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The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

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The first step in winning a public debate, indeed in any effective communication, is to get attention for your message. But that in and of itself is not enough. Attention is the means, not the end, because the end is persuasion. Once you have people’s attention, then you can try to persuade them with your evidence and arguments.This, at least, is the traditional model of communication. The trouble is, this basic model has fallen apart. It is crumbling to dust before our eyes, though we have a hard time accepting how far gone it is. The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen.Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.This transformation has been a long time in the making. Before the digital age there was the TV age. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, the author Neil Postman argued that for its first 150 years the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium – pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons – structured not only public discourse but the institutions of democracy itself. TV destroyed all that, Postman argued, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was literally meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”Postman first settled on his argument while working on an essay about two different dystopian visions of the future that had been offered in the mid-20th century: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Postman’s insight was that these two books, though often grouped together, portray very different dystopias. In Orwell’s vision, all information is tightly controlled by the state, and people have access only to the narrow, bludgeoning propaganda that is force-fed to them. Huxley’s vision was the opposite. In Brave New World, the problem isn’t too little information but too much, or at least too much entertainment and distraction. “What Orwell feared,” Postman writes, “were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The key insight that propels Postman’s now-classic work is that Huxley described the future much better than Orwell.View image in fullscreenPostman didn’t quite frame his argument in terms of attention, but what I take from it is that in competitive attention markets, amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it. By the 1980s, the dominant mode of political communication was the minute-long ad, and Postman’s central point, that it’s a long way down from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, where the two challengers for the Illinois state senate squared off in 90-minute speeches, to Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial, seems irrefutable.A little more than two decades after Postman published his book, the US writer George Saunders developed some of its themes in an essay about the bleating idiocy of American mass media in the era after 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq war. In it, he offers a thought experiment.Imagine, Saunders says, being at a cocktail party, with the normal give-and-take of conversation between generally genial, informed people. And then “a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well:“Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general (‘We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!’), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking (‘Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?’), the gossipy (‘Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!’), and the trivial (‘Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?’).”Yes, Saunders wrote that in 2007, and yes, it sounds uncannily like the spoken patter of a certain US president, doesn’t it? But Saunders’ critique runs deeper than the insidious triviality and loudness of major TV news. He’s making the case that the sophistication of our thinking is determined to a large degree by the sophistication of the language we hear used to describe our world.This is not a new contention: the idea that dumb media make us all dumber was part of the very earliest critiques of newspapers, pamphlets and the tabloid press in the late 18th century, and has continued right up to the present day. I once thought, along with many others, that the internet was going to solve this problem. No more gatekeepers, no more relying on the crass commercial calculations of megacorporations about what audiences want. We, the public at large, were going to seize back the means of communication. We were going to remake the world through democratic global conversations. Now, the wisdom of crowds would rule.That’s not what happened. The internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that for too long had been controlled by far too narrow (too white, too male, too affluent) a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to a more serious, thoughtful era. The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in the mode that Postman pined for.As for the guy with the megaphone prattling on about the cheese cubes? Well, rather than take that one guy’s megaphone away, we just gave everyone at the party their own megaphone. And guess what: that didn’t much improve things! Everyone had to shout to be heard, and the conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans. The effect is so disorienting that after a long period of scrolling through social media you’re likely to feel a profound sense of vertigo.Not only that: the people screaming the loudest still get the most attention. And it was in this setting that the guy with the loudest megaphone, the most desperate, keening need for attention in perhaps the entire history of the United States, rose to power.It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump. You simply cannot write about how the rise of attention as the most valuable resource has changed our politics without writing about Trump. He is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age. He seemed to sense intuitively – born of a combination of his experience with the New York City tabloids and his own psychological needs – that attention is all that matters.This is not typically true for politicians. Yes, they need to attract attention to have sufficient name recognition, but that is just a first step. A politician needs attention as a means of getting people to like him and vote for him. Of course, if you are only concerned with maximising the amount of attention you receive, there are all kinds of things you can do to get that attention. The problem is that, in the traditional model, not all attention is good. There are ways to get attention – running through your district naked – that are foolproof for the limited goal of getting attention, but would probably hurt you in your attempt to persuade your neighbours to vote for you.Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing. In that race to become the Republican nominee, his competitors found the entire spectacle infuriating. No matter what they did – unveil a new plan for tax policy, give a speech on America’s role in the world – the questions they faced were about Donald Trump. Tim Miller, who worked on Jeb Bush’s campaign, recounts that he had a staff member track in a spreadsheet all of the media mentions of Bush. By far the biggest category was mentions of Bush reacting to Trump. Trump was the attentional sun around which all the other candidates orbited, and they knew it. There was no way to escape the gravitational pull, no matter what they did. And of course whatever you said about Trump – criticism, sarcasm, praise – it was all just further directing attention to Trump.Unlike love or recognition, attention can be positive or negative. Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse.View image in fullscreenThere was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs. Here’s a concrete example: in 2016, polling tended to show that Republicans were more trusted on the issue of immigration than Democrats. Trump wanted to raise the amount of attention paid to the issue, and to that end he was constantly saying wild and hateful things on the topic. In the first few minutes of his very first speech, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and other criminals to the US, an accusation both ludicrous and offensive enough that it immediately led several businesses and organisations (including NBC, which aired The Apprentice) to cut ties with him. But that was just the beginning. As a standard part of his stump speech, he infamously promised to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile expanse of the US-Mexico border and, even more absurdly, claimed he would make Mexico pay for it. In June of that year, a  Gallup poll found 66% of Americans were opposed to building a wall along the whole southern border.You would think, given those polling numbers, that Trump would not keep hammering the issue. But his continued insistence on the policy reliably attracted attention to the issue of immigration, in which, as a general matter, Republicans had an advantage over Democrats. When he attacked the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit, it was despicable and bigoted, but also another opportunity to attract attention to immigration.Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds – with the size of the word corresponding to the frequency of response – Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails”, while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience.In 2024, Trump more or less reprised this model. While polling showed his popularity and approval edging up a bit from what it was during his presidency, his negatives – as pollsters call them – remained high for a successful candidate. Certainly higher than, say, Mitt Romney in 2012. But once again his domination of public attention was near total. