| | | Are you still interested in this newsletter? Since you haven't read in a while, we'll pause sending it to you. Let us know if you still would like to keep receiving it. | | | | | | Did a Cyclone forward this to you? Sign up here. Here we are, a year-and-a-half into President Donald Trump’s second term and … oh, excuse me for a moment, I’m being handed a note. As it turns out, Trump has only been president for a month?! That can’t be right, but until I double-check those numbers, let’s simply go with it. That means that all of the myriad developments that have, uh, developed since he took office have somehow been crammed into the past 33 days. You can be forgiven if you have not kept up with all of them. We are just lowly primates, after all, critters who spent tens of thousands of years needing to be aware of little more news than “looks like rain” or “there might be seeds under that tree.” Now we are tapped into a global information network that tracks billions of people and sometimes our little brains have trouble keeping pace. With that in mind, I’d like to turn your (limited) attention to an interesting project by the polling firm Ipsos (which is also, coincidentally, The Washington Post’s partner on a poll we released on Thursday). Rather than simply evaluating how people felt about certain news events, Ipsos measured both familiarity and interest — how much people “know” and “care” about each event. The result, more entertaining in its interactive format, is shown below. |  | | As you may recall, I have recently been designated an Opinion columnist at The Post, so I will offer my opinion that the above chart is sort of ugly. There’s just a lot going on and I don’t love the colors? But I want to highlight one aspect of the chart that would be easier to discern if I made my own version of it. So I did. |  | | How to read this chart™®©: This is a scatterplot, which shows two dimensions of measurement at once. From bottom to top, news events (the dots) are arranged from the events that the fewest Americans cared about to the ones the most Americans cared about. From left to right, the measurement is from events that the fewest people knew about to ones that most people knew about. There are events included from 2023, 2024 and 2025, with the most recent events being indicated with the largest circles. Obviously this version of the chart doesn’t tell us anything about the events themselves, but it does show a pattern: more people say they care about news events than say they knew about those events. In fact, 65 percent of the news events included in Ipsos’s analysis had at least half of respondents say they cared about the event. Only 42 percent of the events were known about by at least half of Americans. About one-third of events had majorities that both knew and cared. |  | | Looking solely at the events from 2025, we have a snapshot of how the measures work. The wildfires in Los Angeles were widely known and cared about. The Iowa State Cyclones winning a bowl game was neither. More people said they cared about a Transportation Department memo prioritizing more Trump-friendly areas for funding than said they cared about Philadelphia winning the Super Bowl. But way more people knew the Eagles had won than knew about the memo. | | Perhaps you noticed on my version of the chart that there was an obvious outlier in the bottom right quadrant, a news event that fell way outside the broad sweep of knowledge and interest. That was Taylor Swift’s 2024 Super Bowl attendance, a news event (such as it was) that was known by a huge number of people — most of whom did not care about it at all. | | If you are curious, the news event that the most people knew about was Trump’s 2024 reelection. As the past month (or however long it’s been) might have indicated, this was not the news event that people cared the most about. | | In other scatterplot news… | While we are on the subject of scatterplots, I thought this chart from Stanford University political science professor Adam Bonica was interesting. His analysis suggests that the strongest predictor of which government departments Elon Musk’s team would target wasn’t headcount or budget. Instead, it was the perceived ideology of the department. Departments perceived as liberal were far more likely to be part of the first wave of firings. |  | | This isn’t necessarily because those departments are more liberal. Instead, it’s likely because Musk (and presumably Trump) simply don’t view the agencies’ work as valuable. As Bonica noted, the “hardest hit agencies are those that regulate industry, protect public health, and expand access to education” — low priority issues for Republicans broadly and Trump specifically. That’s not to say this is somehow an accident. “Authoritarians often disguise political purges as ‘cost-cutting’ or ‘efficiency’ measures,” Bonica wrote. “They claim the purges about streamlining government but are done to consolidate power. This is what’s happening now.” | | Update on the attention war | Earlier this week, I found myself curious about what Americans were googling. As you may know, Google has a tool called Trends that allows users to explore patterns in interest for search terms. It’s very useful for determining when something or someone is breaking into the public consciousness. Or when someone has been camped out there since announcing his 2016 presidential bid from his eponymous tower in June 2015. Specifically, I was wondering whether Elon Musk’s insistence on scrambling into the spotlight was being rewarded with search attention. The answer is yes, but only sort-of. Musk is certainly the focus of more search interest now than he usually is. But it’s still modest — far less than what former vice president Kamala Harris saw during the 2024 election and less than former president Joe Biden saw in 2020 or early 2024. It is also far, far less than what Trump has seen since his emergence from post-Jan. 6 pseudo-exile. |  | | Where Musk is triumphing is in comparison with Trump’s official vice president. People are a lot more interested in information about Musk than they are in information about Vice President Mike Pence which … oh, excuse me for a moment, I’m being handed another note. | | | Now for the quick ones. The consistently interesting @_sportsball Instagram account turned its hand-drawn attention to “Jeopardy” — specifically, the relatively new playoff structure that the classic game show has adopted. | | (_sportsball on Instagram) | | It’s worth your time to click through and see the whole thing, even if you aren’t a Washington Post employee who recently competed on the show. I also thought this look at acceptance of same-sex marriage by age among Catholic priests was interesting. An inverse of the broader age-related pattern of acceptance of same-sex relationships. | | We conclude with an amusing finding from a Canadian poll focused on Trump’s musing about somehow annexing that country. Canadians overwhelmingly object to the idea, as you might expect. Even if you gave them $20,000 per household, only 3 percent of Canadians would vote to join the United States. Make it $60,000, though? Suddenly, you’re up to 8 percent. | | Now I want to run a series of polls cranking up the dollar amount until that support hits 50 percent. “Mr. President, we have determined that for only $4.9 billion per Canadian household, the country’s citizens will vote to join the U.S.” A triumph of diplomacy. To conclude this week, please enjoy this excellent graphical summary of the moment. The dashed line of the existing universe is long. Let’s hope it starts bending in the other direction soon. | | | | |
_tstmp_1737647232-80-0.png){kind=small}
