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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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      in US Politics

      Trump will destroy the government agencies that most help working people | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      The Republican party has shellacked its clean-cut corporatism, in recent years, with a veneer of economic populism. See JD Vance’s pseudo-criticisms of Wall Street, so gestural they could be mistaken for an interpretive dance routine, or Donald Trump’s stint as a McDonald’s “employee”, which seemed more inspired by his contempt for Kamala Harris than his affection for fry cooks.But when it comes to how the second Trump administration actually intends to govern, there have already been plenty of signals that they intend to target and weaken – if not outright destroy – the parts of government most beneficial to working people. And right now, the agency most clearly in their crosshairs is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).While there’s new fervor behind rightwing efforts to undermine the CFPB – or, indeed, “delete” it, as Elon Musk recently tweeted – these attacks have been ongoing since the agency’s inception. In his first term, in fact, Trump slashed the CFPB’s budget, appointed a vocal critic to run it and rolled back regulations protecting consumers from predatory practices.Trump and his nearly-half-trillionaire “first buddy” feel threatened for good reason: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is one of the few federal agencies created explicitly to help average Americans, and actually given authority to do so. Its efforts have represented some of the Biden administration’s most impactful advances for working people – and gutting it would be among the most devastating anti-consumer moves the Trump administration could make.The CFPB was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, which saw almost 400 banks fold and American households lose about $17tn in wealth (that’s 42 Elon Musks). The popular narrative rightfully blames predatory lending and securities fraud, but those lapses were only possible because of decades-long bipartisan deregulation. In response, the then Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren proposed a federal agency to centralize regulation of the consumer financial sector, work which had been spread thin across seven different agencies. Rather than being “duplicative”, as Musk has claimed, the CFPB began as a novel effort to make government more responsive, effective and – indeed – efficient.But not until the current directorship of Rohit Chopra did the CFPB begin fulfilling its true potential. Since his appointment in 2021, Chopra has cracked down on exploitative consumer practices with a fervor not seen since Upton Sinclair stepped into a meatpacking plant.In the last year, the agency has banned excessive credit card late fees, saving consumers $10bn annually. It has started regulating “buy now, pay later” lenders, which often leave buyers on the hook for expensive purchases they return. It has created a registry of businesses who have repeatedly engaged in illegal practices, finally bringing a tough-on-crime approach to “corporate recidivism”. And just last week, the CFPB announced a rule capping overdraft fees that will return another $5bn to consumers every year.Chopra has notched these wins while burnishing a dynamic persona that might best be described as swashbuckler meets bureaucrat. He has embraced public engagement in a way most regulators don’t; see his PSAs on medical debt with Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan representative. He has also embraced conflict, prompting some opponents to accuse him of antagonism, as when he sued not just a credit reporting firm but one of its executives for misleading consumers. Still, one populist’s antagonism is most Americans’ vindication, and Chopra has even drawn reluctant praise from Republicans such as the onetime speaker pro tempore Patrick McHenry.Other than consumers, arguably the biggest beneficiary of Chopra’s ferocity has been Joe Biden. The CFPB has accomplished many of his administration’s most unambiguously progressive (and practical) victories. Chopra joins a class of hugely productive Biden appointees – Lina Khan at the FTC, Marty Walsh and Julie Su at the Department of Labor, and a slate of pro-worker appointees at the National Labor Relations Board – who reaffirm the adage that “personnel is policy”.Even in the administration’s waning days, Khan’s FTC has helped unravel a merger between Kroger and Albertsons that would probably have spiked food prices, and raised alarms about “task scams” that have cheated targets out of millions. In this respect at least, Biden has taken a page from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gleefully stocked his cabinet with unabashed crusaders such as Frances Perkins, the mother of the New Deal.While many Democrats continue post-election recriminations, many will no doubt feel tempted to disavow anything and everything associated with the first one-term Democratic president since Carter. But a prevailing lesson of 2024 has been that voters respond to brash anti-corporate messaging, even when it comes from the mouths of an erstwhile venture capitalist and a real estate tycoon who stiffs workers.So even if the legacies of Chopra, Khan, Walsh and Su aren’t reflected in the next four years of governance, progressives can at least embrace them in their campaign rhetoric – especially in response to Trump’s imminent efforts to deter or even dismantle agencies such as the CFPB in favor of corporate interests.Three years ago, immediately after his swearing-in ceremony, Chopra wrote a memo describing the CFPB’s most important mission as this: “We must anticipate emerging risks so we can act before a crisis, rather than acting after it is too late.”It may be too late to avert the crisis of the last election. But it’s also the best time to act in anticipation of the next one.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of the Nation. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has contributed to the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times More