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, enthusiastically threw himself into Trump’s campaign using both $250m dollars in direct campaign expenditures and the manipulation and domination of the attention platform X. Recent polling shows that Musk’s favourability has plummeted as his antics draw more attention, but in the end the attention is the point. It worked.As the old models for how to win attention and how to use it erode, we are left with a struggle for attention itself, a war of all against all, in every moment. Despite being embedded in the attention age, despite our lamentations of its effects, and our phone addictions, and our addled, distracted mental states, I think we all still retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens. We are still thinking in terms of “debate” – a back-and-forth, or a conversation, or discussion.But that is not at all what’s happening. Trump is a terrible debater in any classical understanding of the term. He doesn’t engage, he doesn’t construct logical refutations and rebuttals. In fact, it’s striking when you transcribe anything he says how syntactically odd it is, full of ellipses and self-interruptions. Often at the sentence level, what he is saying is nearly devoid of propositional content. What he does is shtick, salesman patter, Borscht Belt insult comedy and ad slogans. What he wants more than anything is for you to pay attention to him.Attentional imperatives feel as though they have fully swallowed informational ones. In ways large and small, we are seeing the erosion of the last vestiges of a functional attentional regime – one that would guide the basic mechanics of, say, selecting who should be the lone political figure elected by all citizens to represent the country.Here’s an example. During the early months of 2024, Joe Biden’s policy of full US support for Israel’s military response to Hamas’s 7 October atrocity began to fracture the Democratic coalition, as the sheer monstrous reality of its effect on Gazan civilians became clear. This was all happening in a presidential election year in which the Republican party already had a de facto nominee in Donald Trump. Under those conditions, you expect a robust debate to emerge between the two likely nominees over this signature foreign policy issue. So what was Donald Trump’s position on US support for Israel’s Gaza offensive?He largely avoided articulating one. Usually, when asked about it, he would say: “If I were president this never would have happened,” and move on. And while it was clear he would be supportive of the Netanyahu government’s war efforts (saying he wanted to allow them to “finish the job”), the Trump campaign never presented any kind of position paper or comprehensive vision of its policy. Mostly, it was a bunch of often contradictory rhetorical gestures and evasions. Under those conditions, how exactly are voters supposed to even begin to evaluate what they would be voting for?Trump was able to get away with this at least in part because of the sharp decline in the ability of the political press to effectively focus national attention. In the past, it would use that power to ends I found maddening – focusing on trivial scandals or ephemeral horse-race questions – but as an institution, what used to be called the campaign press or the national political press did have the ability to commandeer the public’s attention.This shaped how campaigns campaigned and how candidates acted. In the summer of 2008, Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. Both John McCain and Barack Obama, their respective party’s nominees, staked out positions on how to respond. The Republican McCain took a maximalist position of confrontation, while the Democrats’ Obama stressed diplomacy and working with allies to isolate Russia. The campaigns put out position papers, and the candidates gave speeches and organised background phone calls with reporters to flesh out their views.That kind of approach – here’s a pressing issue of the day, here’s where I stand on it – is almost entirely gone now. We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club. The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.Because focus is harder and harder to sustain in the attention age, it is thus more and more important. Which stories and issues obtain disproportionate public attention will have enormous consequences for how government functions and what choices our elected representatives will make.This simple truth has profound implications for our civic health. Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is very different from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society. This tension is the central challenge of working in the attention industry, as I do. We in the news business have, to borrow the phrase used to describe the work of the Federal Reserve, a dual mandate: we must keep people’s attention and tell them things that are important for self-governance in a democratic society. And like the Fed trying to keep both inflation and unemployment low, we must try to do both even when there’s a direct trade-off between the two.Here’s just one example of the challenge, repeated in some form or another nearly every single day of the 13 years I’ve been hosting a cable news show.On 18 June 2023, a small deep-ocean submersible called the Titan lost communications contact after it departed for a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in the North Atlantic. The five passengers inside the minivan-size pod had about 96 hours of oxygen, and quickly a massive multinational rescue mission set out to find them before their air ran out.View image in fullscreenIt was immediately clear that this was going to be a huge story, particularly on TV news. It had a set of features that reliably grab and hold attention. First, there was the suspense inherent in the plight of the five passengers: what would happen to them? Situations in which people are trapped alive and rescuers race to save them always draw big audiences. Then there’s the general fascination with transport disasters – sunk ships, plane crashes – not to mention the fact that this was all taking place around the wreckage of the Titanic itself, probably the single most iconic disaster in history.And of course, the story did produce enormous audience demand and wall-to-wall coverage. But as the search dragged on, people began to rebel against the disproportionality of the coverage. During that very same week there had been another awful maritime disaster: a fishing boat filled with hundreds of migrants from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria capsized in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Italy. Hundreds of men, women and children died, all as a Greek coastguard ship watched nearby and did not rescue them. It was by no means the first such incident; this had become a gruesome regular occurrence in the Mediterranean.And yet the boat full of hundreds of migrants had received a tiny sliver of the coverage of the five people inside the Titan who, it would turn out, had died when it imploded early in its journey. As the coverage of the submersible took over the news cycle, there emerged another subgenre of pieces making this very point – that there was something profoundly dehumanising and wrong about so much attention being paid to the plight of five affluent tourists while hundreds of desperate migrants drowned in silence.Viewed coldly – and with as many years in the attention business as I have, I can’t help myself – the pieces about the double standard of the coverage were themselves pieces about the submersible, an attempt to capture the wind of attention gusting toward that story and then use it to power interest in another direction. When the New Republic ran one of the dozens of these pieces – “The media cares more about the Titanic sub than drowned migrants” – people noted that the New Republic itself hadn’t to date published any stories on the Greek migrant boat other than that one.Without concerted effort, habit and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be worthy bear no relation to one another. They may sometimes overlap by happy accident, but they are more often than not as estranged as id and superego. We have a robust vocabulary to describe the category of things we find gripping but morally dubious: “titillating”, “lurid”, “prurient” and so on. This is the category that occupies an enormous amount of the attention economy. The lurid and titillating are what tend to drive the evening news; they are the stories that we now describe as clickbait and once called “tabloid”.There are consequences to where public attention flows. To go back to the two disasters at sea, once the story of the Titan’s loss of communication went public, an enormous search and rescue effort was undertaken by the US, Canadian and French governments. It’s hard to get a solid estimate on how much money the governments spent, but it was certainly millions of dollars. These are real material commitments that come as a direct result of the attentional imperatives. No such concerted rescue effort attended the capsized migrant boat.This is just one example, but it serves as a kind of allegory. In nearly all areas of policy, from the smallest local township to the federal government, money follows attention, and the literal cost of a life depends in no small part on how attention-grabbing the death was.Nowhere is the problem of attention more obvious and urgent than when it comes to climate change. According to our best estimates, it’s probably the hottest it’s been on the planet in 150,000 years. The effects of climate change are visible, sometimes spectacularly so, but climate change itself – the slow, steady, invisible accretion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – is literally imperceptible to human faculties. It is almost the opposite of a siren. It evades our attention rather than compelling it. None of our five senses can detect it.It’s striking that when film-maker Adam McKay wanted to make a Hollywood blockbuster film about climate change, one that had to hold viewers’ attention for two-plus hours, he chose to tell the story via an allegory about a comet speeding toward Earth that would destroy the planet and extinguish all human life. One of the most dramatic moments in Don’t Look Up is when the comet appears in the sky. People notice it, traffic stops, and drivers and passengers emerge from their cars to gaze up in awe and terror. I loved this movie, but the thing about climate change is precisely that it never gives us that specific moment. We have charts to look at and pictures of droughts, and wildfire smoke, and glaciers calving. Heatwaves shut down airports and kill people in their homes. But we can’t see or hear the actual thing itself. There is no single moment, like the moment the comet appears in the sky, or the moment the second plane flew into the twin towers, that will be the moment when we realise the scale of the disaster.Climate activists around the world have taken increasingly desperate measures to produce the kind of spectacle that will focus public attention. Some have taken to parking themselves in the middle of a road, binding themselves to each other with their arms handcuffed together inside tubes, refusing to move. Traffic builds up, people get angry and eventually news cameras arrive. Then there are the museum protests in which a few climate activists enter a museum and throw soup or paint on a famous work of art, which seem designed to create a sense of shock and revulsion. Other protests have disrupted concerts or sports contests.View image in fullscreenThe reaction to these efforts is almost uniformly negative: this doesn’t help the cause! This only alienates people who view you as weirdos and freaks, negatively polarising precisely the people you want to persuade! Which: fine. Sure. But the sheer, desperate, cri de coeur, FOR-THE-LOVE-OF-GOD-PAY-ATTENTION thrust of these demonstrations captures something objectively true: we’re hurtling toward disaster and no one seems to be giving it anywhere near the level of attention we should be.These disruptions are designed to make the same kind of trade that Trump pulled off so successfully. What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention? Who cares if people have a negative reaction so long as they have some reaction? You can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Those are the choices in the Hobbesian war of all against all in the attention age, and it’s very hard for me to blame these people for choosing the latter. Adapted from The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes, published by Scribe More

