When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump speak at length? There’s a qualitative way to think about this question, about the substance of what he’s saying: He is still talking — perhaps more than people realize — about how the last election was stolen from him, and he treats the 2020 election as a Year Zero event that has ruined the world.

But there’s a second — quantitative — way of looking at this question.

In 2015 and 2016, as he was becoming the Republican nominee the first time, Mr. Trump quickly transformed into an all-encompassing, central figure, in an evolving, building story that started like a dark joke that Mr. Trump was in on, then swooned into a reality. Around this time eight years ago, terrorist mass shootings took place in Paris and California as the race for the Republican nomination became increasingly dark. It seemed to click into place then that Mr. Trump’s fluid plans, reactionary ideas, jokes and lies could coexist with and shape grave events. The combined effect of all this was to concentrate the country’s attention like a supernova; reaction to Mr. Trump became a constant feature of politics and also people’s personal lives.

But the path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same. “The street still hopes for somebody else,” one Trump-critical donor recently said of Wall Street donors, a kind of dreamy summary of where things stand. Sarah Longwell, who’s overseen regular focus groups, noted on her podcast this fall that many voters seem not to have clocked that Mr. Trump and President Biden are likely to be the nominees. “People are constantly telling me, ‘But couldn’t this happen? But couldn’t this happen?’” If Mr. Trump were to win the first two contests by large enough margins, the general election could essentially begin as early as next month.

Why does the volume around Mr. Trump feel different? For one thing, he has opted out of two old ways he achieved omnipresence, no longer tweeting and no longer appearing at Republican debates. Eight years in, there is also a lack of suspense about whether Mr. Trump could become the Republican nominee or the president.

A big change is structural, however. In 2016, a good deal of the old, postwar structure of media remained in place, like evening news broadcasts, along with the cable news apparatus that got layered on during the 1990s and the basic infrastructure of digital news in the 2000s. The 2016 election was the first in which a supermajority of Americans owned smartphones. Phone news push alerts gained prominence in 2015 and 2016, just in time for each turn of that unbelievable thing happening in the country.

Twitter introduced the quote-tweet function in 2015 and shifted toward an algorithmic timeline in the spring of 2016; the combination juiced essentially every Trump tweet into a conflict that sat there like an electromagnet. Mentions of Mr. Trump on Facebook were so prominent and constant, they could barely be compared with those of the other candidates.

Some of the deep challenges that the media business faced then persist (like the steep decline in newspaper circulation that began during the Great Recession), but some, like cord cutting, were more an existential threat rather than the massive, ongoing shift it is now. And streaming and digital options were exploding, seeming poised to replace the old. Mr. Trump knew and understood the old media (the desire for spectacle and participation) and was the perfect vessel for social media (constant debate about him). The result of the old and new at the same time was like a Trump cacophony.

Eight years later, Mr. Trump is often on TV less compared to his presidency, and fewer people are watching; he’s not on social media in the same way, and social media is kind of falling apart, except for TikTok, which is less centralized. Last summer, John Herrman wondered if 2024 would be “a placeless race, in which voters and candidates can and will, despite or maybe because of a glut of fragmented content, ignore the news.”

The smallest percentage of households are being reached by paid, live television since 1991, according to research by MoffettNathanson. The old newspapers and new digital outlets continue to scale back or shut down. Last year, during jury selection for the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, potential jurors offered a wide range of answers for how they kept up with the news. A few people said CNN. One said local CBS AM radio. “Google, anything on the internet,” one man said. “Social media is my news outlet,” one woman said, as The New Yorker reported. “Every now and then I’ll listen to a podcast,” Juror 71 said. “I don’t barely watch the news — I just watch YouTube,” Juror 31 said.

It just feels as though it requires much more work to find and understand the main news events of any given day now — a hazy feeling, yes, but one people seem to express often.

And yet Mr. Trump’s voice is ceaseless. TV can change, social media can break down further, people can feel that they know all there is to know about him, and he still holds power over millions of people. Even if he never wins a general election again, he retains this hold. The indictments against him didn’t markedly diminish Mr. Trump’s standing with the party or in national polling, which seems to amaze even him, given how often he talks about it on the trail. The decline of the media structures of the 2010s and his place in them doesn’t seem to have diminished this hold, either.

Perhaps this fractured landscape is why Trump’s seeking re-election can feel more muted than last time. People are perhaps holding a static image of Mr. Trump in their brains or forestalling the reality of what another Trump nomination would mean.

But in the present, his words keep changing and influencing how Republicans, from politicians to activists to some share of voters, think about elections, power, the state, immigration, the courts and retribution. This change is active and constant. Just think about how differently politicians used to talk 10 years ago, how many things have happened in recent memory that would not have been believed. Mr. Trump’s nomination in 2016 started narrowly, with pluralities; nothing about that choice was inevitable, and yet it’s reshaped so much since then. It’s not even inevitable now — there’s still time — but Republicans’ picking him again would formalize and accelerate this change process again.

To nominate someone for president locks half the country into one person’s priorities and half the country into reacting to him or her. The reality of Mr. Trump being more present in people’s lives is days spent with him saying undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, days of reactions to and ludicrous defenses of other lines it’s hard to imagine a presidential candidate saying 10 years ago, days of grim polling about what voters think of the sentiment. And as the thousands of days like this pile up, the policy and personnel of a major political party keep changing, so that one day bombing drug cartels and, by extension, Mexico goes from a half-thought of Mr. Trump’s to, a year or two later, the essential policy of the Republican Party.

If you really think through the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch — accept it, dwell on it, take on board the details — it’s like finding yourself in a darkened room with a concrete wall in front of you and only a few inches of clearance behind you. A person can tune out everything, disappear into Instagram and TikTok and ignore the news, and Mr. Trump will still be there.

Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.

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