Here’s a thought experiment: what if the White House held a press conference and nobody came? What if the president tweeted and nobody saw it? What if late-night talk show hosts didn’t mention the president once during their monologues?
These things would disturb the president more than the sharpest satirical barb because the president understands a key political media equation: the total amount of attention one gets is more important, more powerful than the kind of attention.
Pollsters and pundits obsess over the president’s approval rating, but this is the wrong equation: approval balances positive and negative sentiment. Is the president popular? Unpopular? No change? It’s a qualitative exercise.
The president knows better: his obsession is quantitative. How much attention is he getting? His metric is AQ, his Attention Quotient.
IQ measures raw intelligence but doesn’t evaluate what the mind will do with that intelligence. A high IQ individual might cure diseases or build bioweapons. It’s all the same to IQ.
Likewise, AQ is shameless. It doesn’t care whether the attention praises or condemns: every thought directed at AQ is a win.
There are lots of things the president doesn’t do. He doesn’t like touching people. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t laugh.
Most importantly, he doesn’t experience shame. Ever. That’s why AQ is his perfect weapon. Negative statements make other people feel bad. The president loves them.
Nobody who experiences shame can use AQ the way the president does.
The president doesn’t hate CNN, the Washington Post or The New York Times. He doesn’t hate Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee or John Oliver. He doesn’t hate Alec Baldwin’s Emmy-winning SNL impersonation of him. He is contemptuous of them: not because of anything they say but because he plays them like Joshua Bell fiddling in the D.C. Metro. Every time Baldwin puts on that blond wig, every time Noah rasps out his eerily accurate vocal impression, every time Michael Moore or Tom Arnold talk about their plans to expose the president, the president wins because he’s measuring AQ– the amount of attention, not the flavor.
As Oscar Wilde observed in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” This is a shameless statement. The president gets it.
How AQ Works
Whatever you think of the president’s policies and actions, his mastery of AQ won him the Oval Office. His over-the-top antics during the campaign earned him nonstop media coverage that one firm estimated was worth $5.6 Billion dollars, “more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined.” Since the inauguration, the president has continued to rack up valuable media coverage for which he pays not one penny.
All of the president’s antics, outrageous statements, violations of behavioral norms, and abrupt shifts in opinion create ever-increasing awareness. He doesn’t care if they’re true: he cares if they increase his AQ because attention is the key to his power.
Awareness is a marketing term. Psychologists and behavioral economists call it availability, which measures how easy it is to bring something, anything, to mind. If you think of a Coca-Cola on a hot summer day and you’re thirsty, then Coke is more available to you than Pepsi. The purpose of every Coke ad in history has been to increase availability.
The more available an idea is to you, the more it distorts how you evaluate information. Soft drinks are actually bad for you, but if Coke is the most available idea when you’re thirsty you won’t stop to think about a glass of ice water. The more times you hear a statement, the more available it becomes, and therefore the more credence you give it without reflection.
Repetition breeds automatic believability.
Using AQ to Brand Ideas
The president understands that within his personal AQ he can build AQ for individual ideas and labels.
The president habitually calls the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt” that has not had any results. (Objectively, there have been more than 17 indictments and five guilty pleas.) Media properties cover the president’s witch hunt statement every time he makes it.
This builds the AQ of the witch hunt label. Over time the witch hunt label becomes more believable to the audiences of those media properties even if the media property condemns the statement as untrue every time.
In other words, although Fox News and CNN may describe how the president labels the Mueller investigation in vastly different ways, the impact of those descriptions is much the same: they both increase the idea’s AQ and make the statement more believable through sheer repetition.
During the campaign, the then-candidate’s canny habit of nicknaming his opponents (Crooked Hillary, Lying Ted and Little Marco) — and then unwaveringly referring to them by their nicknames — made the ideas that Hillary Clinton was a crook, Ted Cruz was a liar, and Marco Rubio is short easily available and therefore believable to audiences that heard them again and again and again.
These days, by always referring to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as “Cryin’ Chuck” the president builds the idea’s AQ, branding Schumer’s responses to GOP positions as those of a crybaby.
More availability makes ideas more believable, regardless of whether or not they happen to be true.
The Point
The president’s opponents — especially midterm Democratic candidates — need to bear in mind that every time they mention the president they are doing him a favor. Any campaign that builds its identity around opposition to the president is doomed because that campaign is about the president (which he likes) and increases the president’s AQ.
The first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club.
The first rule of defeating the president is not to talk about him. That’s why you won’t find the president’s name anywhere in this column.
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