Break on Through to The Other Side

A little more than a year ago, as Trump’s inauguration loomed, Chris Hayes was sharing the thesis for his new book The Sirens’ Call, which can be summed up with the phrase “attention is power.”

As the first year of Trump’s second term unfolded, the thesis seemed to be one that Trump himself lived by. Grabbing and sustaining the public’s attention seemed to be Trump’s top priority at all times, especially when another narrative was damaging his administration. Outlandish proposals like annexing Canada or Greenland, social media posts provocative enough to incite widespread argument, and aggressive foreign policy excursions in Venezuela and Iran all confirmed Hayes’ thesis on a near-daily basis. Indeed, the president was constantly thanking Americans for their attention.

And he’s gotten it. In fact, for all of 2025, there was no political issue that was talked about on social media more than Trump himself. He WAS the political issue:

There was one week in June when ICE/immigration/protests was nearly tied with Trump - this was the week that the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles first received widespread coverage, which also coincided with the week of the first “No Kings” rally - but aside from that one moment, Trump has floated far above all other topics in terms of sheer volume of posts.

In fact, one might even make the case that Trump’s riskiest foreign policy gambit to date - the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities - was at least partially a result of Trump feeling threatened by the attention that the anti-ICE protests were getting.

2026, though, is a different story. For two weeks in a row, Trump lost our attention, at least compared to two other political issues that both are threatening to capsize his presidency: namely, the ICE killings in Minneapolis and the Epstein files.

Take a look at the same chart, but with the first weeks of 2026 included:

Note the orange line at the end - first it falls below the brown line (ICE / immigration / protests) after the Pretti killing, then it falls below the gray line (Epstein):

For the last two full weeks of data, Trump has gotten less attention than other political issues. This did not happen once in 2025. I’d be willing to bet that the recent racist video depicting the Obamas as apes, shared on Truth Social by Trump, was a desperate attempt to grab the spotlight once more. Attention-getting is a bit of a magic trick, and Trump relies on the American public being intimidated by his actions and statements. It appears that the public is less inclined to take him seriously lately.

This, incidentally, also happened in 2020 - while comparing social media data from 6 years ago to today is not exactly apples-to-apples, there were two topics that overwhelmed social media that year, and subsumed Trump along with them: COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests. Trump raged and thrashed, but was not able to make himself bigger than those events in the public mind, and that diminishment of stature was likely one of the key factors in him losing his re-election bid.

Americans who are opposed to Trump should not let up now. The Washington political class still treats Trump like the laws of political gravity don’t apply to him, but he’s finally being pulled down to Earth by events beyond his control. Over the past two weeks, Trump may have just lost the only political superpower he had left - the power to make us stop scrolling. The president who overcame arrests, convictions, impeachments, and assassination attempts may just be defeated by his most powerful Kryptonite: Americans are getting bored with him.

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