Gavin Newsom used imitation of Trump’s bombastic online style to draw massive engagement around redistricting, blending entertainment with political messaging. The approach achieved broad reach but also reinforced the durability of blustery, incoherent rhetoric in public life. Social media and smartphones have shortened attention spans and incentivized short, inflammatory messaging and constant spectacle. Some progressive forces can succeed online by pairing provocative tone with substantive policy, yet victories come with the cost of normalizing profanity and spectacle. Rising phone use and falling long-form reading indicate a sustained shift in media habits and civic attention.
Amid the ongoing battle over congressional redistricting, Newsom's pitch-perfect posts about Trump's " TINY HANDS" and California's " PERFECT MAPS " have been wildly entertaining, and, at least by one measure, wildly successful-the posts have garnered millions of views and counting. While it's refreshing to see a prominent Democrat unapologetically standing up to the current administration, Newsom's jabs also reinforce the staying power of Trump's blustery and incoherent style. And they reveal the degree to which the attention economy has disrupted our focus and degraded our language.
Trump continues to benefit from the steady decline in the American attention span driven by social media. His style of short, punchy, inflammatory language-and his strategy of flooding the zone with a new federal freak show day after day-is engineered to succeed in this chaotic environment. But some recent online victories seem to indicate that progressives can also win on this battlefield if they deploy the right combination of profane style and policy substance.
It's possible the Trump era would never have been inaugurated without the concurrent smartphone era's reshaping attention spans and media habits. One survey has found that Americans check their phones an astonishing 144 times daily, and about 40 percent of adults report being " almost constantly online." As a result, Americans are reading less. In 2024, less than half of adults said they had picked up a book in the past year, continuing a consistent downward trend.
Collection
[
|
...
]