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      in US Politics

      You can judge someone by their enemies. I write for the Guardian because it has all the right ones | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The year is 2050. The US government is run by President Elon Musk and his 690 children. Donald Trump, immortalized as an AI hologram, continues to send ALL CAPS tweets ALL THE TIME. The US has a special new relationship with the UK: the British Isles have been turned into a SpaceX rocket factory.In this brave new world, might is right. International human rights law doesn’t exist anymore. Journalists don’t exist either. Kash Patel, who Trump picked as his FBI director in 2024, promised to “come after people in the media” and he followed through. Now state news is piped directly into people’s brains via Musk’s proprietary microchips.I wish I could say this was all tongue-in-cheek, all completely fantastical. But it increasingly feels like we are marching towards a techno-authoritarian future. Over the past year we’ve seen norms shattered. We’ve seen what Amnesty International, along with many leading experts, have termed a genocide in Gaza, become horrifically normalized. We’ve seen international law dangerously undermined, an accelerated rollback of reproductive rights, and attacks on press freedom. We’ve seen book bans, and school curriculums warped by rightwing ideologues – with public schools in Florida teaching the “benefits” of slavery.As Trump, who has called the press “the enemy of the people”, readies himself for his “revenge” term, we’ve also seen his former critics scramble to kiss the ring. Two major (billionaire-owned) US newspapers refused to endorse a candidate in the US election, seemingly out of fear of getting on Trump’s wrong side. Anticipatory obedience, a term coined by the historian Timothy Snyder, is the phrase of the moment.At the Guardian we’re already practicing anticipatory disobedience. You can judge someone by their enemies – and the Guardian has lots of enemies in high places. The delightful Musk has described the Guardian as “the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth” and “a laboriously vile propaganda machine”. (Propaganda, you see, is when you hold the most powerful people on earth to account.)As you may have guessed, this is where I ask you to support our work – which, because we are not owned by oligarchs, is only possible because of readers like you.I want you to know that I don’t make this request lightly. Over the past year, which has been the very worst year of my life, I have woken up every day to horrific, and seemingly never-ending, pictures of dead children in Gaza and felt utter despair. I have watched as Palestinians like me are dehumanized by many in the western media. The likes of the editorial board of the Washington Post argue that there should be two tiers of justice, and the ICC shouldn’t investigate war crimes against Palestinians. I have agonized over the role of journalism and asked myself again and again what the point of writing is. And I have, to be completely honest, felt frustrated by some of the Guardian’s own coverage of Gaza.But I wouldn’t still be writing for the Guardian if I didn’t believe it to be an essential force for good in the world; one which we simply can’t afford to lose. I write for the Guardian, and I’m asking for your support now, because there is no other media outlet with the global reach – and no paywall – that stands for progressive values in the way that the Guardian does. There is certainly no other comparable media outlet that would have let me write uncensored about Palestine in the way the Guardian has.And, of course, I write about other things as well: everything from woke chicken to feminism to vagina candles. One of the things I appreciate most about the Guardian is that although we do serious work, we don’t always take ourselves too seriously – there’s still room for humor. And in dark times, humor is not some sort of indulgence, it’s essential to getting by.As we head into a new year I hope you will consider supporting us. At the very least, please do join me in putting a very delicate middle finger up to all the Musks of the world, who would be ecstatic if the Guardian ceased to exist.You can make your contribution to the Guardian here. More

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      in US Politics

      Elon Musk’s rumoured $100m donation may just fuel a fresh look at UK political funding

