Drama is now the most important currency in politics. One man has cornered the market.

---

Source: BBC

In Davos this January, the people who run the world queued like punters outside a nightclub, shivering in the alpine air for a chance to see Donald J. Trump. Chief executives, central bankers, tech bosses and foreign ministers shuffled forward in their Italian wool and gossiped. Would he really do it? Would America, the land of the free, annex Greenland, the sovereign territory of a NATO ally? Unthinkable! Scandalous! Most of all, unmissable.

Trump had written the script of a thriller and kept the ending to himself. His supposed peers were reduced to extras, loitering outside the set to find out what their lines would be. Walter Russell Mead of the Wall Street Journal, watching from the floor, said he had never seen a leader demonstrate this kind of power over his peers.

Mead takes the Trump Show seriously, as a show. The commentariat, by contrast, parse each line for policy, tally every fabrication, and work themselves into fresh outrage at the pettiness and the corruption. A whole industry turns a profit auditing a man who “does not speak in order to convey information.” All of them miss that the bullshit is beside the point. Trump’s words are not commitments. They are baited hooks, cast to see what bites.

The same logic runs through Trump’s appointments. He casts his cabinet as a producer, not a president, selecting for screen presence and lacquered rage. Hegseth, RFK, Patel, and the women he has since tossed aside, Noem, Bondi, Gabbard: characters to dominate a two-minute Fox segment rather than technocrats to run a department. Noem shot her own dog in a gravel pit and wrote it up in her memoir as a lesson in resolve. An attorney general fired in public is worth more to Trump than a justice department quietly doing its job, because Bondi’s sacking is the story. Trump is “not a policy wonk,” as Mead puts it. “He’s a drama queen.”

Most politicians treat attention like money. They raise it in campaign mode, spend it to win office, then live off the balance until the next election. Trump treats attention as a perpetual-motion machine. He trades eyeballs for power, and spends the power not on the dull work of governing but on the next spectacle: a surprise tariff, a threatened annexation, an ally betrayed. Each drama pulls in more attention, which buys more power, which buys the next spectacle. No living person has ever occupied more penthouses in more heads. Wherever you go on earth, the talk is of Trump.

But there is no such thing as perpetual motion. The machine runs on a reserve Trump did not create: the credibility of American guarantees, hard-won alliances, the weight of the dollar. He is spending down a political inheritance decades in the making, faster each year, because each spectacle must outdo the last to hold the same share of the global mind. A machine that runs on surprise cannot idle.

Take Iran. Trump tore up the deal Obama had signed and went to war in its place, assuring Americans it would be over in weeks. Months later, the framework asks less of Iran than Obama’s did, while offering sanctions relief and a reconstruction fund worth hundreds of billions. He bombed his way to a weaker deal than the one he destroyed. A better deal was never the prize; the drama of Trump as world-breaker was, and on that he delivered: a war, a crisis, the whole world watching to see what he would do next.

The political arsonist tells the voter their fear is justified, that the system really is rigged and no amount of personal striving will unrig it. The right-wing version offers a return to a past that never existed; the leftist equivalent promises a utopia held back only by villains. Both are lies, but the right captures the public mood more often, because a road back is easier to picture than a paradise that keeps receding. Every version needs its enemy; a solved problem is a dead storyline and a standing grievance a renewable resource: the immigrant and the “Islamist” for the right; the billionaire and the “Zionist” for the left.

Enough of the electorate has always wanted bread and circuses; Juvenal was sneering at the Roman unwashed in the second century. On 14 June, for his eightieth birthday and the republic’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth, Trump staged a live cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House.

The man screaming for blood at the octagon is not always the dupe the media takes him for. He has watched successive governments preside over a shrinking town, a closed plant and a wage that buys less each year. He carries scars from W’s pointless wars in the Middle East, saw his taxes bail out millionaire bankers in 2008, and for his trouble was lectured on his privilege by a class that suffered none of it.

When a politician is grazed by a bullet and rises with his fist in the air, that voter sees something no eight-hundred-page policy paper can match: a leader prepared to stand on his side and take a hit. He may know he is backing a confidence man, a self-dealing fantasist. But he calculates that a brawling fraud is preferable to a polite technocrat who holds him in contempt.

The most revealing moment of Trump’s career came at the first debate in 2016. When Clinton said his returns showed he paid no federal income tax, he did not deny it or scramble to explain. “That makes me smart,” he cut in. He had gamed the system every voter suspected was rigged, and rather than hide it he offered it as proof of his political fitness.

Conventional politicians could not survive that move; the admission alone would end them. Every step that carried them to the centre bred out the shamelessness Trump exhales: the willingness to risk dignity, to say the unsayable and double down while the commentariat gasps. The qualities that win power in an attention economy, the hubris, the relish for the fight, the refusal ever to be boring, are close to the opposite of the ones the job demands once power is won.

The old order of three television networks relaying a common set of facts was a brief aberration the educated class mistook for the natural order. The platforms, indifferent to democracy’s health, have restored an older and rowdier baseline, and our politics now breeds two kinds of leader: the showmen who win and cannot govern, and the managers who govern and cannot consistently win. We swing between them, tiring of each in turn.

The showman spends what others built: the institutions, the alliances, the shared facts that once let a society argue on common ground. The manager who follows inherits less, and has no time to rebuild before the next showman arrives to spend what remains. By the time Juvenal mocked the mob’s hunger for bread and circuses, Roman self-government had been dead for over a century. The spectacle was its wake.

About the Author

Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.

On Substack, Luke writes about the systems we’re breaking and the blindness that lets us — from climate and geopolitics to AI and the future of work. Read & Subscribe on Substack here.