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    The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

    The first step in winning a public debate, indeed in any effective communication, is to get attention for your message. But that in and of itself is not enough. Attention is the means, not the end, because the end is persuasion. Once you have people’s attention, then you can try to persuade them with your evidence and arguments.This, at least, is the traditional model of communication. The trouble is, this basic model has fallen apart. It is crumbling to dust before our eyes, though we have a hard time accepting how far gone it is. The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen.Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.This transformation has been a long time in the making. Before the digital age there was the TV age. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, the author Neil Postman argued that for its first 150 years the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium – pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons – structured not only public discourse but the institutions of democracy itself. TV destroyed all that, Postman argued, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was literally meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”Postman first settled on his argument while working on an essay about two different dystopian visions of the future that had been offered in the mid-20th century: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Postman’s insight was that these two books, though often grouped together, portray very different dystopias. In Orwell’s vision, all information is tightly controlled by the state, and people have access only to the narrow, bludgeoning propaganda that is force-fed to them. Huxley’s vision was the opposite. In Brave New World, the problem isn’t too little information but too much, or at least too much entertainment and distraction. “What Orwell feared,” Postman writes, “were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The key insight that propels Postman’s now-classic work is that Huxley described the future much better than Orwell.View image in fullscreenPostman didn’t quite frame his argument in terms of attention, but what I take from it is that in competitive attention markets, amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it. By the 1980s, the dominant mode of political communication was the minute-long ad, and Postman’s central point, that it’s a long way down from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, where the two challengers for the Illinois state senate squared off in 90-minute speeches, to Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial, seems irrefutable.A little more than two decades after Postman published his book, the US writer George Saunders developed some of its themes in an essay about the bleating idiocy of American mass media in the era after 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq war. In it, he offers a thought experiment.Imagine, Saunders says, being at a cocktail party, with the normal give-and-take of conversation between generally genial, informed people. And then “a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well:“Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general (‘We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!’), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking (‘Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?’), the gossipy (‘Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!’), and the trivial (‘Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?’).”Yes, Saunders wrote that in 2007, and yes, it sounds uncannily like the spoken patter of a certain US president, doesn’t it? But Saunders’ critique runs deeper than the insidious triviality and loudness of major TV news. He’s making the case that the sophistication of our thinking is determined to a large degree by the sophistication of the language we hear used to describe our world.This is not a new contention: the idea that dumb media make us all dumber was part of the very earliest critiques of newspapers, pamphlets and the tabloid press in the late 18th century, and has continued right up to the present day. I once thought, along with many others, that the internet was going to solve this problem. No more gatekeepers, no more relying on the crass commercial calculations of megacorporations about what audiences want. We, the public at large, were going to seize back the means of communication. We were going to remake the world through democratic global conversations. Now, the wisdom of crowds would rule.That’s not what happened. The internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that for too long had been controlled by far too narrow (too white, too male, too affluent) a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to a more serious, thoughtful era. The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in the mode that Postman pined for.As for the guy with the megaphone prattling on about the cheese cubes? Well, rather than take that one guy’s megaphone away, we just gave everyone at the party their own megaphone. And guess what: that didn’t much improve things! Everyone had to shout to be heard, and the conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans. The effect is so disorienting that after a long period of scrolling through social media you’re likely to feel a profound sense of vertigo.Not only that: the people screaming the loudest still get the most attention. And it was in this setting that the guy with the loudest megaphone, the most desperate, keening need for attention in perhaps the entire history of the United States, rose to power.It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump. You simply cannot write about how the rise of attention as the most valuable resource has changed our politics without writing about Trump. He is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age. He seemed to sense intuitively – born of a combination of his experience with the New York City tabloids and his own psychological needs – that attention is all that matters.This is not typically true for politicians. Yes, they need to attract attention to have sufficient name recognition, but that is just a first step. A politician needs attention as a means of getting people to like him and vote for him. Of course, if you are only concerned with maximising the amount of attention you receive, there are all kinds of things you can do to get that attention. The problem is that, in the traditional model, not all attention is good. There are ways to get attention – running through your district naked – that are foolproof for the limited goal of getting attention, but would probably hurt you in your attempt to persuade your neighbours to vote for you.Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing. In that race to become the Republican nominee, his competitors found the entire spectacle infuriating. No matter what they did – unveil a new plan for tax policy, give a speech on America’s role in the world – the questions they faced were about Donald Trump. Tim Miller, who worked on Jeb Bush’s campaign, recounts that he had a staff member track in a spreadsheet all of the media mentions of Bush. By far the biggest category was mentions of Bush reacting to Trump. Trump was the attentional sun around which all the other candidates orbited, and they knew it. There was no way to escape the gravitational pull, no matter what they did. And of course whatever you said about Trump – criticism, sarcasm, praise – it was all just further directing attention to Trump.Unlike love or recognition, attention can be positive or negative. Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse.View image in fullscreenThere was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs. Here’s a concrete example: in 2016, polling tended to show that Republicans were more trusted on the issue of immigration than Democrats. Trump wanted to raise the amount of attention paid to the issue, and to that end he was constantly saying wild and hateful things on the topic. In the first few minutes of his very first speech, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and other criminals to the US, an accusation both ludicrous and offensive enough that it immediately led several businesses and organisations (including NBC, which aired The Apprentice) to cut ties with him. But that was just the beginning. As a standard part of his stump speech, he infamously promised to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile expanse of the US-Mexico border and, even more absurdly, claimed he would make Mexico pay for it. In June of that year, a  Gallup poll found 66% of Americans were opposed to building a wall along the whole southern border.You would think, given those polling numbers, that Trump would not keep hammering the issue. But his continued insistence on the policy reliably attracted attention to the issue of immigration, in which, as a general matter, Republicans had an advantage over Democrats. When he attacked the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit, it was despicable and bigoted, but also another opportunity to attract attention to immigration.Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds – with the size of the word corresponding to the frequency of response – Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails”, while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience.In 2024, Trump more or less reprised this model. While polling showed his popularity and approval edging up a bit from what it was during his presidency, his negatives – as pollsters call them – remained high for a successful candidate. Certainly higher than, say, Mitt Romney in 2012. But once again his domination of public attention was near total. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, enthusiastically threw himself into Trump’s campaign using both $250m dollars in direct campaign expenditures and the manipulation and domination of the attention platform X. Recent polling shows that Musk’s favourability has plummeted as his antics draw more attention, but in the end the attention is the point. It worked.As the old models for how to win attention and how to use it erode, we are left with a struggle for attention itself, a war of all against all, in every moment. Despite being embedded in the attention age, despite our lamentations of its effects, and our phone addictions, and our addled, distracted mental states, I think we all still retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens. We are still thinking in terms of “debate” – a back-and-forth, or a conversation, or discussion.But that is not at all what’s happening. Trump is a terrible debater in any classical understanding of the term. He doesn’t engage, he doesn’t construct logical refutations and rebuttals. In fact, it’s striking when you transcribe anything he says how syntactically odd it is, full of ellipses and self-interruptions. Often at the sentence level, what he is saying is nearly devoid of propositional content. What he does is shtick, salesman patter, Borscht Belt insult comedy and ad slogans. What he wants more than anything is for you to pay attention to him.Attentional imperatives feel as though they have fully swallowed informational ones. In ways large and small, we are seeing the erosion of the last vestiges of a functional attentional regime – one that would guide the basic mechanics of, say, selecting who should be the lone political figure elected by all citizens to represent the country.Here’s an example. During the early months of 2024, Joe Biden’s policy of full US support for Israel’s military response to Hamas’s 7 October atrocity began to fracture the Democratic coalition, as the sheer monstrous reality of its effect on Gazan civilians became clear. This was all happening in a presidential election year in which the Republican party already had a de facto nominee in Donald Trump. Under those conditions, you expect a robust debate to emerge between the two likely nominees over this signature foreign policy issue. So what was Donald Trump’s position on US support for Israel’s Gaza offensive?He largely avoided articulating one. Usually, when asked about it, he would say: “If I were president this never would have happened,” and move on. And while it was clear he would be supportive of the Netanyahu government’s war efforts (saying he wanted to allow them to “finish the job”), the Trump campaign never presented any kind of position paper or comprehensive vision of its policy. Mostly, it was a bunch of often contradictory rhetorical gestures and evasions. Under those conditions, how exactly are voters supposed to even begin to evaluate what they would be voting for?Trump was able to get away with this at least in part because of the sharp decline in the ability of the political press to effectively focus national attention. In the past, it would use that power to ends I found maddening – focusing on trivial scandals or ephemeral horse-race questions – but as an institution, what used to be called the campaign press or the national political press did have the ability to commandeer the public’s attention.This shaped how campaigns campaigned and how candidates acted. In the summer of 2008, Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. Both John McCain and Barack Obama, their respective party’s nominees, staked out positions on how to respond. The Republican McCain took a maximalist position of confrontation, while the Democrats’ Obama stressed diplomacy and working with allies to isolate Russia. The campaigns put out position papers, and the candidates gave speeches and organised background phone calls with reporters to flesh out their views.That kind of approach – here’s a pressing issue of the day, here’s where I stand on it – is almost entirely gone now. We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club. The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.Because focus is harder and harder to sustain in the attention age, it is thus more and more important. Which stories and issues obtain disproportionate public attention will have enormous consequences for how government functions and what choices our elected representatives will make.This simple truth has profound implications for our civic health. Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is very different from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society. This tension is the central challenge of working in the attention industry, as I do. We in the news business have, to borrow the phrase used to describe the work of the Federal Reserve, a dual mandate: we must keep people’s attention and tell them things that are important for self-governance in a democratic society. And like the Fed trying to keep both inflation and unemployment low, we must try to do both even when there’s a direct trade-off between the two.Here’s just one example of the challenge, repeated in some form or another nearly every single day of the 13 years I’ve been hosting a cable news show.On 18 June 2023, a small deep-ocean submersible called the Titan lost communications contact after it departed for a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in the North Atlantic. The five passengers inside the minivan-size pod had about 96 hours of oxygen, and quickly a massive multinational rescue mission set out to find them before their air ran out.View image in fullscreenIt was immediately clear that this was going to be a huge story, particularly on TV news. It had a set of features that reliably grab and hold attention. First, there was the suspense inherent in the plight of the five passengers: what would happen to them? Situations in which people are trapped alive and rescuers race to save them always draw big audiences. Then there’s the general fascination with transport disasters – sunk ships, plane crashes – not to mention the fact that this was all taking place around the wreckage of the Titanic itself, probably the single most iconic disaster in history.And of course, the story did produce enormous audience demand and wall-to-wall coverage. But as the search dragged on, people began to rebel against the disproportionality of the coverage. During that very same week there had been another awful maritime disaster: a fishing boat filled with hundreds of migrants from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria capsized in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Italy. Hundreds of men, women and children died, all as a Greek coastguard ship watched nearby and did not rescue them. It was by no means the first such incident; this had become a gruesome regular occurrence in the Mediterranean.And yet the boat full of hundreds of migrants had received a tiny sliver of the coverage of the five people inside the Titan who, it would turn out, had died when it imploded early in its journey. As the coverage of the submersible took over the news cycle, there emerged another subgenre of pieces making this very point – that there was something profoundly dehumanising and wrong about so much attention being paid to the plight of five affluent tourists while hundreds of desperate migrants drowned in silence.Viewed coldly – and with as many years in the attention business as I have, I can’t help myself – the pieces about the double standard of the coverage were themselves pieces about the submersible, an attempt to capture the wind of attention gusting toward that story and then use it to power interest in another direction. When the New Republic ran one of the dozens of these pieces – “The media cares more about the Titanic sub than drowned migrants” – people noted that the New Republic itself hadn’t to date published any stories on the Greek migrant boat other than that one.Without concerted effort, habit and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be worthy bear no relation to one another. They may sometimes overlap by happy accident, but they are more often than not as estranged as id and superego. We have a robust vocabulary to describe the category of things we find gripping but morally dubious: “titillating”, “lurid”, “prurient” and so on. This is the category that occupies an enormous amount of the attention economy. The lurid and titillating are what tend to drive the evening news; they are the stories that we now describe as clickbait and once called “tabloid”.There are consequences to where public attention flows. To go back to the two disasters at sea, once the story of the Titan’s loss of communication went public, an enormous search and rescue effort was undertaken by the US, Canadian and French governments. It’s hard to get a solid estimate on how much money the governments spent, but it was certainly millions of dollars. These are real material commitments that come as a direct result of the attentional imperatives. No such concerted rescue effort attended the capsized migrant boat.This is just one example, but it serves as a kind of allegory. In nearly all areas of policy, from the smallest local township to the federal government, money follows attention, and the literal cost of a life depends in no small part on how attention-grabbing the death was.Nowhere is the problem of attention more obvious and urgent than when it comes to climate change. According to our best estimates, it’s probably the hottest it’s been on the planet in 150,000 years. The effects of climate change are visible, sometimes spectacularly so, but climate change itself – the slow, steady, invisible accretion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – is literally imperceptible to human faculties. It is almost the opposite of a siren. It evades our attention rather than compelling it. None of our five senses can detect it.It’s striking that when film-maker Adam McKay wanted to make a Hollywood blockbuster film about climate change, one that had to hold viewers’ attention for two-plus hours, he chose to tell the story via an allegory about a comet speeding toward Earth that would destroy the planet and extinguish all human life. One of the most dramatic moments in Don’t Look Up is when the comet appears in the sky. People notice it, traffic stops, and drivers and passengers emerge from their cars to gaze up in awe and terror. I loved this movie, but the thing about climate change is precisely that it never gives us that specific moment. We have charts to look at and pictures of droughts, and wildfire smoke, and glaciers calving. Heatwaves shut down airports and kill people in their homes. But we can’t see or hear the actual thing itself. There is no single moment, like the moment the comet appears in the sky, or the moment the second plane flew into the twin towers, that will be the moment when we realise the scale of the disaster.Climate activists around the world have taken increasingly desperate measures to produce the kind of spectacle that will focus public attention. Some have taken to parking themselves in the middle of a road, binding themselves to each other with their arms handcuffed together inside tubes, refusing to move. Traffic builds up, people get angry and eventually news cameras arrive. Then there are the museum protests in which a few climate activists enter a museum and throw soup or paint on a famous work of art, which seem designed to create a sense of shock and revulsion. Other protests have disrupted concerts or sports contests.View image in fullscreenThe reaction to these efforts is almost uniformly negative: this doesn’t help the cause! This only alienates people who view you as weirdos and freaks, negatively polarising precisely the people you want to persuade! Which: fine. Sure. But the sheer, desperate, cri de coeur, FOR-THE-LOVE-OF-GOD-PAY-ATTENTION thrust of these demonstrations captures something objectively true: we’re hurtling toward disaster and no one seems to be giving it anywhere near the level of attention we should be.These disruptions are designed to make the same kind of trade that Trump pulled off so successfully. What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention? Who cares if people have a negative reaction so long as they have some reaction? You can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Those are the choices in the Hobbesian war of all against all in the attention age, and it’s very hard for me to blame these people for choosing the latter. Adapted from The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes, published by Scribe More