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      Elon Musk has denied he is gearing up to chuck $100m at Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, as it pushes to take on the Tories. But the very fact the question arose is a reminder of the pressing need for political funding reform on this side of the Atlantic.Musk is the living embodiment of economic power in the modern US: a multibillionaire, with spicy political views, who has bought his way into a role as Donald Trump’s costcutter-in-chief.Part of his motivation seems to be not just slashing spending for the sake of it but the dismantling of regulators that his companies have found irksome.He had previously joined legal action, alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, aimed at having the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional, for example.This is the body, created in 1935, that enforces workers’ rights. It ensured staff at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse had the opportunity to ballot – successfully – for union recognition (an outcome the giant retailer has continued to challenge).Musk has also said he wants to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, suggesting it is “duplicative”.Musk et al’s affront at the very idea that federal agencies have oversight of business is reminiscent of the fury faced by President Theodore Roosevelt and his allies during the so-called Progressive Era, at the turn of the 20th century, when they fought to bust vast monopolies and tame the worst excesses of capitalism.The mega-rich capitalists back then were the likes of JD Rockefeller and JP Morgan but then, as now, there was a clash of principles about the government’s right to oversee corporations. And then, as now, money was used to buy influence over the debate.If Musk and his co-director, Vivek Ramaswamy, succeed in scrapping a whole suite of regulators, it could fundamentally shift the relationship between capital and the individual (which, of course, is exactly his hope).Musk’s deregulatory zeal may yet run into trouble in Congress, and Trump may tire of his fellow egotist and end up wheeling out his catchphrase from the Apprentice to tell the Tesla boss “you’re fired”.But the immense influence Musk has bought, by spending an extraordinary $243m (£190m) on getting Trump re-elected, and using X to pump out pro-Trump propaganda, should sound alarm bells in the UK.We may lack the equivalent of Silicon Valley’s galactically rich donor class, with their screwball libertarianism. But we still have a system where wealthy individuals can effectively give unlimited sums to their favourite political parties.There are spending limits during campaigns, but these are very high: for a party standing candidates in every seat in the UK, it topped £34m at this year’s general election.Party funding rules state that you have to be a UK citizen to give more than £500 – or a UK-registered company, which “carries out business in the UK”.So even if Musk felt so minded, he could not donate as an individual, but would have to channel any donation to Farage’s crew via the UK outpost of Twitter, now known as X.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the very fact he could do so in theory highlights the gaping holes in our funding rules.Keir Starmer’s Labour seems at ease with big money. Labour declared three times as much in donations as all other parties combined during this year’s election campaign – more than £9.5m – with big donors including the trade unions, of course, but also wealthy individuals, such as Lord Sainsbury, the former chair of the supermarket chain, as well as the Autoglass founder, Gary Lubner, and the hedge fund manager Martin Taylor.Yet the row over freebies – which led to Starmer being castigated over donations of glasses and gig tickets – revealed a deep public scepticism over the role of private money in politics.Just as with the MPs’ expenses scandal, a practice that Westminster considered perfectly normal was shown to be deeply unpalatable to voters.Labour’s manifesto included a promise to “protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties”. It is unclear what that meant, and it didn’t feature in Labour’s first king’s speech, but my colleague Eleni Courea has reported that Labour will look closely at a forthcoming report from the IPPR thinktank, which is expected to recommend a £100,000 annual cap on individual donations.Cross-party talks on political funding have often foundered on Labour’s reluctance to accept any cap on trade union donations. This is a difficult circle to square – Labour is, after all, the party of labour. At the very least, union donations should be democratically endorsed, so that they function as much as possible like a collection of individual members’ subs.On this basis, plans in the employment bill to move to an “opt out” approach for union political funds seem like a backwards step (though the unions would point out that they do hold regular votes on how their political funds are used).Transparency International, which campaigns to drive big money out of politics, recommends a much lower £10,000 cap on donations, and has a slate of other suggestions – including reducing campaign spending limits, which were raised dramatically by the Tories. Labour would be wise to look closely at these, too.Political funding reform should be a worthy aim in itself, without the looming threat of the populist right. But If Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for Nigel Farage helps motivate the UK’s mainstream parties to crack on with cleaning up politics, both men will have made an unexpectedly positive contribution to public life. More

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      Elon Musk revealed as sole funder of RBG Pac that claimed Trump and Ginsburg were aligned

