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.

By the same token, though, if you’re a heavy news consumer who voted for Clinton / Biden / Harris, you should be honest with yourself that you’re not particularly open-minded about the ins-and-outs of the Trump administration’s policymaking. Exactly how outrageous you find any given executive order won’t be the difference between supporting Dems or Republicans in the midterms. Persuading yourself of the most dire possible interpretation of some second-tier action isn’t going to change your behavior in any way. Nor is learning, at the margin, about some obscure new case of misconduct. That’s not to say you’re obligated to completely unplug from the news, but consider this advice from Jill Filipovic:

Our task now is not to follow every twist and turn and to know every bit of minutiae. That doesn’t matter (or at least, it may be counter-productive to try to follow all of it). What matters is identifying the patterns and understanding the larger goals of this administration— and then interrupting the most dangerous efforts.

But it’s in your interest to try to be honest with yourself about your reasons for engaging.¹

Of course, if you have personal, professional, community, or family ties to voters who you think may be persuadable — Biden/Trump crossover voters, people who didn’t vote in 2024, or people for whom 2024 was the first time they voted — then understanding what their interests are and delivering potentially persuasive facts to them could be very valuable. Trump halting all new wind and solar leasing on public lands, for example, hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but is clearly contrary to the goal of improving the cost of living. People who enjoy shopping on Shein or Temu may be interested to know that Trump is raising their taxes. These points are less cosmically significant than the rolling constitutional crisis Trump is causing over impoundment. But the kinds of people who are interested in big abstractions are mostly anti-Trump already, and the ones who aren’t anti-Trump are familiar with the liberal arguments. Persuadable people do tend to care about relatively picayune things, so again, if you know specific people who you think are persuadable, then seeking out information that’s relevant to them is useful. But the key here is cognitive empathy. The point isn’t to seek out the stories that hit you hardest in the gut, but to try to imagine what someone who doesn’t already agree with you might care about.

If you don’t have specific people in mind, then it’s good to return to basics. Democrats’ best issues are abortion rights and health care with a side dose of Trump pardoning criminals. Posting about that stuff on social media is good, but you don’t actually need to dive deep into every depressing rabbit hole to find it.

Find opportunities to act

I think attending protests is probably helpful, so reading and spreading the word about them is also a good use of time.

Another important opportunity for action, obviously, is elections. Special elections pop up, and reading about them and potentially contributing money can be very useful. Abigail Spanberger is the clear favorite to be the Democratic Party nominee in Virginia and shouldn’t have too hard a time winning the race. New Jersey is more interesting, because it’s a crowded primary field and also a place where Democrats looked surprisingly weak last year — they could really benefit from a smart, reformist candidate. I like both Mikie Sherrill and Steven Fulop and am trying to pay more attention to what’s going on there. In New York City, Zellnor Myrie, who has a great housing plan and a good criminal justice plan, is currently in the low-awareness trap, where nobody knows who he is, so his polling is terrible, so he’s not getting much coverage. Kathryn Garcia was in a similar position four years ago when I first wrote about her and ended up nearly winning, so I’m hopeful there’s still potential for Myrie.

This stuff is, I agree, not quite as emotionally gripping as reading the latest details about which bright young things DOGE has dispatched to which agency.

If we all end up in Elon Musk’s gulag five years from now, people are going to say it was silly that I spent this week blogging about a mayor’s race in New York City. But if we end up having a strong revival of Common Sense Democrats who renew the party, defeat Trump, and usher in a new era of broadly shared prosperity, that will have happened because smart reformist candidates won races and paved the way for more success in 2026 and 2028.

More broadly, if you are represented in Congress by Democrats, they probably care what you think. I sometimes hear from members who tell me they like some of my ideas but are afraid that if they said X or did Y, they would lose a primary. I remind them that Biden won the 2020 primary because rank-and-file Democrats really hate Trump and really want to win and are, in fact, not in love with Elizabeth Warren’s economic ideas or making everybody read Tema Okun. But what they hear from their constituents can make a difference. Reading the news can be helpful for constructive communication with your member of Congress or your senator, but it’s not essential. And I would challenge everyone to at least try to do marginally more active communication and marginally less passive consumption.

Winning is good, losing is bad

Last but not least, to the extent that you know other people who are reading bad news and experiencing bad feelings about events, I think a high-value undertaking is to try to explore the significance of those emotions a little.

A hypothetical I like to raise is imagine if you went to a GOP meeting in the summer of 2012 and said to a bunch of Republicans, “Hey, I bet if you guys just didn’t run on privatizing Medicare or kicking gay soldiers out of the military, you’d stand a better chance of winning.” I bet those Republicans would tell you that these are really important issues of principle that they can’t just give up on. And yet, we saw that, in practice, Republicans were really happy with the outcomes of the 2016 and 2024 elections. Similarly, the 2024 election has made Democrats really sad and frightened. Losing sucks. It sucks for concrete reasons because bad things happen. And it sucks emotionally. It’s alarming. It’s depressing. It’s bad.

Under the circumstances, was it really so important to “pause” LNG exports, block mining projects in Alaska, raise drilling fees on public lands, promulgate regulations that annoyed lobstermen, do mildly inflationary student loan policies, take lots of partisan FTC actions that angered tech executives, make an unpopular pledge to abolish the death penalty that you had no way of enacting, make an unpopular pledge to repeal the Hyde Amendment that you had no way of enacting, or any of a dozen other instantiations of the broad leftward shift of the Democratic Party since Obama’s re-election? At the time, I’m sure it felt to lots of people that victory would be hollow and pointless without these bold stances on behalf of whales or vacuous position-taking that had no path to passing the Senate. But was that true? Wouldn’t you rather have won?

This is relevant going forward.

People who are alarmed and upset naturally want to see Democrats fighting for them. A lot of grifters and opportunists are out there claiming that Democrats in Congress aren’t doing this, rather than telling the truth, which is that their options are limited. The continuing resolution that funds the government will expire in mid-March, which will be a big focal point for a fight. That’s coming pretty soon! But it’s in a few weeks, not a few days.

The more substantive issue is what constitutes “fighting?” Does every single fighter need to oppose every single thing that Trump says and does, such that Democrats are the party of DEI trainings and protecting every bureaucrat? Or does fighting mean recapturing the spirit of 2006 and recruiting the largest possible tent of Trump opponents? I think it means the latter. And the most constructive way to engage with Trump news is to try to have a friendly, welcoming attitude toward anyone who is alienated by any of his actions and try to push back against the tendency to say that anyone who wants to be a “good” Trump critic needs to sign on to a seventy-seven point laundry list.

1. My excuse for consuming large volumes of political news is that it’s an input to my actual work writing these articles for you.