On the same day this week that President Donald Trump was tweeting about the F.B.I.’s fictional #SPYGATE “scandal” and the special counsel’s “WITCH HUNT” into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia—lies that were splashed across the country’s television and mobile screens in short order—Senate Democrats held a photo-op at the most expensive Exxon station on Capitol Hill. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was joined by three other suit-wearing Democrats to make the case that Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal would drive up gas prices. It was a definitional middle-class “pocketbook” argument, one that Democrats hope to make part of their 2018 economic message. Schumer, waving a sheaf of paper, stood behind a sign that proclaimed, rather impotently, “Senate Democrats Demand Lower Gas Prices.”
“Senate Democrats look for traction on gas prices,” was the headline of The Hill’s perfunctory write-up of the event. Did you hear anything about it? Most likely you didn’t. Traction, in the Trump era, is a mighty difficult thing to obtain.
This is always true for the party out of power, forced to reckon with its ideological cleavages, personality conflicts, and the lack of a singular leader who can compete head-to-head with the bully pulpit of a president. But Trump, our first celebrity president, has made the challenge even more difficult for his foes. We are supposed to be living in a time of historic media fragmentation, when the competition for fickle eyeballs is the chief priority for businesses, media companies, and politicians. Only Trump, an old-school media hound who still cares about things like magazine covers and leathery-faced, 90s-era TV personalities, has figured it out. He dominates our attention universe to the point where he blocks out the sun. It is as depressing as it is remarkable. And it’s no wonder people don’t quite know what Democrats stand for.
We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass-audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that more than 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at.
On Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton won, we might just be watching the N.B.A. Playoffs or The Americans while browsing recipes on our second screen. But we live on a planet where Trump comes at us from every angle. In Trump’s world, you see something about Trump on television, while a push alert about Trump surfaces on your phone, prompting you to text your friends about Trump and post something about whatever happened on your chosen social-media account. Trump has mastered attention capture. As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.”
So when Trump claims that he is the victim of a “DEEP STATE” conspiracy designed to undercut his presidency—#SPYGATE!—our political conversation suddenly becomes premised on a lie, but his lies are nevertheless the terms of the debate. The conservative echo chamber falls in line behind Trump to amplify the noise, repeating his claims without scrutiny. Even the mainstream press slips and muddies the waters, as when The New York Times blithely repeated Rudy Giuliani’s one-sided claim that Robert Mueller plans to wrap up his investigation into whether Trump obstructed the Russia investigation by September 1. How can Democrats possibly compete with this information overload?
“The way to disempower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.”
The Democratic consultant class in Washington would like you to know, thank you very much, that its candidates running for office this year aren’t focused on Trump’s scandals, or the Russia investigation, or Stormy Daniels, or the latest indictment-of-the-week. The national media is fixated on that stuff! Regular people don’t care! Trump, Trump, Trump. Russia, Russia, Russia. It’s all you see on cable news and Twitter, tiny pockets of conversation occupied by a small class of opinion elites and thin-skinned reporters. But no, Democratic professionals are fond of tweeting; Americans are more preoccupied with day-to-day concerns like health care, gas prices, and access to affordable education.
Sure, polling bears these Democrats out. Health-care costs, the economy, and national security routinely top the list of voters’ most pressing concerns this year. Trump’s personality and conduct in office lag well behind. In last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and in subsequent special elections for local and federal seats, Democrats have been winning by talking about local issues like transportation and education.
But the undercurrent to all of this Democratic energy is Trump, and it would be folly to ignore the mounting evidence of crimes by Trump’s allies and the ongoing investigation into the president’s own conduct. It is the biggest story in the world! Democrats are showing up in primaries and special elections in numbers that well outpace their performance in previous midterm elections. Talk to any Democrat you know in real life: they are ready to crawl over broken glass to vote in November. You don’t need a poll to tell you this. And it’s because of Trump—his policies, his recklessness, his personality, and, yes, his scandals. “Anti-Trump sentiment is what’s going to drive the midterms for Democrats, in part because Trump will own the news cycle and in part because we are the opposition party,” said Tom Perriello, the former Virginia congressman and progressive activist. “That’s just how it works.”
Still, that Trump “owns the news cycle” is almost taken for granted at this point—and that’s a source of vulnerability for Democrats. The Russia investigation isn’t going anywhere, and most Americans still support it, but Trump has been ruthless about framing it the way he wants. It’s starting to have an impact, and Democrats are letting him get away with it. A poll out this week from Navigator Research, a Democratic firm, found that Americans are having a tough time seeing through the fog. While a vast majority of Americans were familiar with the investigations into Trump and his associates, a full 59 percent of Americans said they weren’t aware of the investigation uncovering any crimes. Remember: a total of 19 people and three companies have either been indicted or have pleaded guilty to criminal charges. In other words, the poll suggests that people are having a hard time making sense of the investigation.