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    Trump justice department fires officials who worked for prosecutor Jack Smith

    The acting attorney general, James McHenry, on Monday fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on the two criminal cases against Donald Trump, saying they could not be trusted to implement the president’s agenda for the justice department, two people familiar with the matter said.The precise extent of the firings were unclear because the department did not disclose names. At the time the cases were dismissed last year, after Trump won the election, special counsel Jack Smith had 18 prosecutors attached to his team.The purge was not unexpected given Trump had vowed, on the campaign trail, to fire Smith. But the abrupt firings were jarring as the acting attorney general took aim at career prosecutors who had served at the department who in theory had civil service protections for their jobs.Smith charged Trump in two criminal cases: in Florida, for mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and defying a subpoena commanding their return; and in Washington, for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In the termination notices transmitted to the prosecutors who worked on Smith’s team, McHenry wrote that they were being let go as a result of their “significant role in prosecuting President Trump” which meant they could not be trusted to “assist in faithfully implementing the president’s agenda”.The termination of Smith’s team comes as major personnel changes shook the deputy attorney general’s office, where the top career official, Brad Weinsheimer, was informed he could either be reassigned to a less powerful post or resign, according to a person familiar with the matter.Weinsheimer, a highly respected veteran of the justice department, was appointed to his current role on an interim basis by Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, which was made permanent by Trump’s final attorney general, Bill Barr.But Trump has since soured on Sessions and Barr, and their endorsements appear to have been of no help to Weinsheimer as the new Trump administration moves to clear the senior leadership of the justice department as they prepare to use it to enforce Trump’s personal and political agenda.The White House and a justice department spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment on the personnel moves, which were earlier reported by Fox News.Shortly after Trump announced his presidential bid in November 2022, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed Smith to serve as a special counsel overseeing the investigation of Trump. Smith resigned before Trump took office.In a report released this month, Smith concluded that the president engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election, but was thwarted in bringing the case to trial by Trump’s November election victory. Smith also investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left the White House, filing a second federal lawsuit in Florida.Trump’s lawyers have called Smith’s report politically motivated. The president denies any wrongdoing in the cases, both of which Smith dropped shortly after Trump’s election win, citingThe two special counsel investigations resulted in indictments, but Smith dropped the cases against Trump after the election, citing a longstanding justice department policy that prohibits the prosecution of a sitting president.In a separate development, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that a Trump-appointed prosecutor had opened an internal review of the justice department’s decision to charge hundreds of January 6 defendants with felony obstruction offenses in connection with the 2021 attack on the US Capitol. More

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    Giuliani says he has settled defamation dispute and will keep Florida condo

    Rudy Giuliani’s trial over whether he must turn over his Florida condo and other prized possessions to former Georgia election workers whom he defamed was delayed on Thursday after the former New York mayor failed to show up in court.Giuliani later shared on X that he had “reached a resolution of the litigation with the plaintiffs that will result in a satisfaction of the plaintiffs’ judgment”.“This resolution does not involve an admission of liability or wrongdoing by any of the parties. I am satisfied with and have no grievances relating to the result we have reached,” he wrote.“I have been able to retain my New York co-op and Florida condominium and all of my personal belongings. No one deserves to be subjected to threats, harassment, or intimidation. This litigation has taken its toll on all parties. This whole episode was unfortunate. I and the plaintiffs have agreed not to ever talk about each other in any defamatory manner, and I urge others to do the same.”A jury ordered Giuliani to pay $148.1m to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss in 2023 after he falsely accused the women of attempting to steal the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.Giuliani, who has shown little remorse for his actions, later turned over multiple watches as well as a 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 once owned by the movie star Lauren Bacall to Freeman and Moss.A federal judge in New York had been scheduled to weigh whether Giuliani must also turn over his condo in Palm Beach, which he claims to be his permanent residence. The non-jury civil trial was also set also determine whether Giuliani must hand over three New York Yankees World Series rings to the two women.Per Giuliani’s post on X, it appears that he was not forced to turn over his condo or World Series rings.Earlier this week, Judge Lewis Liman ordered that Giuliani’s son Andrew must hold on to the rings as the trial gets under way, saying, “The point was to ensure the security of the rings,” ABC reports.This month, Giuliani, who has been disbarred in New York and Washington DC, has so far been found in contempt of court twice.Last week, Liman issued his ruling after Giuliani failed to provide financial evidence surrounding his $148m judgment, saying: “The defendant has attempted to run the clock by stalling.” At the hearing, Giuliani acknowledged that he did not always comply with the requests for information, arguing that he regarded them as a “trap” set by lawyers.Later that week, Giuliani was once again found in contempt of court for continuing to spread false statements about Freeman and Moss. Federal judge Beryl Howell in Washington DC said Giuliani had violated court orders that prevented him from defaming the two women.Giuliani’s attorney, Ted Goodman, said in response: “This is an important point that many Americans still don’t realize due to biased coverage and a campaign to silence Mayor Giuliani. This contempt ruling is designed to prevent Mayor Giuliani from exercising his constitutional rights.”After the verdict in 2023, Freeman and Moss detailed their harrowing experiences as a result of Giuliani’s lies against them. Freeman said: “I want people to understand this: money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with … I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.” More

