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I sometimes think about how left-wing news anchor John Harwood opened a line of questioning during a CNBC presidential debate:
John Harwood: Mr. Trump, you’ve done very well on this campaign so far by promising to build a wall and make another country pay for it.
Donald Trump: Right.
Harwood: Send 11 million people out of the country, cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit.
Trump: Right.
John: And make Americans better off because your greatness would replace the stupidity and incompetence of others.
Trump: That’s right.
John: Let’s be honest. Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?
Trump: It’s not a comic book, and it’s not a very nicely asked question, the way you say that.
What Harwood, who is not a very bright individual, was touching on was that Trump had figured something out — a skill that would propel him to the job of president: he’d hacked America’s attention algorithm. The nature of his pronouncements and the “these go to eleven” attitude he had toward Twitter gave the media fits even as it fed their desire for love/hate viewership. CNN could put an empty lectern on camera just for the anticipation of it: what would the orange man say next?
Where Trump’s medium was tweets and rallies, a similar vector is developing thanks to a different form of social media: the dominance of Dylan Mulvaney on TikTok. The Mulvaney tale is in a way excruciatingly boring — for the whole timeline, listen to this week’s Blocked and Reported, where host Katie Herzog unpacks the major story beats: a gay theater guy decides to come out as nonbinary, then come out as trans, all while adopting a persona that seems like a campy bit of womanface.
Call it a comic-book version of being a woman. Sometimes it pays to loudly identify as something you’re obviously not.
Mulvaney found ways to go viral enough at first. But what really made this person go big was when their niche brand of anti-women tropes — I’m just a girl, I don’t get sportsball! — interfaced with a larger, more established series of brands. Mulvaney has figured out how to hack the attention algorithm of corporate wokeness: find some low-level marketing promoter, dial in the precise frequency that will piss off and polarize the most people, and you can become twice as famous as you were yesterday.
Take a swag bag of influencer promotional material, announce yourself as a brand ambassador, and suddenly people are taking sides over you. Before you know it, InBev is having to cut defensive ads drenched in Americana — Clydesdales, farmers, firefighters, veterans, flags and the Lincoln Memorial itself — to win you back to their favored brew. The controversy fuels the fame, the fame fuels the controversy, and the media cycle runs 5,600 news stories about you.
There’s another thing Dylan Mulvaney and Donald Trump have in common: they both seem to be fine with Dylan Mulvaney. RealClearPolitics’s Phil Wegmann notes that Trump is pretty alone in the 2024 field for not having weighed in on the Bud Light fracas, not normally a topic you’d expect him to ignore. Wegmann cites Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley as all dinging Budweiser for its decision to partner with the Mulvaney.
“You have this man, who dresses up like a girl, and clearly makes a mockery of women – it’s just not right,” Haley told RCP. “Feminist groups who claim to be pro-women have gone silent. We need to use the power of our voice to call this out.”
In contrast: “The Trump campaign did not return repeated RCP requests for comment even though the former president has been outspoken in his opposition to transgender surgery for minors.”
In keeping with the early buzz that Trump may be considering leaning away from the abortion issue, is this a sign that Trump’s response to DeSantis’s culture warrior dominance will be to be the social moderate in the field? It certainly would be in keeping with his positioning on gay marriage in 2016. Maybe, as Donald Trump Jr. suggests, this is about being able to take pictures with Kid Rock even as the GOP rakes in donations from Anheuser Busch. Or it could just be game recognizing game.