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      Elon Musk has emerged as the sole financial architect behind a provocative political action committee that appropriated the name of late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to bolster Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to federal campaign finance reports released on Thursday.The RBG Pac, funded entirely by the world’s richest man with a $20.5m donation in the final two weeks of the campaign, ran advertisements and mailers suggesting an ideological alignment between Trump and Ginsburg on abortion.That’s a narrative that Clara Spera, the justice’s granddaughter, denounced as fundamentally misleading.“The use of her name and image to support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and specifically to suggest that she would approve of his position on abortion, is nothing short of appalling,” she told the New York Times in October.​​The RBG Pac’s strategic advertising push arrived at a critical political moment, following months of Democratic attacks on Trump’s abortion stance. Its website featured a photo of Trump and Ginsburg with the caption “Great Minds Think Alike” – a claim that directly contradicts Ginsburg’s well-documented judicial philosophy and her personal opposition to Trump.“Why did Ruth Bader Ginsburg agree with Donald Trump’s position on abortion?” the website asked. “Because RBG believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate our abortion laws.”The Pac claimed that Trump doesn’t support a federal abortion ban – something Trump himself said on the campaign trail – although he will face pressure from Republicans and opponents of abortion to enact one once he takes office anyway.Spera has shared in the past that Ginsburg’s dying wish in September 2020 had been that she was not replaced on the court until a new president was sworn in. That request was ignored by Trump when he appointed Amy Coney Barrett, who would later be part of the conservative majority overturning Roe v Wade.Musk’s political spending far exceeded this single Pac, ballooning to more than $260m in the 2024 election cycle. His primary vehicle was America Pac, which raised about $252m, with Musk making high-profile campaign appearances and conducting voter outreach initiatives that included controversial $1m giveaways in swing states.The billionaire’s political donations also extended to a $3m contribution to a Super Pac linked to Robert F Kennedy Jr and nearly $1m directly to Trump’s campaign committee.Now with the Trump win, Musk is positioned to play a significant role in the incoming administration. He’s set to co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, pledging to dramatically reduce federal bureaucracy. More

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      Trump taps billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead Nasa

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      A billionaire entrepreneur who led the first flight of an all-private crew of astronauts, and became the first civilian to walk in space earlier this year, has been nominated by Donald Trump to be the next leader of Nasa.If confirmed by the Senate, Jared Isaacman, also an experienced jet pilot with his own display team, will guide the space agency at a pivotal moment in its 76-year history as it moves closer to returning humans to the moon for the first time since 1972 and sending the first crews to Mars.The 41-year-old founder of the commercial aerospace defense company Draken International said in a tweet he was “honored” to receive Trump’s nomination, and would be “grateful” to serve.“Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” he wrote.“On my last mission to space, my crew and I traveled farther from Earth than anyone in over half a century. I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun.“Space holds unparalleled potential for breakthroughs in manufacturing, biotechnology, mining, and perhaps even pathways to new sources of energy. There will inevitably be a thriving space economy … that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space. At Nasa we will passionately pursue these possibilities and usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization.”Isaacman was the commander of September’s five-day orbital Polaris Dawn mission that saw him make the first spacewalk by a civilian, nearly 460 miles (740km) above Earth. He would succeed outgoing Nasa administrator Bill Nelson, a former space shuttle astronaut and Democratic senator for Florida who was appointed by Joe Biden in 2021.Nelson oversaw crucial advances in the Artemis program, including the pioneering November 2022 flight of the Artemis 1 moon rocket, which is scheduled to land the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface by the end of 2026.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the nomination of Isaacman, who is a close friend of the SpaceX founder and Trump acolyte Elon Musk, will raise questions over the future of a key government-funded component of the Artemis program, namely the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.Musk’s company has been progressing its own Starship heavy lift rocket in recent months, also designed for long-duration human spaceflight to the moon and Mars, and the commercial space industry is expected to become much more prominent during the second Trump administration.In a statement announcing his pick on Wednesday, Trump praised Isaacman as “an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut”.“Jared’s passion for space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new space economy, make him ideally suited to lead Nasa into a bold new era,” Trump said.Lori Garver, who was deputy administrator of Nasa from 2009 to 2013 during the Obama administration, said in a post to X that Isaacman’s nomination was “terrific news”.“[He] has the opportunity to build on Nasa’s amazing accomplishments to pave our way to an even brighter future,” she said. More

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      Can we keep the Elon Musks of the world out of British politics? Only if we act now | Oliver Bullough

