Now that the Trump’s hush payment trial has moved past the hubbub of the first couple days, it is starting to become rather boring. However, it will still occupy a lot of Trump’s attention, and be the leading story about him. What I predict, or maybe just hope, is that this will make Trump a non-topic for the next several weeks. He will be too consumed with saying things about the trial that are no longer newsworthy, but unable to pull his usual stunts that draw press attention.
Trump’s primary source of power is his intuitive understanding of the attention economy and a frankly masterful ability to hijack people’s attention. Most of his comments are designed to draw some sort of outrage response from the establishment (either progressives like us, mainstream media commentators, sometimes old school conservatives or even Republicans) in a way that inflames the anti-elitist feelings, distrust of the establishment, and overall frustrations that so many Americans feel about politics being disconnected from their ordinary everyday problems. We progressives are too often Trump’s richest target because so many of us still see ourselves as anti-establishment or counterculture, even though our class (college educated, cosmopolitan, minimally religious, humanist) dominates the establishment.
With the leading story about Trump becoming essentially a non-story, it will be hard from him to run his standard playbook. Note that he has had almost nothing to say about the passage of the Ukraine aid deal, which he was largely responsible for blocking. He’s also stuck on the sidelines of the abortion ruling in Arizona both because of his non-position, and because the story about him is the hush money trial. I doubt many editors want to feature two “Trump says” stories at the same time, and clearly the trial story is of more public significance than another Mean Tweet.
That’s a huge opening for us and for Biden, because it means we can turn the conversation to regular policy and government and move our core message, which as Simon Rosenberg says is “With Democrats, things get better”.
Here’s hoping that this window of Trump being on mute persists and we can capitalize on it.