Trump as volatility asset in the attention economy

This article develops a Marxist account of the US attention economy through Donald Trump’s media presence. It argues that Trump operates as a “volatility asset” within platform capitalism, a figure valued for producing rapid spikes and crashes of attention that can be converted into advertising inventory and behavioural data. Bringing Marx’s commodity analysis into dialogue with Smythe’s audience commodity, communicative capitalism, surveillance capitalism and data colonialism, the article introduces “spectacular accumulation” to name the fusion of media spectacle, metrics and data extraction. It reframes Marx’s distinction between formal and real subsumption to theorize the real subsumption of political discourse under platform capitalism, where political communication is organized around engagement metrics and data capture. Using an illustrative mapping of high salience Trump media events, it shows how scandal driven communication reorganizes newsroom labour and platform participation. It concludes that decommodifying attention requires not only regulatory reform but also struggles over the ownership and control of communicative infrastructures, in order to weaken the profitability of political volatility.