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      It is an inevitable consequence of the inequality inherent to the “special relationship” that, as soon as someone wins the election in the US, the British government has to swallow its objections to anything they do. Donald Trump may have been “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” six years ago, but it’s 2024 now and the once and future president has become “a very gracious host” with a soft spot for the royal family. Tech billionaire Elon Musk might compare Keir Starmer’s Britain to Stalin’s Russia but, as long as he’s Trump’s new best friend, “he’s far too important to ignore”.This kind of toadying must be as embarrassing for the politicians doing it as it is for those of us watching it, but it is at least understandable. Being friends with the US is not just the foundation of our national security policy, it’s pretty much the whole thing.What is not understandable is successive governments’ failure to learn from the US experience, and to act to prevent our own democracy from being drowned in dark money. British politicians will no doubt say that overhauling regulations around political donations isn’t a priority, that they’re focused on delivering policies that will improve ordinary people’s lives instead.But reports now suggest Musk is considering giving $100m to Reform UK as what has been described as a “f*** you Starmer payment” that would in effect install Nigel Farage as leader of the opposition. The Guardian reported on Monday that Labour might consider closing some of the loopholes that make such a wild suggestion possible – but only in the second half of this parliament, which can only mean the government has failed to understand how urgent this is.For any US billionaire, let alone the richest man in the world, spending on British politics would be like the owner of a Premier League club deciding to invest at the bottom end of the football pyramid: he could buy not only an awful lot of players, but in short order he’d probably own the whole competition.Total spending on the US presidential and congressional elections this year topped $15bn. In Pennsylvania alone, the two main parties spent almost $600m on advertising, so Musk’s $100m wouldn’t make much difference. In Britain, on the other hand, it would be transformational. The Electoral Commission is yet to publish its report on 2024’s general election, but it is unlikely that any of our parties spent much more than that – on central costs, candidate costs and staff costs – in the whole country over the whole year.A pressing need, therefore, is to limit how much political parties can spend. We do already have restrictions, which were introduced after the 1990s “cash for questions” scandal. But, under Boris Johnson, the Tories increased the limits by almost half to a combined total of about £75.9m on the central party and its candidates. The increase was transparently intended to help the Conservative party since, in the 2019 election, no other party came close to raising enough money to reach the previous threshold.The government must reduce the limit back to its old level. As with a football league, healthy competition and financial propriety suffer when one or two participants can vastly outspend the others, and the stakes are far higher in democracy than they are in sport.If politicians are constantly battling to raise more money than each other, then they will be focused on raising funds for themselves rather than on solving the problems of everyone else. They will also, inevitably, be tempted to offer their donors concessions in exchange for that money. It is in the interests of everyone – apart, of course, from the big donors – to stop that from happening.We also need to reduce the amount that any individual can give. If one man can give £5m to a political party, it inevitably undermines trust. Wealthy people may be different, but few ordinary voters would give away that kind of cash without expecting something in return. In an excellent analysis of the past two decades of political giving published this week, Transparency International suggests a yearly donation cap to any one party of £10,000, while the Labour-aligned thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research apparently intends to recommend a higher limit ofAlthough these changes might stop Musk from throwing his $100m molotov cocktail into the House of Commons, it would not stop him – or other ill-intentioned foreign billionaires – from giving money at all, and this is where I think we need to be radical.The US culture of massive electoral spending has deep roots, but the problem was super-sized in 2010 when the supreme court ruled that corporations have the right to free speech, that spending is a form of speech, and therefore that stopping companies from making donations was unconstitutional. The result was a huge increase in donations to groups supposedly independent of political candidates, but in practice closely aligned with them.In the UK, only individuals registered to vote can donate money to political parties, but this restriction (along with others) can be avoided by making donations via a British-registered company, partnership or “unincorporated association”, an obscure kind of structure that can allow you to disguise who you are.Many observers have proposed complicated arrangements to plug these loopholes, but rich people have lawyers to circumvent complicated arrangements, so I would just ban corporate giving altogether. Companies are not people. They can’t vote, and I see no reason why they should be able to fund political campaigns either. Our democracy belongs to the voters, to no one else, and we need to keep it that way.The final step to plutocrat-proof our political system would be to re-empower the Electoral Commission, which was defanged – again, by Boris Johnson – in 2022. It needs to have its independence from government restored, and to be able to impose the kind of fines that would make even a US billionaire think before seeking to undermine the integrity of our elections. We also need to toughen the law to impose serious criminal penalties for anyone who breaks the law anyway.Democracy is in retreat everywhere, and we cannot be complacent that Britain’s version will survive today’s challenges just because it has in the past. But if we use Trump’s election as the impetus to finally build defences for our political system against dark money and its owners, then at least some good will have come out of it.

      Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals, and Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back More

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      What does it actually mean when we talk about the American ‘working class’? | Rebecca Solnit

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      In the aftermath of the election, the working class was constantly invoked and rarely defined – invoked as a badge of authenticity, as the people who really matter, as the salt of the earth, the ones politicians should woo or be chastised for failing to woo sufficiently. Who exactly is in this category? I asked around, and the definitions didn’t just vary – they wobbled, clashed and blurred.The more nebulous something is, the more it can mean anything useful to the speaker or writer. I thought of Alice Through the Looking Glass:
      ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
      ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
      When a word means whatever you choose it to mean, it becomes a cudgel for your cause, while it fails to do what I want words to do, which is to describe the world in ways that make things more clear and coherent.So what is the working class? Is it income levels or education, when some who work in the trades earn splendid annual incomes and some white-collar work mires people in poverty? Is it the kind of work or the status of being an employee, when the person who works for a construction company may go on to become a contractor herself?A Marxist told me it’s about whether or not you own the means of production, but this theoretical contractor, like many a construction worker, owns a F250 pickup truck and a lot of tools and maybe a garage workshop, just as many farmers own or inherit land.Someone else said it meant being paid by the hour, rather than salaried, but lawyers and legal experts bill (lavishly) by the hour. And more and more people work in the gig economy or are otherwise casual labor seen as self-employed or as subcontractors, not employees. Someone else insisted it’s about whether or not you have unearned income, but many a union person or employee of a big firm has a stake in a pension fund invested in the stock market.Another criterion was education levels, though quite a few people’s time in college netted them little but debt to be paid off via pink- or blue-collar work. In California, our public universities claim a lot of first-generation students, but the community college system defines that as people whose parents did not go to college at all, while the University of California system defines it as anyone whose parents didn’t graduate from college. The California State University system, meanwhile, has wobbly definitions: “In one scenario, 31% of CSU students are considered first generation; according to another definition, 52% are.”What’s clear about first-generation students is that some who grow up in blue-collar families become white-collar professionals and thereby have a foot in both worlds and sometimes an identity in tension with their current status. A lot of us worked entry-level jobs before entering a profession – before I was 21 I supported myself as a salesperson, a dishwasher, a data processor and a waitress. Upward economic mobility is central to the American dream and the draw for immigrants; downward mobility, debt peonage and destitution have been at the heart of the American nightmare set up by Reaganomics and the other forces creating a super-elite and a desperate underclass.One thing that’s been dismally obvious since 2016 is that by working class some speakers really mean white men, and imagine that group in nostalgic terms, as hardhat wearers and factory workers or as red-blooded rural Americans, even though much of the lower-income population is not white or male or rural. It’s janitors and nail salon workers and hotel maids, casual labor and delivery people and home healthcare aides.I’m not arguing that the working class doesn’t exist, and there are a lot of workers we would probably all agree belong to this class – but the borders and thereby the definitions are blurry, and the frame is too often invoked for other agendas.The idea that the working class is white men too readily becomes a justification for politics that pander to white male prejudices and entitlements, since white men are the single most right-leaning demographic. Framed that way, it often seems to mean: shut up about rights for women and non-white people. Meanwhile about 92% of Black women, a great many of whom meet most of these definitions of working class, voted for Kamala Harris, which is a reminder that talking about class without talking about gender and race flattens out a complex terrain (the same goes, of course, for talking about gender or race without the other two).Harris mostly spoke about the middle class, which many identify with whether or not they fit some of these criteria for the working class; I don’t think her rival used the term “working class” at all but pandered to white racism, misogyny and transphobia, each of which can fracture solidarity and even the perception of common ground, including economic common ground.In the end, all that’s clear is that we had an election in which the party that was supposed to be elitist was not the party whose candidate was a billionaire, the one put back in office in no small part through the machinations of the richest man in the world because they agreed on an economic agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and further impoverishing the poor.“Elite” is another nebulous word that pretends that somehow human rights are an upscale product like designer handbags or that the majority of us in this country – if you add up women, Bipoc, queer and trans people, immigrants, etc – are a special interest group. In this framework, the 26% or so that is white and male is imagined as the majority, perhaps because they once owned and ran nearly everything.White male grievance is a powerful force that cuts across class, as exemplified by the habitual whining of the billionaires. Those billionaires also own too many of the means of information production, from Twitter and Facebook to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Those and other means encouraged people to perceive themselves by many criteria that don’t include class or economics, but do include a lot of kinds of resentment.This was part of a package deal, of a whole lot of people getting a lot of misinformation about the sources of their problems and the potential solutions, which encouraged many of them to vote against their own and their economic peers’ self-interest. The lack of clarity about what the working class is is only one part of the ongoing problem of misinformation and missing information.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More