The Pinball President

By John Dickerson

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

In 1946, the year that Donald Trump was born, the pinball machine offered everything but control. The bumpers were propulsive, the lights flashed, but the player’s only honest move was to pull a spring-loaded plunger. After that, the ball belonged to the machine, zinging and zooming wherever the bumpers sent it.

 

This is how many Americans experience the Trump presidency today: antic caroming that they can do little more than watch. The ballroom. The Iran war. The threats against Canada. Greenland. Portraits of himself as Christ, a decorated general, or the pope. The arch. The Kennedy Center. Prosecution of enemies. Pardons. Imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals. Federal incursions into voting. Tariffs on. Tariffs off. Tariffs on again. The Qatari plane. Endless promises—to release tax returns, to end corruption, to deliver $5,000 checks—that never materialize.

 

No president has been more with us than Trump, because no president has been better at seizing public attention. But there is a difference between getting attention and doing something with it. For months, the president has been unable to convince the public that he’s up to the job. In a CNN poll released at the end of July, 65 percent of respondents said that his policies had worsened the economy, and only 28 percent approved of his handling of Iran.

 

Voters have watched the caroming and have concluded that he doesn’t have his eye on the ball. They care about the economy, and he seems to care about everything else. Only 27 percent of adults told CNN that Trump has the right priorities, down from 45 percent when the term began. And a record 73 percent said he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important issues. In June, while Trump was fixated on the Reflecting Pool and stopping widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist, a bipartisan housing bill aimed at high costs reached his desk. He called it “a big yawn” and said he hadn’t decided whether to sign it. In July, he let it become law without his signature.

 

This is a problem for Republicans in November 2026, but it’s an opportunity for voters looking to November 2028. Once a roster of candidates emerges, their supporters will discover that the office demands—wouldn’t you know it?—exactly the qualities that their preferred candidate happens to possess. Now, when there’s no one horse to back, is the time to use the current president’s rat-a-tat treatment of our attention to ask how we want the next president to spend it.

 

Many voters will ask only one thing of the next president: Don’t be Donald Trump. Fair enough. But stopping at “not Trump” wastes the extremity of the Trump years. Extremes clarify. A flood shows you where the ground was always low.

 

The Trump years have been a reminder that the presidency is a trust. The public’s attention belongs to the public. A president borrows it, and the test at every turn is whether he spends it on their account or his own. Trump treats it as a possession, to do with as he pleases, like the East Wing. For him, the public is his cheering section. A president who ignores the half of the country that voted against him teaches them that elections are conquests. They will remember that when they win.

 

It’s true that when Trump wants to focus the nation’s attention on something, he is relentless: immigration, his enemies, his ballroom. In April, The Washington Post found that he had publicly mentioned the ballroom on roughly a third of the days by that point in the year; he had posted about it more than about tariffs. But what he cares about often isn’t in the nation’s greater interest. A trustee doesn’t spend the trust on himself.

 

The next president should ration his calls on the public’s attention, which, after all, protects his own effectiveness and the country’s. “Public psychology,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote in 1935 to a reporter urging him to speak out more often, “cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” When Roosevelt did speak, he explained. In his first fireside chat, he walked the country through how a bank works. Explanation is what lets a president speak less: A public that has been shown why can carry the argument on its own, and a public that has only been told what must be told again tomorrow.

 

A president cannot push opinion where it doesn’t want to go, only nudge it, and that is possible only if he hasn’t already worn the audience out. A president who is always talking cannot use talking to signal that this time matters. The creed of this current era is the opposite. “If you’re not making news, you’re not governing,” wrote former Representative Matt Gaetz, who made news nearly every day he served and governed not at all.

 

A president who consumes the country’s attention spends down a resource that citizens need for their own affairs, including those delightful corners of human experience that should be free of political consideration. The UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell understood this before the bouts on the White House lawn this summer. Mitchell, who did not participate, said that the government was “desecrating its role in society.” The government, he said, “is supposed to protect us, not entertain us.”

