I did a Q&A for the @McCourtSchool website about a short book our team wrote for the Cambridge Elements Series. It analyzes the lessons Trump has taught us about the "attention economy."

Every semester, @GUPolitics brings to campus a group of political practitioners as fellows, to give our students first hand access to the political process. This fall, we have another outstanding group joining us! Take a look! youtube.com/watch?v=FOwhxDpD…

There is a lot more here, including chapters looking in depth at coverage of Clinton's email scandal, coverage of the pandemic in 2020, and a comparison of the Comey letter coverage versus the Hunter Biden laptop story as different examples of "October surprises."

Attention domination is especially not a silver bullet when Trump holds office. Then, Trump can't escape coverage of bad national outcomes or crises. People still hear news about Trump more than his opponents. But it is often bad national news, and his popularity suffers.

But (and there is a big but!), this attention domination does not always lead to people hearing **positive** things about Trump or to him being popular. In short, Trump illustrates that being extremely skilled at dominating the attention economy is not a political silver bullet.

Trump is astonishingly good at dominating attention. We find he consistently dominates coverage and (crucially) he dominates what people in open-ended survey responses can remember about political news. He demonstrates how someone with media skills can use the attention economy