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    Jack Smith’s final letter on Trump case offers little consolation and less justice

    A forlorn note from Jack Smith to Merrick Garland, the attorney general, provides a poignant epitaph into the unfulfilled and ultimately fruitless two-year criminal investigation into Donald Trump.“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters,” the special prosecutor wrote in a letter attached to the 137-page report, which concludes that the president-elect would have been criminally convicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election if he had not been re-elected four years later.“I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”With Trump less than a week away from returning to the White House after having tried to stay there by resorting to foul play, there is a certain pathos to Smith’s insistence that his endeavours were not in vain.There is also an irony that his incongruously hopeful message should be addressed to Garland.The attorney general – despite being another of Trump’s frequent targets – has faced criticism for his handling of the investigation into the former and future president, including from Joe Biden, who Trump has insistently and falsely accused of using his constitutional power to orchestrate the special prosecutor’s investigation into him.Far from that being the case, Biden is reported to have voiced regret for appointing Garland – a former judge who maintains a scrupulously above-the-political-fray posture – believing that he waited too long to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Trump.That delay ultimately led to the investigation running out of time, as Trump and his legal team used repeated delaying tactics to run down the clock in the calculation that Smith’s work would be overtaken by the election – as ultimately proved the case.“Merrick Garland is the greatest failure of an Attorney General in the modern era,” Dean Obeidallah, a liberal podcaster and broadcaster, posted on X following the report’s publication, repeating an earlier comment he made on MSNBC.“Smith had tons of evidence to convict Trump but Garland prevented for more than a year an investigation into Trump.”The messy ending is cruelly unsatisfactory for those who died as a result of the violent frenzy that unfolded as a pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol on January 6, with the goal of keeping their man in the White House.Meanwhile those who sat on the House of Representatives’ select committee that investigated the attack are left to hope that Biden will issue a pardon in his last few days in office to protect them from the wrath of Trump, who has said at least one of its members, Liz Cheney, the House’s former number three Republican, should face a military tribunal for her role.The committee’s chair, Bennie Thompson, a Democratic representative from Mississippi, told Punchbowl that he would accept such a pardon if offered.“I believe Donald Trump when he says he’s going to inflict retribution on this,” Thompson said. “I believe when he says my name and Liz Cheney and the others. I believe him.”Concern over Trump’s possible revenge may be also be felt by Smith.The release of the special prosecutor’s report at 1am drew a characteristic nocturnal diatribe from Trump, in the form of two social media posts that showed his sense of grievance burning brightly despite its contents having been rendered legally meaningless by his presidential election victory.“Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were,” the incoming president vented on his Truth Social platform barely 40 minutes after Smith’s report had been published.Showing who was going to be boss from next Tuesday, he added: “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”A few minutes later, he posted: “To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1:00 A.M. in the morning. Did he say that the Unselect Committee illegally destroyed and deleted all of the evidence.”It would be understandable if Smith contrived to view the incoming president’s late-night rage as affirmation that was, despite everything, meaningful.Yet that is scant consolation given that its consequences are unlikely to ever visit Trump’s door – and may, in fact, rebound to haunt Smith and his team if the president-elect makes good on his threats to exact retribution. More

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    Five key takeaways from Jack Smith’s report on alleged Trump election crimes

    A special counsel report detailing Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday and concluded that the president-elect would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020.However, Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election scuppered the investigation.Jack Smith was appointed as special counsel and his report was published after a fierce legal battle by Trump’s team to keep it under wraps. In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible to continue the prosecution into his attempts to stay in the Oval Office despite his electoral loss to Joe Biden in 2020.Here are some key findings:1. Trump did not cooperate fullySmith laid out the challenges he faced during the investigation, including Trump’s assertion of executive privilege to try to block witnesses from providing evidence, which forced prosecutors into sealed court battles before the case was charged.Another “significant challenge” was Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts, prosecutors”, which led prosecutors to seek a gag order to protect potential witnesses from harassment, Smith wrote.2. Smith calls allegations of political interference ‘laughable’Smith hit back at claims by the president-elect that he pursued the charges for political reasons.“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully,” wrote Smith, who resigned from the justice department on 10 January.He added that “nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making.“And to all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote.3. Trump knew his allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election were falseSmith wrote that Trump knew his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were false – but he continued to make them anyway.“Mr Trump’s false claims included dozens of specific claims regarding certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for Mr Trump to votes against him. These claims were demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false,” Smith said.4. Smith believed Trump should be charged despite supreme court immunity rulingDespite a supreme court ruling on presidential immunity, Smith wrote that he believed the charges he filed against Trump still held water.He notes that his team was able to secure a superseding indictment from a grand jury after the top court handed down its ruling, which gave Trump immunity for official acts taken as president.“The Supreme Court’s decision required the office to reanalyze the evidence it had collected. The original indictment alleged that Mr Trump, as the incumbent president, used all available tools and powers, both private and official, to overturn the legitimate results of the election despite notice, including from official advisors, that his fraud claims were false and he had lost the election.“Given the supreme court’s ruling, the office reevaluated the evidence and assessed whether Mr Trump’s non-immune conduct – either his private conduct as a candidate or official conduct for which the office could rebut the presumption of immunity – violated federal 33 laws. The office concluded that it did. After doing so, the office sought, and a new grand jury issued, a superseding indictment with identical charges but based only on conduct that was not immune because it was either unofficial or any presumptive immunity could be rebutted.”5. Trump is furiousIn a typically incoherent social media post put online in the early hours of Tuesday, Trump’s rage at the release of the report was clear.Trump, who returns to the presidency on 20 January, wrote: “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were. Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” More