One could argue, perhaps, that the media has done a poor job of explaining the ins and outs, but no one would accuse the media of not covering every turn of the Russia saga. Instead, with Mueller operating in silence, it’s up to Trump and the Democrats to shape the almighty “narrative” around the investigation—and Trump appears to be winning that battle. The same Navigator poll showed that the phrase most associated with the investigation—other than “Trump”—is “Witch Hunt.” What’s the Democrats’ message?
Trump doesn’t understand much, but he very much understands that simplicity and conflict win the attention war, not nuance. His shamelessness, too, is an advantage. As the Associated Press reported this week, Trump told an associate that he wanted “to brand” the F.B.I. informant who was dispatched to snoop on his campaign as a “spy,” because he believed “the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.” He went on to tweet about #SPYGATE 10 times in three days, and it’s now what the national press is talking about.
Yes, the Washington media is obsessed with the Russia investigation. But it would also be simplistic, and patronizing, to claim that people in Columbus or Sacramento or Decatur are not, or that they’re just tuning it out in favor of what’s happening in their own communities. The news today is homogenized. It used to be that all politics were local. Now all politics are national.
“This is still a mistake that Democrats make. This is a party still led largely by people who came of age in the last century rather than this one,” said Perriello. “This old idea was that ‘everyone knows their own district best’ and you can go home and have your own messages. That made sense a generation ago when people got the majority of their news from local sources. Now the vast majority of information comes from national sources and social media. Even local news is full of national-news packages. Even if we wanted to not talk about Trump, that’s not an option. The media is going to talk about Trump, and Trump is going to be the story they talk about whether we want them to or not.”
Perriello told me that Democrats should absolutely focus on health-care premiums and the fact that the tax bill overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest. But they should also be prepared to talk about the Trump investigation in a coherent way, crystallizing the fact that the sitting president of the United States has surrounded himself with grifters and criminals who have been indicted for bank fraud, conspiracy, lying to federal investigators, and whatever other charges may come. “The more it’s about Russia and the 2016 elections, that feels backwards-looking and seems like a partisan lens,” he said. “It works when it’s about corruption and crime and the fact that the president shouldn’t be above the law. . . . Trump has put his narrative out there, and quite frankly, Democrats haven’t put it out there or talked about it in effective ways. When Trump says ‘witch hunt’ or ‘deep state,’ from the Democrats you sort of get nothing. And then Mueller says nothing, so it starts to sound like maybe this is all just silly partisan politics.”
Voters still aren’t on Trump’s side—most respondents in the Navigator poll said Trump has responded poorly to the investigation, and a majority of Americans think Mueller should continue—but it’s undeniable that voters aren’t hearing a well-articulated message on the investigation from Democrats. There’s some timidity at play here. Democrats in Washington, rightfully, don’t want to be talking about the prospect of impeachment, a concept that makes Americans queasy. There’s also a fealty to the idea, especially in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss, that it’s important to stick to issues on the campaign trail instead of just talking about scandal and personality. Democratic ad-makers will argue, too, that economic issues are important for paid media, and paid media still matters in state and local races. That is correct. But they won’t cop to the fact that advertising matters less than ever in national politics. Today, it’s about capturing attention with earned media and the social conversation—and those environments are dominated by Trump and his endless rhetorical onslaught, however debased and offensive it is.
The Washington conversation has always been insular and small, far removed from the concerns of “everyday Americans,” as Clinton memorably called them. But there’s an ever-shrinking distance between local and national—a voter in a state-house district in Iowa is reading and watching the same news as a similar voter in Arizona. If Democrats are truly on offense this midterm year, they should be talking about Mueller in a smart way, as well as gas prices and health care and immigration. The sensationalism of the Trump soap opera is, whether we like it or not, what connects everyone these days, across devices and platforms and channels. It’s what we all talk about—and Democrats should be talking about it more if they don’t want to be caught by surprise come Election Day. Trump is the first attention merchant to occupy the White House, and that should not be underestimated.
Put another way: when the biggest show in the world is the Trump show, and then a new primetime program about Grandpa Chuck’s visit to a local Exxon station debuts on another network, which show do you think is getting canceled?
Peter Hamby is the host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America.
