Trump "Engagement" Syndrome

The Strange Symbiosis of Attention, Outrage, and the Man Who Never Leaves the Room

There’s something about the name. Say Trump, and attention flares. Not just from those who love him, or those who loathe him, but from everyone. He is, for reasons both obvious and less so, very difficult to ignore.

This article isn’t a deep dive into the man himself. It’s not about his policies or personality. It’s about what happens around him. The noise, the fixation, the gravitational pull that keeps him front and centre. I call it “Trump Engagement Syndrome”. The term captures something real and persistent, a cycle of attention that doesn’t seem to end, no matter how many news cycles pass or elections come and go.

The Attention Economy at Work

In today’s media environment, attention is the prize. It drives revenue, fuels algorithms, and shapes what stories get told and retold. Trump, like it or not, delivers that attention in spades.

Newsrooms have known this for years. Online traffic tends to rise when his name appears in a headline. Podcasts spike when he’s the subject. Social media posts mentioning him, whether in passing or with full-blown analysis, are more likely to be shared, argued over, and reposted. This is not about support. It’s not even about politics, strictly speaking. It’s about engagement, and Trump guarantees it.

Back during his first presidency, media outlets saw record numbers. CNN’s ratings surged. The New York Times subscription base expanded rapidly. Pundits, influencers, and YouTubers built entire brands—sometimes empires—around reacting to Trump. When he left office, the drop in numbers was noticeable. Some figures in the industry even said so out loud.

A Symbiotic Relationship

What’s fascinating, and revealing, is how the dynamic plays out on both sides. Supporters treat Trump as a singular figure, a kind of last line of defence against everything they fear. For them, he’s not just a politician. He’s a stand-in for something larger: defiance, identity, belonging.

Opponents, meanwhile, often position him as the embodiment of what’s wrong with politics, culture, or even the country itself. Campaigns are built around stopping him. Activist networks rally people to resist him. Entire books have been written simply to express dismay at his existence.

In both cases, the focus is the same. Trump remains the organising principle. He draws the spotlight. Even silence becomes a kind of statement. If he doesn’t respond to a crisis, that’s news. If he says something ambiguous, hours of commentary follow. He’s the figure people are reacting to, for or against, again and again.

The Feedback Loop

You can almost see the loop in action. Trump says something. A journalist tweets about it. The media machine revs up. Video clips circulate. Supporters explain what he really meant. Critics issue rebuttals. Donations pour in. Podcasts record emergency episodes. YouTube thumbnails go red and angry. Then, right on cue, a new comment or court case drops, and the cycle starts again.

There’s no need for novelty. The pattern alone sustains the machine. Trump might be repeating something he’s said before, or simply attending a rally, but the mechanics of attention remain the same.

Take, for example, the days surrounding his 2023 indictment. Long before any trial began, the media was already filled with speculative panels, mock-up mugshots, hot takes about democracy’s fate, and of course, merchandise. People were selling T-shirts based on an event that hadn’t yet happened.

It wasn’t just reporting. It was theatre. And the audience, whatever their view, kept showing up.

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Trump Engagement Syndrome doesn’t prove that one side is unhinged or the other is fanatical (though they probably are :-)) . It shows how the political-media ecosystem actually works.

Some personalities suit this ecosystem better than others. Trump happens to be one of them. He’s unpredictable, emotionally vivid, and easily quoted out of context. He’s also unusually effective at creating polarisation, which regardless of your politics, is good for business. The more polarised the subject, the more likely people are to care, click, and share.

But this raises a larger question. Not about Trump, but about us.

What Gets Pushed Aside

The real cost of this kind of constant engagement isn’t just fatigue. It is displacement. Attention, once a limited and valuable resource, is now diverted and chopped into fragments by platforms designed to reward speed, emotional intensity, and controversy. In this environment, other things, quieter, slower, and more enduring slip out of view.

The public square at its best, should not be about personalities per se, it is the domain in which we wrestle with the deepest and most enduring questions of human life. It is the space where differing visions of the good contend. It should be centred on ideas on arguments about justice, liberty, authority, community, law, obligation, memory, identity, and truth. These are not rhetorical ornaments. They are the foundations on which a civilised society rests.

But such questions are harder to ask when every discussion leads back to a single personality. When the political becomes inseparable from the performative, the space for principled disagreement and thoughtful debate begins to shrink. Political speech becomes reaction. Intellectual patience begins to seem like weakness. Shared ground erodes, and the possibility of dialogue withers in favour of alignment and performance.

This is not merely a theoretical concern. The decline of serious discourse is visible all around us. People across the political spectrum often find it more difficult to hold a position that is not immediately legible to others. It is harder to say, “That depends,” or “I’m not sure,” or “That’s more complicated than it seems.” The conditions no longer encourage ambiguity or caution. The demand for rapid response discourages reflection. Paragraphs give way to slogans. Thought is replaced by performance.

While the culture is preoccupied with figureheads, those who can help us think clearly are ignored or forgotten. Writers like Christopher Lasch, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich did not seek celebrity. They wrote slowly and seriously about the forces that shape our lives—forces often hidden beneath the surface. Lasch warned of a culture that trades tradition for novelty, and depth for therapeutic self-regard. Ellul exposed the mechanisms of propaganda in an age saturated with media. Illich showed how institutions often end up undermining the very human relationships they were meant to support. These thinkers are not easily reduced to left or right. They do not serve the needs of factions. What they offer is clarity, not distraction.

They understood something that now feels increasingly distant. That when a society becomes transfixed by the immediate—by screens, personalities, and spectacles it forgets how to think about first principles. And when that happens, politics becomes reactive rather than imaginative. Policy becomes branding. Culture becomes noise.

The danger is not only distraction, but a kind of moral amnesia. We begin to lose the ability to distinguish what is urgent from what is important, what is popular from what is wise. We start to believe that truth must always be trending to be real, that silence means irrelevance, and that slowness signals weakness. The deeper insights of history, philosophy, and theology become inconvenient. They take too long. They cannot be monetised. They do not always flatter the reader.

But these are the sources we most need. They are the roots that hold the soil in place. If we turn away from them, the consequences will not be immediate, but they will be real. We will become increasingly vulnerable to manipulation, increasingly unable to recognise wisdom when we see it, and increasingly incapable of forming a vision of the common good that is not pre-packaged and platform-approved.

There is still time to recover what has been lost. But it will not happen by accident.

There’s Still Time

This syndrome, this cycle is not inevitable. It can be resisted. But not through outrage or mere detachment. It requires something quieter and more difficult.

We need to re-learn how to think in terms of ideas, not just personalities. That means choosing to pay attention differently. To seek out books that don’t trend. To listen more than we post. To stop reacting to everything with a hot take. And to remind ourselves, again and again, that the most important things aren’t always the loudest.

Trump will eventually leave the stage, one way or another. But the habits we’ve formed in relation to him, the constant need to respond, to perform, to position ourselves may stay with us far longer unless we consciously walk away from the loop.

We still have the choice. We can still trade noise for substance. But only if we want to.

It starts with attention. Then comes thought.