The Democrats Are Losing A Game They Don't Seem To Know They're Playing

On Jan 7th, 2021, after a “day of love” at the Capitol, Facebook and Instagram banned Donald Trump from posting on their platforms. Twitter banned him the following day.

And while you might think Trump’s first move would be reflecting on his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution,” or maybe apologising to the families of Ashli Babbitt and the police officers who died fighting over his lies, what he actually did was launch a micro-blog called, From The Desk Of Donald J. Trump where he dropped 280 character nuggets for his followers to repost on Twitter.

And when viewership of the site dried up in less than a month, Trump got to work on a fully-fledged social media platform, Truth Social, that he still maintains today even though it’s running at a ~$327 million loss.

Because, like all good influencers, Trump understood that if he wanted to keep his audience loyal, he needed a direct channel to keep bombarding them with “alternative facts.”

Influencers aren’t powered by the truth or integrity or the need to contribute to society, they only exist if their followers are thinking about them.

As of this writing, it’s been fifty-nine days since Trump’s inauguration. And sadly, I don’t think I’ve spent a single one of them not thinking about Donald Trump.

It’s hard to believe that anyone could fit extorting the mayor of New York, threatening the territorial integrity of America’s closest allies, and launching a series of ill-considered, self-sabotaging trade wars, into such a short space of time.

But it’s even harder to believe that in that same period, I’ve barely thought about any left-leaning politicians at all, except to marvel at how painfully cringy and out of touch they can be.

Sure, Bernie Sanders has been doing great work highlighting how the Trump/Musk symbiote is screwing over veteransand farmers and Medicare recipients (as well as criticising the bipartisan corruption that makes stopping them so difficult), and yes AOC has been reminding Congress that their duty is to the people who elected them, not to Musk’s ketamine-fuelled tweets, but most Democrats have faded into the wallpaper.

And honestly, I’d almost forgotten that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz exist.

Since Trump’s inauguration, despite having a golden opportunity to say, “I told you so,” about the economic and geopolitical upheaval she predicted, Harris has tweeted just fifteen times, with precisely zero of those tweets calling out Trump’s actions since taking office.

Walz has done slightly better at thirty-one tweets, some of which even address Trump’s political insanity.

Yet Trump, even while he’s been busy aligning America with North Korea, scamming his followers with meme coins and getting punked by a four-year-old kid, has found time to post on Truth Social one-thousand and thirty-six times (yes, I counted).

And while there was a time when I’d have considered it crass to use social media activity as a metric of political relevance, there was also a time when I’d have considered it unthinkable that a man who compulsively quoted Hitler, bragged about spying on naked, underaged girls, and incited an insurrection at the Capitol, would get elected for a second term.

For better or worse — and to be clear, it’s far, far worse — politics has changed in the past ten years. Memories are short, attention spans are even shorter, and the influencer generation is old enough to vote.

And the secret of Trump’s success in this brave new world is that he never, not for one second, stops talking about what he’s planning and telling us what he’s feeling and spinning events for the maximum possible attention.

A couple of days ago, Trump got hit in the mouth with a boom mic during an interview. And his first instinct (after giving the mic operator a death stare) was to point out that, “She just made television tonight. She just became a big story…”

During the now-infamous Zelensky press conference, after spending seven minutes ensuring that no nation will ever quite trust America again, Trump’s final thought was, “This is gonna be great television, I’ll say that.”

And even when his COVID-era nemesis, Anthony Fauci, contradicted him on live TV about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, Trump wasn’t mad, all he cared about was the viewership numbers, “Wow, did you see those ratings?…They’re better than cable!”

JD Vance’s singular unlikability, Elon Musk’s burgeoning Auschwism, for years, we’ve been taught that this should be disastrous for a politician.

But Trump has never concerned himself with likability or integrity or decreasing the frequency of Nazi salutes in the world. Because attention, positive or negative, only increases the amount of time people spend thinking about him.

One of the many challenges facing the Democrats after (and even before) Harris’ loss is finding a viable challenger to Trump.