In January 2026, the federal government issued an executive order titled "Celebrating American Greatness With American Motor Racing." A few weeks earlier, it had issued one called "Holding Former Government Officials Accountable For Election Interference And Improper Disclosure Of Sensitive Governmental Information." Earlier still, "Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety," "Protecting The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship," "Unleashing American Energy."

Initially, the function of these may not be clear. As of April 2026 the second Trump administration has issued 254 executive orders, 59 memoranda, and 136 proclamations (Peters and Woolley 2026). The pace of the orders is closer to a content schedule than a legislative process.

254
executive orders signed in fifteen months — closer to a content schedule than a legislative process.

An administrative directive to the Office of Management and Budget about regulatory review has not, in the precedent of governance, required a title at all. "Celebrating American Greatness" is the name of a campaign ad. The act of governance has been engineered for downstream distribution.

Political scientist Murray Edelman published The Symbolic Uses of Politics. His argument was that mass politics does two things at once: it distributes tangible benefits to organized interests and it distributes symbolic gratifications to the general public (Britannica 2024a). He thought the broad public is kept loyal by political spectacle while the actual decisions were settled through quieter processes. Edelman's prediction is conservative compared to where the system has actually arrived. He thought the spectacle ran in parallel with the material decisions, however, decisions are now selected for their value in the symbolic register first and the policy consequences follow.

The 2024 election was the proof of concept. The campaign demonstrated that the most effective way to reach voters was no longer the package of TV ads, direct mail, and turnout machinery the parties had spent half a century perfecting. The road to 270 was recognized as being online-first, then trickling to the general public. Trump sat with Joe Rogan for nearly three hours in late October (Allen and Gomez 2024). He sat with Theo Von, Lex Fridman, Shawn Ryan, Adin Ross, Bussin' With The Boys, Logan Paul, while Kamala Harris stuck to the standard circuit of already-partisan leading podcasts (Bond 2024). Right-wing influencers posted roughly 2.5 times as much as left-wing ones over the cycle (Stocking et al. 2025).

It worked. Trump won the popular vote by 1.48 points — the first Republican to do so since George W. Bush in 2004 (Montanaro 2024). He carried all seven swing states (Frey 2024). Men under 30 swung roughly 13 points relative to 2020 (Navigator Research 2024). Hispanic and Black male voters shifted in the same direction (Hartig et al. 2025). The 2020 coalition that elected Biden depended on legacy mass media, conventional turnout work, and an opponent running as a return to normal. The 2024 coalition was assembled in different territory altogether and confirmed that the territory could now decide the outcome.

+13
point swing among men under 30, relative to 2020.

The symbolic-interactionist tradition, established by Herbert Blumer, has three main premises (Gecas and Tsushima 2018).

  1. People act toward objects on the basis of the meanings the objects have for them.
  2. Those meanings emerge from social interaction.
  3. The meanings are continuously revised through interpretation.

The objects of mainstream political conflict are not stable ideals that the parties disagree about, they are sites where meaning is produced and discarded in constant interaction. The political fight is over which meaning controls the narrative.

Once in office, the campaign mode has not stopped, rather, it has become the operating mode of government. The pace of the orders, the public targeting of opponents, the use of social posts as primary announcement channel, the broadcast of cabinet meetings, the dismantling of institutions in performances designed to produce video. These are the visible signs that what was learned during the campaign about how to hold attention is now being applied to the work of running the country.

The Department of Government Efficiency was launched as a CPAC bit with a chainsaw (Manchester 2025). Within a year it had reduced the federal workforce dramatically, and the reductions were narrated as content, with each round of layoffs producing posts, clips, and reactions before the substantive consequences had time to materialize (Wagner 2025).

It was disbanded a year after it was established; its purpose fulfilled (Renshaw 2025). That purpose may have genuinely been to reduce the federal deficit (if so it failed) or, more likely, it was designed as an arm of the eternal campaign. A signal to show that things were Happening, rather than to actually make things change.

This has a sociological term, coined by Daniel Boorstin, "pseudo-event." Originally, it described press conferences and product launches (Britannica 2023b). This has been promoted from a deficiency of media coverage into a form of statecraft.

The traditional sociological picture of mass political participation was of a public mostly absent from the process, occasionally pulled in by elite-level conflict, outmatched by an organized minority with the time, money, and infrastructure to set the agenda. The many were many but disorganized, the few were few but organized, and the few won.

That picture doesn't fit the active half of the country. The Trump (and Harris) coalition(s) are organized, with dense communication networks via shared sources of content.

The participant's experience inside the network is parasocial. The voter who participated in that content economy in 2024 experiences the eventual win as a shared achievement, in roughly the way a sports fan experiences a championship as something the team did with them. The vote was one act among many participations.

The original analysis was that a politician deployed culture war themes to assemble voters in service of an underlying program in the real world. Material decisions are now selected in order to achieve victories in the battleground of information and opinion.