In his rambling address to 800 Flag officers of the U.S. military, President Trump didn’t get his MAGA boost from his audience. The 800 weren’t an audience really. They had been summoned and were awaiting further orders. If they didn’t like what they heard, they could, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsteth advised, resign. The President doesn’t want them to resign because as he reads the tea leaves he’s going to need this audience, which is not the audience he’s been playing to since The Apprentice. He therefore needs to find a way to make them his audience. I won’t speculate here as to why he needs the military as compliant as his Department of Justice. The mission is so transparent that we should fully expect a countering plan in place.

While it is true that the fight now is for attention in a mosh pit of opinions, clashes and truthiness where lies and bullshit don’t win the day but do a good job in darkening the glass of observation, attention is gotten if you read your audience correctly. I mean you pitch to where attention is already being paid. Attention is attracted because it confirms what an audience is already attracted to. This is the Ouroboros: what we are already attracted to is what we’ve been paying attention to.

To say that President Trump attends only to what suits his own personal interest begs the question as to how has he been able to make that interest his audience’s interest. I’ve already given the answer theoretically: he knows the likes and dislikes of his audiences, doubles down on their fears, paranoia, bloodlust, anger, impatience, bigotry and hatred of authority and those who claim authority, aka The Elite. He thusly solidifies an audience that any politician running for audience will have to attract. In short, this is an electorate now transformed into an audience.

This electorate now an audience has been paying attention to Donald J. Trump for a long time. We’ve all been paying tickets to his solo performances. Whatever was there before him suffering with dysphoria, immiseration, cognitive dissonance and dysfunction, President Trump expanded into a base for any future electoral politics.

Many are speculating as to what history will say about Trump’s presidencies but I would write this:

“That he read his audience well and took them further into the darker devils of our nature than any president before him. He created an audience that degenerated into viewing some facts as hard shell convincing to some and opposing facts as hard shell convincing to others. He turned a........

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