Trump: the teacher we can’t ignore

The American President is pioneering a new form of political communications. We must swallow our pride and learn from him.

Trying to blend in at a Trump rally at Latrobe, Pennsylvania

The royal cutlery is being polished so Trump can see his handsome face in it. The Corgis are being trained to rhythmically bark USA, USA, USA. And the King is practicing saying, ‘drill baby drill’ until it rolls off the tongue.

So, the fawning is in overdrive for the upcoming state visit of the American President.

Many will want to show their justifiable disgust and anger at someone who is ripping up the pillars of American democracy and stoking division.

But in this piece, I want to stand back a bit. I have spent much of the last year thinking about how to counter right-wing populists. I’ve spent time talking to Trump supporters, and I’ve tried to analyse what makes him the pre-eminent political talent of this moment.

If the centre-left (or indeed centre-right) wants to fight back, it must learn from him and understand his skill both at navigating the attention economy and building a successful political movement.

Rewriting the rules of political communication for the attention economy

“I know he’s an asshole,” said the sixty-year-old woman at the Trump rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to my surprise. “But you need to be a bit of an asshole to get any change around here.”

I had expected undiluted adoration. Instead I got something a little more realistic, at least from some of the assembled crowd.

Still misunderstood by too many on the left, Trump supporters know he’s over the top; but they are sick to death with the ‘stuffed shirt’ politics they believe fails to get anything done.

“We are going to shake things up,” she told me emphatically.

The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes brilliantly describes the attention economy. “Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organisation is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.”

Trump is the master of this world. He understands that if you are holding a megaphone in the town square, and you keep holding it, and you don’t let go, and you shout loudly, you will dominate the airwaves.

Hayes says Trump’s approach is the equivalent to ‘running naked through the neighbourhood; repellent but transfixing.’ In the words of his great supporter, Steve Bannon: “The president understands controversy equals attention equals power.”

According to Michael Woolf, who spent more time in the White House with Trump in the first term than any other writer: “The story of Trump is the story of how he tried to make himself a story. He is post-literate…total television.”

Trump, Woolf says, “governs like he’s still the host of a reality show—every day needs a cliff-hanger.” And each episode requires a colourful cast of characters, a compelling scenario, a series of plot twists - and usually someone getting fired.

Episode 1: Making Canada the 51st state of America. Episode 2: Annexing Greenland. Episode 3: Tariffs. Episode 4: Shake up Ukraine/Russia conflict. Episode 5: Send in the army to US cities. And on and on goes the long-running series.

Woolf says Trump asks his advisors, not whether a policy will work or improve people’s lives, but whether it will make big news.

Trump has honed a way of communicating that is a million miles away from the carefully planned, often bland, infrequent, play it safe, communications of mainstream politicians.

He is unscripted. He dispenses with all of the niceties of political discourse. He uses exaggeration in a way that infuriates opponents but always sparks debate, controversy and push back.

Journalist Maggie Haberman who has observed him for a long time says “his communication strategy is chaos as a tactic: overwhelm the system, dominate the news cycle, and make fact-checking impossible.”

He throws so much out there that opponents are grappling to respond to the first controversy, while he’s moved on to the next or the one after that.

He takes an intractable problem and blows it up. In doing so, he doesn’t just grab attention but reframes the issue. This is communications as policy.

The Ukraine war is stuck. Europe is not pulling its weight on defence. Too many illegal immigrants are crossing the American border. The government is bloated and not delivering. Too many American products and jobs have gone to China.

His solutions might dismay us - his treatment of Zelensky in the Oval Office, DOGE taking a chainsaw to federal employees, the cruelty of the ICE deportations, tariffs - but his supporters believe he’s identified the right problems, he’s acting on their behalf, and he’s got the strength to do something about it. He says he will do things, and then he does them.

The big question for mainstream politics is how to respond. It is too easy to say we want nothing to do with the Trump approach, it’s demeaning. But how then do we take back control of the agenda, grab attention and cut through the noise?

The seven key techniques of Trump communications

This table provides graphic evidence of the challenge – how lame traditional communications can seem when head to head with Trump’s techniques.

I can see some people reading this and saying, but he also lies, distorts, defames, demeans. All those things are true. My point is not that we brush these aside, but that our anger at what he is doing, shouldn’t blind us to what we can learn and what we must change in the way we go about politics.

This is not a call for gimmicky use of social media. Politicians are barking up the wrong tree if they think this is about tap-dancing on Tik Tok to show they are ‘human’. That is not what Trump does. Trump may blur entertainment and politics, but it is all in service of his big political messages.

Of course, each politician needs to work out what is authentic to them. But it’s easy to be risk averse. You hear a lot of justification of boring communications from those who say, for example, that government is a serious business, which it is, so politicians should spend all their time in meetings doing the real job.

If there is one thing we really should learn from Trump, it’s that in the attention economy, and with a volatile electorate, communication is governing. It’s not an add on. It’s a central part of democratic engagement. People have a right to know what is going on, what the government is trying to do and why. And it is simply not good enough to suggest that this is a more trivial, irritating or less important part of the job.

Turning a boring, political party into a movement

Trump has not only mastered the attention economy. He has turned a hobbling Republican party into a potent force.

Paradoxes abound when analysing Trump. None more so than the ultimate narcissist has created the most powerful political movement in generations, where many feel a genuine sense of belonging. He may believe in the supreme ‘I’, but his followers - the MAGA faithful - believe there is a powerful ‘We’.

For many people who feel they are disrespected, left behind, on the backfoot in life, being part of MAGA is about the restoration of pride. It is an antidote to the censorious left.

And all movements need symbols, rituals to build their community. The MAGA hat, the T-shirts, the chants of USA, USA, USA, the big, sprawling, rambling rallies all add to a sense of collective mission.

We may comfort ourselves with the cliche that MAGA is just ‘grievance politics’. It isn’t. It offers real hope, the hope of a better future in which America is standing tall again, and working people feel the American dream is restored.

However much traditional Republicans may balk at what their party has become, or Democrats fulminate at its excesses, Trump supporters feel they are part of something with an energy, a passion, a set of beliefs, arguments and ideas and most of all a galvanising sense of purpose.

Reform want to do the same in Britain. They have studied the Trump playbook and are attempting - not always successfully - to put a British face on it. They are blurring entertainment and politics; just watch one of their rallies. They don’t yet have many ideas. And they don’t have MAGA style caps - not very British - but they do have football shirts, which are very British.

In contrast, there’s something tired, predictable and risk averse about mainstream political parties. They are too often lost in their technocratic world or getting worked up about causes that are a long way from the everyday concerns of the people they wish to serve. It is as if the very idea of creating a movement is a step too far.

MAGA puts the lie to the idea that people are apathetic, that they don’t care about politics. MAGA shows that people want a cause, to believe in something bigger than transactional politics.

If centrist parties want to survive, renew and become successful in this changed political landscape, they will need to learn from Trump.

Not every politician can be like Trump. Not every politician wants to be like Trump or should be like Trump.

But every politician can adapt to the attention economy. Every political party can turn itself into a movement with a cause.

It’s time we swallowed our pride and started to learn from someone who is rewriting the rules of the game - and leaving us all flat-footed in response.