Donald Trump ‘‘is the brightest and shiniest of all the bright, shiny objects,’’ said David Axelrod, a longtime Obama political adviser. Trump is like a one-man meteor shower of this genre. He sprays exhilarating antagonism upon all manner of Megyn Kellys, Mexicans or whoever his ‘‘loser’’ target of the day might be. He tweets around the clock, rides around in a shimmering helicopter and has that noggin of shimmering hair. He hurls us into the ropes until we find ourselves disoriented, careening against a turnbuckle: Where are we? How did we get here?

The shiny-­object metaphor is not confined to the realm of politics. Business ­strategy, technology and marketing consultants have all referred to ‘‘bright, shiny objects’’ (or ‘‘B.S.O.s’’) to describe the fickle tastes of modern life. Urban Dictionary identifies ‘‘S.O.S.’’ (‘‘shiny-­object syndrome’’) as ‘‘a condition which causes an inability to focus on any particular person while online dating.’’ (By the same token, a number of commentators have dismissed Trump’s recent success in the polls as ‘‘just a summer fling.’’) Its origin may actually lie with an older sort of stump performer. ‘‘Magicians use sleight of hand, dangling a shiny object in front of their audiences to distract them from the hidden deception going on elsewhere,’’ said Christopher Cerf, a co-­author of ‘‘Spin-glish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language.’’

To some degree, politics has always involved deception. The advent of television intensified this, shrinking attention spans, creating ways to distort and vilify and dramatizing the existential stakes of prosaic debates. Think Lyndon Johnson’s devastating ‘‘Daisy’’ ad in his 1964 re-­election campaign against Barry Goldwater, which showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy and the sudden explosion of a bright, shiny mushroom cloud.

In 1962, the historian Daniel Boorstin published ‘‘The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream,’’ in which he identified the dawning of the ‘‘age of contrivance,’’ marked by ‘‘pseudo-­events’’: staged happenings that animate a cultural calendar (Hallmark holidays, anniversaries), as well as political set pieces (photo ops, candidate ‘‘announcement’’ ­speeches). Political pseudo-­events have been the engine of television advertising, which focuses on smaller-­bore matters, or ‘‘wedge issues,’’ that would have little relevance to an actual presidency but nonetheless shine a nasty glare on a candidate. George Bush attacked his Democratic presidential opponent, Michael Dukakis, by asserting that Dukakis’s support of a prison-­furlough program in Massachusetts represented a permissive liberalism that he would take to the White House. (The shiny object here was Willie Horton, the escaped convict featured in an infamous campaign ad.) If television was a major development in the creation of shiny objects, the Internet was an Ursa Major development. Even the most isolated outrages become outsize on our little, attention-burning screens.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama and his campaign team warned against becoming too drawn to the ‘‘shiny objects’’ that preoccupied the press. ‘‘It was basically a not-­subtle way of saying that political reporters had attention-­deficit disorder,’’ said Dan Pfeiffer, a former top adviser to Obama. In our defense, though, the A.D.D. of political reporters is fostered by a warped and warping system. Media bosses demand a constant flow of material, which ensures that much reporting remains undigested. Customers want speed or will click elsewhere; competitors spew their own undigested news, and campaigns are only too happy to concoct it, or their opponents will. Shiny objects become tools of our least resistance. Polls and gaffes take less time and brainpower to comprehend than, say, Jeb Bush’s book on immigration policy.