 

Sometimes a president doesn’t have to ask for the country’s attention, because catastrophe has already gathered it. In these cases, a president can act as a moral force, particularly in consolation. Reagan after the Challenger explosion, Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, the younger Bush after the attacks of 9/11, and Obama at Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina. Each president spent the nation’s attention on its grief and, in doing so, reminded the nation what it valued. Trump has nearly erased this part of the job, inventing a new one in its place: chief grave dancer. When Rob Reiner was murdered in December, Trump blamed Reiner himself; when Robert Mueller died in March, Trump wrote, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

 

A president sends a moral signal not just in the words he uses but also in what he chooses to spend them on. After the white-nationalist march and the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump denounced the Nazis, but the thrust of his attention was aimed elsewhere. He obsessed over the counterprotesters. He praised himself for being the only one brave enough to name what he claimed were the misdeeds of the people opposing the Nazis. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he insisted without evidence, “and nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now.” He sent six tweets about Charlottesville and, in those tweets, never used the terms racism, bigotry, or white nationalism. He sent 37 tweets about NFL players kneeling during the anthem.

 

All of this happens where we can see it. We tend to treat the presidency as if it existed only in that public form. Most of it doesn’t. Because much of the job happens in secret or out of camera range, what the president chooses to do with public attention is our best evidence of how he sorts the world in private. That evidence has limits. A president who never mentions the deficit might be working on it every morning. Eisenhower’s style was called the “hidden hand”: The president who looked idle at the podium was working the levers out of sight. But a president whose public attention shows no discipline, discernment, or patience isn’t going to discover those attributes at the necessary scale when the cameras turn away. Trump governs by the Heisman hand, always in your face.

 

The presidency demands brutal prioritization. “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important,” goes a line that Eisenhower liked to quote. “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” It was such a simple idea that it became the Eisenhower Matrix, used by managers everywhere to sort incoming challenges. The principle applies with more force in a job where the urgent arrives by the hour. If missile stockpiles are low, we want a president fixing that now, not giving a speech about the deficit. But we also want a president who can see the deficit coming and feel some obligation to the future citizens who will live under galactic debt. Trump spends a lot of his time on matters that are neither important nor urgent. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for 30 years, has said that if you charted his mind these days, 70 percent of it would go to gilding, construction, renaming, and tribute projects.

 

The exhaustion after Trump will produce an appetite for quiet. It has happened before. George W. Bush campaigned on restoring dignity to the office because Americans were worn out by the dramas of the Clinton years; he wanted a presidency that his team promised would show up on page A24 of the newspaper. But quiet is not a standard. The office needs a benchmark built from the job itself, not from the last man to hold it. Nor should the next president react to Trump’s frivolity by turning every subject into a family talk in the living room about Important Matters—a brittle standard where partisans adopt the posture of the online scold who answers “I love dogs” with “Your silence on cats is deafening.” Under that standard, a president must speak to everything, and a president who speaks to everything has no time left to do anything.

 

Campaigns often measure for qualities that have little or nothing to do with the office. But voters can evaluate how candidates treat public attention on the campaign trail and make some inferences about how they would approach the job. Here are some questions to ask: Does the candidate choose problems that a president can actually move, and can he say why those and not others? Can a president articulate a vision for the country to people who are not likely to vote for her? Can he explain rather than merely assert? Does she ever talk about a problem that won’t pay off before the next election? Can he let a news cycle pass without joining it? And when grief or outrage arrives, does he show any evidence of a concern for the entire nation? How a candidate handles these moments during a campaign—when public attention, ever more scarce in the age of the algorithm, is the only thing he has to spend—tells us how that candidate will spend ours.

 

In 1947, the year after Trump’s birth, pinball changed. The flipper was added, which meant the player was no longer merely watching. Where the ball went was now, at least in part, up to the player. In 2028, voters will be in the game again. But that requires attention to the office now.