Chris Hayes, MS NOW host and author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” joined Ari Melber on Thursday’s “The Beat” to explain why he believes the Trump administration has become “kind of addicted to their own trolling.”
“It is amazing how just locked into the most pathological, toxic parts of the attention economy they are,” Hayes said, adding that President Donald Trump is “someone who has a sort of pathological instinct for, and dependency on, other people’s attention that has now suffused the entire governing apparatus.”
The “All In” host used the U.S. military’s recent raid in Venezuela as an example. After that operation, the administration shared pictures of what appeared to be a makeshift Situation Room. In the background, a television appeared to show search results for “Venezuela” on X.
“The reductio ad absurdum of that, of course, is planning a raid where people are going to get shot and killed, and where U.S. service members might give their lives, and … you’re looking at what’s the buzz on Twitter about it?” said Hayes.
He added that “content” is the “primary imperative for everything they do.”
According to Hayes, this “content-first” approach can be seen across the Trump administration. “We just saw an ICE officer shoot and kill Renee Good, and one of the strangest and most unnerving things about the sequence that led to him firing three shots that took her life is that he’s got a cellphone video in his hand the whole time,” he said. “In fact, he has to switch hands to the cellphone so that he can bring out his gun and continues to tape.”
Although Hayes stressed we have yet to hear from the ICE agent involved, and do not yet know whether he was instructed to film his encounters, he said, “there seems to be a real directive to ICE agents to create as much content as possible.”
“Even in this life-or-death moment, that is the overriding imperative to the point that he has to move the phone from one hand to the other in the moment that he presumably, I think, would say that he, quote, ‘feared for his life,’” Hayes said.
He did offer a “silver lining,” however, telling Melber that despite Trump’s constant need for attention, negative attention does have “diminishing returns.” “There are problems with that,” he said. “That does come with costs.” “They’re making a spectacle in Minneapolis,” he added. “People are paying attention. … They’re succeeding in getting attention. The problem is, people hate it.” You can watch the full conversation between Melber and Hayes in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. Recommended
