Narrative Turbulence

I believe Trump’s political durability is best explained by his capacity to exploit structural weaknesses in the modern media ecosystem – weaknesses that normally discipline, and sometimes terminate, political careers.

Imagine a political career as a balloon. The gas inside represents latent popular support; the balloon’s altitude corresponds to the degree of institutional success the politician has attained; and sharp objects it might collide with, like nails, are focalised negative events (gaffes, scandals, policy blunders) onto which journalistic attention converges. A single nail can burst a balloon if the entire force of scrutiny is concentrated on that one point. By contrast, when many nails are pressed simultaneously, each bears only a fraction of the load; the balloon may survive even though overall pressure is higher. Of course, altitude matters too: the higher a career ascends, the larger the differential between internal and external pressure, and the easier it is to rupture, even if thick skin helps.

Politicians under attack have a limited range of responses. They may push back, perhaps at their peril; resign, thereby lowering the altitude; or retreat from view in gentle deflation and until they can be patched. There is, however, a final and counter-intuitive tactic: cause more scandals – add more nails. If one can proliferate apparent scandals faster than media can coordinate, then the force each outlet brings to bear is necessarily diffused. Importantly, such fragmented coverage follows not from collusion but from competition in an unregulated information commons with poor incentives. Outlets are unbound by alliance and lack the decentralised coordination function of a strong culture, making them ‘competing co-belligerents’. Each wants the trophy of single-handedly toppling a career; none wishes to share the credit; and all wish to offload the reputational cost of failure onto their rivals. Today’s equilibrium is precisely the pattern that best serves charismatic politicians rather than policy politicians : many stories, each pursued just enough to keep the carnival going, none pursued with the concentration required.

Journalism’s professed telos is to select objects that maximise civic understanding. Its commercial incentive, however, is to offer the audience a consistent, digestible viewpoint distinctive enough to stand out in an environment of perpetual novelty and familiar enough to be reassuring.¹ Distinctiveness outruns significance, and scandals proliferate.

Here Trump displayed singular skill. He manipulated two parameters of what I term Narrative Turbulence. Let α denote the rate at which topics change and β the irregularity of that change; Narrative Turbulence increases monotonically with both. Trump fuelled narrative turbulence by issuing statements that were semantically under-determined (“nested ambiguities”, to borrow Eric Weinstein’s phrase). Each ambiguous element doubles the range of plausible interpretations; opposing factions, loaded with different priors and unable to appeal to a shared catalogue of facts, interpret the same words in diametrically opposed ways, each side treating the other’s modus ponens as its own modus tollens. During debates and speeches, Trump also switched topics with disorienting speed, depriving more policy-minded journalists of the extended context normally required to resolve ambiguity. The press, hungry for novelty, followed him from one half-opened narrative door to the next, scattering its energy and our attention across an ever-widening field.

Boris Johnson articulated this dynamic in 2006:²

“I’ve got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on. They cease to be newsworthy. You completely ‘out-general’ the media and they despair. They despair. They leave you alone.

You shell them. You pepper them. You pepper their positions with so many gaffes — like chaff from a helicopter — and then you slip in quietly and drop your depth-charges wherever you want to.”

The resulting relationship is textbook codependency. Non-specific outrage supplies cover for politicians and unpredictability supplies the media with fuel for that non-specific outrage to sustain traffic. No 4D chess, just business: the alignment of mutual, short-term incentives, where each side is committed to privatising benefits and externalising costs.

Solutions must target the incentive structures that reward media outlets for flooding our attention field while sparing any one of them the burden of decisive inquiry. Large polities must maintain a minimally shared set of truths and avoid high-turbulence information environments.