I’m convinced that there’s an attention economy and virtually nothing matters in politics anymore if nobody hears about it. So you have to become skilled at breaking through the noise, especially the endless cacophony coming from Trump and his minions, in order to make any headway. (I wrote a bit about this earlier.)
Josh Marshall has some excellent insights on this phenomenon in his piece today. Here’s an excerpt:
To the extent the outcome of a political question or fight is pre-determined, politics and news coverage of it ceases to exist. Or if it doesn’t cease to exist, it loses the vast amount of its electricity and impact. We see this most clearly in 2025 public corruption stories. There are countless public corruption stories out there right now. But do they matter? Are you as a reporter going to really dig deep into one and is your editor going to give you a lot of running room when it is an absolute certainty there will never be an investigation by the Trump DOJ? The Tom Homan story is almost the exception that proves the rule. The Feds already basically caught him totally dead to rights. And yes, this case is so totally bonkers that reporters are kind of razzing Trump and AG Pam Bondi and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about it. But even here, reporting is constrained by the iron reality that Homan won’t lose his job, let alone face any legal consequences.
This dimension of politics applies in legislative and DC politics as well. As long as the outcome is foreordained, the gas just drains out of the politics tank. This is why the Epstein story caught hold like wild fire during the summer. It really wasn’t the inherently shocking and provocative nature of the crimes. It was that people could see that it wasn’t clear the White House could control it. Then politics and media coverage, which to a real degree were in a sort of months-long coma, began to flicker to life.
That’s the same issue here. It’s easy to look all-powerful when you are in fact … well, all-powerful. Blue America and all its commentators and consultants and campaign gurus have never been sufficiently attuned to how Trump’s constant performances of power create this aura of invincibility around him which in turn makes him seem uncrossable. The Kimmel fight — despite being about a late-night talk show — began to pierce some of that bubble. The trillion dollars of health care cuts weren’t popular when they passed this summer either. But as long as the outcome was guaranteed, it was never going to get sufficient attention. No one wastes time watching a rigged prize fight. All political contest and all the news coverage that swirls around it are based on uncertainty and the fact that there’s always the new detail to be known. This is a big part of why this fight, regardless of the outcome, was so important. Democrats don’t just seem to be winning this political fight, at least for the moment. They’re bringing actual politics — contests of power and public opinion about which the outcome is unknown — out of its coma. And that makes everything look very different.
That’s what the fighting is for. We don’t know how it will come out and that’s what gets people’s attention and creates engagement. This is always true to some extent but in the Trump era it is everything. So far, the Democrats have made this shutdown have some real suspense and as a result they’ve created the space to have some success as well.