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    Trump would have been convicted over 2020 election, says special counsel

    Donald Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 but for his victory in last year’s US presidential election, according to the special counsel who investigated him.Jack Smith’s report detailing his team’s findings about Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday.After the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Smith was appointed as special counsel to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His investigation culminated in a detailed report submitted to the attorney general, Merrick Garland.In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.“The department’s view that the constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith writes.“Indeed, but for Mr Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”Trump was impeached for his role in spurring the January 6 riot, accused by a congressional panel of taking part in a “multi-part conspiracy” and ultimately indicted by justice department on four counts, including “conspiracy to defraud” the US.Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.After the release, Trump, in a post on his Truth Social site, called Smith a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the election”.He has depicted the cases as politically motivated attempts to damage his campaign and political movement. He also calculated correctly that he could outrun the law by staging a spectacular political comeback and regaining the White House.Volume one of Smith’s report meticulously outlines Trump’s alleged actions, including his efforts to pressure state officials, assemble alternate electors and encourage supporters to protest against the election results.Smith writes: “Significantly, he made election claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost.”The report underscores Trump’s persistent spreading of “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” claims about the 2020 election. These served as the basis for his pressure campaign and contributed to the January 6 attack.Much of the evidence cited in the report has been made public previously. But it includes some new details, such as that prosecutors considered charging Trump with inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol under a US law known as the Insurrection Act.Prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge posed legal risks and there was insufficient evidence that Trump intended for the “full scope” of violence during the riot, a failed attempt by a mob of his supporters to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election.The indictment charged Trump with conspiring to obstruct the election certification, defraud the US of accurate election results and deprive US voters of their voting rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmith’s office determined that charges may have been justified against some co-conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan, but the report said prosecutors reached no final conclusions. Several of Trump’s former lawyers had previously been identified as co-conspirators referenced in the indictment.Trump and his legal team have characterised the report as a “political hit job” aimed at disrupting the presidential transition and waged a protracted legal battle to prevent its release.Smith, who left the justice department last week, directly addresses accusations from Trump and his allies that the investigation was politically motivated. He asserts that his team operated solely on the basis of facts and law.Smith writes: “My office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less. To all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.”Smith acknowledges the justice department’s policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, a factor that ultimately led to the dropping of charges against Trump after his 2024 victory. The report also references a supreme court ruling expanding presidential immunity, which complicated the case.But Smith wrote in a letter to Garland attached to the report: “While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”A second section of the report details Smith’s case accusing Trump of illegally retaining sensitive national security documents after leaving the White House in 2021. The justice department has committed not to make that portion public while legal proceedings continue against two Trump associates charged in the case.Trump, who will be inaugurated as the 47th president on Monday, was last week sentenced to an unconditional discharge for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment during the 2016 election.Reuters contributed to this report More

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    Rudy Giuliani found to be in contempt of court again for 2020 election lies

    Rudy Giuliani was found in contempt of court on Friday for continuing to spread lies about two former Georgia election workers after a jury awarded the women a $148m defamation judgment.Federal judge Beryl Howell in Washington DC is the second federal judge in a matter of days to find the former New York City mayor in contempt of court.Howell found that Giuliani violated court orders barring him from defaming Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman. She ordered him to review trial testimony and other materials from the case and warned him that future violations could result in possible jail time.A statement from Giuliani’s attorney, Ted Goodman, said: “The public should know that mayor Rudy Giuliani never had the opportunity to defend himself on the facts in the defamation case.“This is an important point that many Americans still don’t realize due to biased coverage and a campaign to silence Mayor Giuliani. This contempt ruling is designed to prevent Mayor Giuliani from exercising his constitutional rights.”Moss and Freeman sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation for falsely accusing them of committing election fraud in connection with the 2020 election. They said his lies upended their lives with racist threats and harassment.A jury sided with the mother and daughter, who are Black, in December 2023 and awarded them $75m in punitive damages plus roughly $73m in other damages.Attorneys for the plaintiffs asked Howell to impose civil contempt sanctions against Giuliani after they said he continued to falsely accuse Moss and Freeman of committing election fraud in connection with the 2020 election.Shortly before Friday’s hearing began, Giuliani slammed the judge in a social media post, calling her “bloodthirsty” and biased against him and the proceeding a “hypocritical waste of time”.On Monday in New York, Judge Lewis Liman found Giuliani in contempt of court for related claims that he failed to turn over evidence to help the judge decide whether he can keep a Palm Beach, Florida, condominium.Giuliani, who testified in Liman’s Manhattan courtroom on 3 January, said he didn’t turn over everything because he believed the requests were overly broad, inappropriate or even a “trap” set by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.Giuliani, 80, said in a court filing that before Friday’s hearing that he was having travel-related concerns about his health and safety. He said he gets death threats and has been told to be careful about traveling.“I had hoped the Court would understand and accommodate my needs. However, it appears I was mistaken,” he said in the filing.On the witness stand during Giuliani’s trial, Moss and Freeman described fearing for their lives after becoming the target of a false conspiracy theory that Giuliani and other Republicans spread as they tried to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump, for whom Giuliani has previously worked as an attorney, won November’s White House election against the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and will be sworn in for a second Oval Office term on 20 January.Moss told jurors she tried to change her appearance, seldom leaves her home and suffers from panic attacks.“Money will never solve all my problems,” Freeman told reporters after the jury’s verdict. “I can never move back into the house that I call home. I will always have to be careful about where I go and who I choose to share my name with. I miss my home. I miss my neighbors and I miss my name.” More