Doomscrolling in the age of Trump

Click less, do more

Back in October of 2023, I wrote a piece titled “When Trump Wins, So Does The Media,” and I think it holds up well a few weeks into his second term.

Trump has an incredible instinct for drama and attention. The world was captivated by a multi-day news cycle about a trade war with Mexico and Canada that ended up not happening. And the non-resolution was orchestrated in such a way as to ensure that we can do the whole thing over again at the end of February. The Biden administration, to the extent that it ever made news, did so for actually doing things, and those things tended to be pretty low-key. When they revised the Thrifty Food Plan guidelines to increase the generosity of SNAP benefits, that generated one nice feature in The New York Times by Jason DeParle, but wasn’t otherwise a big story. The fiscal cost of this is over twice the total cost of USAID, but Trump messing around with the USAID grants has already been a dramatically bigger story.

This is not necessarily biased towards or against anyone.

I don’t think it would have benefitted Biden to have more coverage of the SNAP changes. And even though Trump clearly thinks all the drama helps him, I’m skeptical. It’s sometimes tactically advantageous, but it’s worth remembering that he was kind of unpopular in the winter of 2019-2020 before Covid hit, even though conditions in the country were pretty stable and good. His manner of doing things is chaotic and exhausting.

But it’s good for clicks and ratings. Trump could probably have achieved what he’s trying to do with Treasury payments software through normal channels. But by doing it in this weird, secretive way he’s turning basic facts about government operations into exciting scoops.

On a personal level, I feel fortunate that Slow Boring is one of the outlets that have benefitted from increased interest and engagement since Trump’s inauguration. But I’ve also long been worried about negativity bias in the media, which as far as anyone can tell is driven not by ideology but by market incentives. Negativity is more engaging, and engagement is the name of the game. A lot of people make themselves miserable by marinating in negativity. An interesting fact about the 2024 election is that Kamala Harris did dramatically better than Trump with heavy news consumers. So we have a president who loves to make news, and a news audience that loves to hate Trump — an audience that is now primed to be sucked into a maw of doomscrolling that feels like participating in the political process but doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to stop reading the news or paying attention to politics. But I do think it’s worth our while to spend some time reflecting on what we’re trying to accomplish with our media consumption.

How open-minded are you?

I sincerely wish that some of the younger, less-engaged people who voted for Trump would spend more time reading news articles about the Trump administration’s policies. My sense is that many of these people are not actually that conservative in their views, but are reacting mostly to inflation plus a sense that the Biden administration was not entirely on the level.

Winning these voters back is a big reason I want to see Democrats throw Biden under the bus.

I think these voters are likely to be upset if they learn that basically nothing Trump is doing is aimed at reducing grocery prices; that Republicans are trying to make huge cuts to Medicaid, chip away at abortion rights, eliminate the Department of Education; and that the actual top GOP policy priority is a giant regressive tax cut.