Chris Hayes has a new book out, and during his MSNBC show on Tuesday he used the occasion to discuss the “sensory bombard” of Donald Trump’s second term, and how he thinks it can be fight back against. His main message: “Focus is power.”
That, as he explained, is basically the theme of his new book, “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” which examines the enormous effort made to grab people’s attention in the modern political and media environment.
“So far, the experience of this first week of Donald Trump has been an awfully familiar, one kind of sensory bombarded, just being overwhelmed by stimuli, unable to focus, a kind of total attentional domination,” Hayes began. “This has been Donald Trump’s modus operandi Since 2015.”
Hayes argued that “through his own, I think personal, psychological brokenness,” Trump instinctively gets that in the age we live, in the attention age, that attention is the most valuable resource. Get enough of it. You command fortunes. Can dominate politics. And for that reason, you pursue it at all costs, even, and this is really important, even if it means courting, even embracing negative attention and conflict, and hatred — millions of people genuinely hating him.”
Hayes pointed out that the problem is bigger than just the current president. “This insistent, beckoning call of the phones and the screens that lure our attention, almost against our will, is now a fixture of our interior and personal lives as well, down to even our most intimate moments,” he said.
“We’re all subjected to a kind of dominion from the online platforms that were represented in person by the people who stood on the very stage next to Donald Trump at his inauguration, from Elon Musk’s X to Meta to Google and Amazon,” Hayes continued. “The entirety right now of our private, social and political lives is dominated by this ever-more-competitive pursuit of our attention, and those who wish to extract it for a value are cracking into our very minds to take it.”
“The book I’ve been working on for last few years,” Hayes said, referencing “The Siren’s Call,” centers around the idea that what we pay attention to at any given moment is really the substance of life. It’s just about the most precious resource we have. When it is aggregated and pooled at scale over billions of users worldwide, it becomes a treasured commodity, both for corporations and for politicians and the mechanisms they now deploy with increasing sophistication, using our own biological wiring to compel our attention.”
This, Hayes argued further, has created a “signature feeling of alienation that I think, is the pervasive mood of our time, a feeling that something should be within us and under our control is now outside of us and in someone else’s control. All of this, I think, actually has really big implications for covering this Trump administration.”
“One of the most important lessons I’ve come to in writing the book is this,” Hayes went on, “that in a distracted age… focus is power. Focus is power. Having an inability to focus is giving away power. And that’s easier said than done. It is something that honest to God, we wrestle with every day, and [have been] wrestling with for years, especially with Trump.”
As an example, Hayes said that Trump “want people to pay attention to… the ICE raids that he is sending TVs Dr Phil on ride-alongs with,” and further that Trump
“does not really want people to pay attention to” things such as “firing most of the government’s inspectors general, top federal watchdogs, in the middle of a Friday night, no Dr Phil ride-along.”
“The fact pf he matter is, as improbable and maddening as Trump’s particular political success has been for so many reasons, he isn’t omnipotent. He’s not a colossus. The politics that he embodies, this obsession with attention, also comes with huge vulnerabilities,” Hayes said. “Because he’s so obsessed with attention, because he’s willing to attract a lot of negative attention and outrage and controversy and blowback.”
“Don’t forget for a second that tens of millions of people find all of it utterly off-putting. He won the first time through an electoral college hat trick while losing the popular vote by millions. The second time he lost, even though he was the incumbent and incumbents around the world were doing well during COVID. The last time he won a fairly narrow victory, but he entered this term with lower approval than almost any other new president recent memory,” Hayes said, adding that “the popularity of this form of domination is not a given. It’s defeatable, but it does require us to be aware and intentional about where we put our attention, and that’s my job with this show.”
“All of our job, all of our jobs in this era, is to work, to maintain focus and to keep focus on things that matter and to stay with them. And my promise to you is that’s the role we are going to try to play as we go through this chaotic nail in which he and his big tech oligarchs are attempting this omnipresent assault on our attentional faculties in public life and in every other moment in between,” Hayes said also.
He went on to tell viewers about his upcoming book tour, and you can see that and the complete commentary in the video below:
The post Chris Hayes Says Trump ‘Isn’t Omnipotent’ and His ‘Form of Domination’ Is ‘Defeatable’: ‘Focus Is Power’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
