outcomes.” This is where we are now with politics and government. If shamelessness and lies are rewarded with attention (and money for the major platforms), the incentive will be to spew lies shamelessly. It’s time to change the incentives before Trump becomes the rule, not the exception.
Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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Well, I limit my exposure to Donald Trump by focusing only on corroborated news coverage (from multiple sources).
Thankfully, commenting (and reading comments) on The Line, on Paul Wells' Substack, as well as two others, as well as on the FT, are "it" when it comes to my social media experience these days.
The likes of Facebook, X and their competitors? No thanks. Too much of what you discussed in this article. Lots of heat, very little light. And, of course, juvenile "flame wars".
The fantastic blog Infinite Scroll, written by Jeremiah Johnson, called out the endgame of the attention economy way back in 2023. He focuses on MrBeast, not Trump, but it’s the same idea. I highly recommend reading this.
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/the-internet-is-for-extremism-repost
I understand Jon Haidt’s next book will be about this, once he’s done with the follow-ups from The Anxious Generation.
At some point we’ll realize that the “logical conclusion of our information economy now being dominated by powerful tech companies whose platforms offer no challenge function prior to publication and whose business models are predicated on the mass harvesting of human attention” (brilliantly phrased by the author here) is incompatible with a functioning democracy. Our chimp brains cannot handle infinite zero-cost publishing directly to supercomputers in our pockets.