@lane_ass_jenna @kcanales02
Well, it's not built into the platform as other platforms do. "Trending" posts on the explore page are propagated specifically by "favorites" that originated from your server. In this case, Mastodon.social. This can lead to different people on other servers seeing completely different "trending" posts.
There are accounts you can follow that boost the most popular posts directly to your feed, but I am unsure if there's one specifically for US topics, unfortunately.😬🤷♂️