… On Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton won, we might just be watching the NBA Playoffs or The Americans while browsing recipes on our second screen. But we live on a planet where Trump comes at us from every angle. In Trump’s world, you see something about Trump on television, while a push alert about Trump surfaces on your phone, prompting you to text your friends about Trump and post something about whatever happened on your chosen social media account. Trump has mastered attention capture.
As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.” CONT.
Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair