President Donald Trump won last year’s election riding on a wave of inflationary discontent, yet his governance is so far removed from economic concerns that it is genuinely laughable. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, starting unnecessary trade wars with U.S. allies, proposing to take over the Gaza Strip, and slashing crucial federal jobs have done nothing to alleviate Americans’ ongoing economic woes. As the president begins his lame-duck term with a flurry of distracting shock-and-awe tactics, the Trump era is drawing to a close with as much drama as one would expect. In this transitional period, Democrats owe it to the American people to strengthen their own economic message.
My first sentient experience with politics was Trump’s first election in 2016. When I was 13 years old, I was shocked into realizing that politics were more than an abstraction that people older than me discussed at the dinner table. Suddenly, the person and party that occupied the White House mattered to me; from there, my fledgling political opinions — most of which centered around my disdain for the president — sprang into existence.
In other words, Donald Trump was the origin point of my political consciousness. He has since become, undoubtedly, the most important political figure of my lifetime. President Trump’s very identity — not simply his actions, words, or ideas — has spawned a novel political movement and shifted American governance in a way we haven’t seen in decades. He has defined the political landscape as I have known it since I came to understand what that phrase meant.
For that reason, I don’t think it is controversial to say he is the most consequential president of the 21st century. Trump has reshaped his own Republican Party, which used to concern itself with small government and fiscal conservatism, into a quasi-fascist entity obsessed with controlling the American population, rooting out the “woke mind virus,” and acquiring new land for the American Empire. At the same time, he has become the Democrats’ boogeyman. Each of the last three Democratic presidential campaigns has been run on the same premise: keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. Two of them failed.
I came of age during the era of Donald Trump. Four of my formative years were spent under his administration; another four were spent under the specter of his return. And now, a decade after announcing his bid for the presidency, Trump has more power than ever before. Unlike in 2016, Trump now governs with what he considers a “powerful mandate” for having won not just the antiquated electoral college vote, but a plurality of American ballots as well — in what turned out to be the tightest popular vote contest since the near-equal 2000 election. In addition to that, the GOP is now virtually unwavering in its loyalty to Trump, and he has filled his cabinet with similarly sycophantic aides who will never refuse even his most outlandish wishes — unlike the long list of first-term cabinet members who successfully mitigated the president’s worst impulses.
As a result of that consolidation of power, the second Trump term is set to be the christening of a new American oligarchy based on personal fealty to the president. Ostensibly liberal tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have bent at the knee to Trump, embracing an administration that they know will help them maintain and expand their respective multi-billion-dollar net worths. Zuckerberg — whose echo chamber-based Facebook algorithm promoted hate speech in Myanmar that contributed to the Rohingya genocide — has decided to remove fact-checking from his platform to appease the MAGA movement. Elon Musk, the single richest person on Earth, has even gotten himself a seat at the table for his lapdogging, which includes his own Department of Government Efficiency, official White House security clearance, and office space in the West Wing.
I could go on, but I don’t think the Review’s reader base needs any further convincing that Donald Trump was, and will once again be, an abysmal president. My point is that these 12 years, from 2016 to 2028, will be defined, in no ambiguous terms, as the Trump era. It’s likely to last beyond the next election in some form, given the lofty ambitions of his family members and closest allies; but after his second term ends, Trumpism will never again have the same force as the cult of personality that currently dominates American political theater.
That is reason for hope: eras are defined as such because they open and close with the passing of time. We are not living at the end of history. Yes, Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda poses an existential threat to Earth’s climate; and, yes, his presidency is spearheading a national trajectory that very imminently threatens the lives and safety of millions. But there will be brighter days in the future.
In the meantime, it is our responsibility as students and activists to resist Trump’s policies and rhetoric. Around half the country voted against Trump, meaning they don’t support mass deportation, the deconstruction of the public education system, restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy, massive wealth inequality, corporatocracy, or the destruction of Earth’s climate. Our job now is to minimize the effects of those societal ills and convince the other half of Americans just how dangerous Trump’s vision for the country is.
Elected Democrats — and the left in general — failed to do that in this past election. Most Americans, including two-thirds of those without a college degree, disapproved of Joe Biden’s performance as president, which had direct consequences on Kamala Harris’ performance in the November 2024 election. This was despite Biden’s legacy of pro-unionism and worker-centric legislation, which Americans broadly favor.
There is no denying that Trump has successfully tapped into the United States’ working class. In doing so, he has snatched the blue-collar vote from figures like Barack Obama, who swept the Rust Belt in 2008 in the midst of an economic recession. Trump has taken advantage of discontent sowed by the decadeslong norm of neoliberalism. This is nothing new, of course; analysts have recognized that fact since 2016. But the American left has yet to develop a clear narrative about how and why its policies are more beneficial to the working class than Trump’s are.
This is not a difficult equation to solve. If Democrats take Trumpism as a chance to double down on a Bernie Sanders-like economic justice agenda — instead of moving ever further toward the ideological center to get ahead of what they see as a paradigm shift — there will be a silver lining to these destabilizing years. Once the dust settles, we may even emerge better than we were before.
