Shifting Vibes?
If the politics of cruelty has peaked, what follows?
Ezra Klein proclaims, “The Trump Vibe Shift Is Dead.”
In January, I made a prediction: “I suspect we are at or near the peak of Trump vibes.” Now, as this long year grinds to its end, I think it can be said more declaratively: The Trump vibe shift is dead. And there are already glimmers of what will follow it.
The Trump vibe shift was American culture and institutions moving toward President Trump and Trumpism with a force unexplained by his narrow electoral victory.
[…]
It was the belief that Trump’s 2024 coalition — which stretched from Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer to Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard — was the arrival of something new rather than, as many thought in 2016, the final heave of something old.
As 2025 closes, Trump’s polling sits in the low 40s, with some surveys showing him tumbling into the 30s. Democrats routed Republicans across the year’s elections, winning governorships in New Jersey and Virginia easily and overperforming in virtually every race they contested.
Moderate Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to bring to the House floor a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. Marjorie Taylor Greene is retiring. Elon Musk said he regretted joining the administration to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Joe Rogan called Trump’s immigration policy “insane.” The right is at war with itself over the Epstein files and how much antisemitism and anti-Indian racism is too much antisemitism and anti-Indian racism.
A year ago, we kept hearing that Trump was cool now. Is anyone saying that now?
After several paragraphs detailing how Trump ran for re-election on the economy and that Trump’s tariff policies have actually made things worse, he continues,
Then there’s the vibes. I’ll admit to surprise that Trump’s ghoulish response to the killings of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner attracted so much opprobrium on the right. Trump routinely responds to personal tragedy with narcissistic cruelty. There is a sickness in his soul. But that sickness was, we were repeatedly told, what the culture hungered for.
Offense can be refreshing when injected into conformity. But cruelty as the dominant culture repulses most people. “The immigration thing — the way it looks is horrific,” Rogan said in October. “When you’re just arresting people in front of their kids — normal, regular people who’ve been here for 20 years — everybody who has a heart can’t get along with that.” Nick Fuentes clips might carry a transgressive charge in MAGA group chats. But how many Americans will see themselves reflected in a political movement partly led by a celibate white supremacist who thinks Hitler is cool?
This all strikes me as right. At the elite level, the Trump coalition was always fraught, with previously normie Republicans kowtowing to a man they clearly found contemptible in order to preserve their viability. Elise Stefanik is but the latest to discover that it’s not worth it. At the grassroots level, Trump’s appeal was more powerful as his crassness separated him from “normal” politicians who they saw as having failed them for so long. But, satisfying as “owning the libs” might be, policies that make their own lives harder will eventually backfire. And there’s also a legitimate backlash over the slow roll on the Epstein files.
In that sense, I hope Klein is right here:
Political backlash always seeks the opposing force to the present regime. Closed and cruel are on their way out. What comes next, I suspect, will present itself as open, friendly and assertively moral. But it will also need to credibly offer what Trump and Trumpism have failed to deliver: real solutions to the problems Americans face.
But I strongly suspect that he’s wrong in how it will happen:
Normalcy is not enough. The Democratic Party will need to represent something new, as opposed to retrenching to something old.
A year ago, Democrats understood MSNBC and The Washington Post but seemed flummoxed by YouTube and TikTok. But younger and less terminally cautious Democrats — Zohran Mamdani in New York City, James Talarico in Texas, Gavin Newsom in California — are showing that Democrats can win the attention wars.
While relative youth and an optimistic tone are likely part of the recipe, I’m skeptical that Mamdani, in particular, is the way forward for reclaiming Middle America. And I’m not alone.
CNN (“‘They’re attacking their own’: DC Democrats irked by surge of left-wing challengers with House majority on the line“):
When Rep. Dan Goldman first ran for Congress in 2022, he was cheered on the left as the party’s top lawyer during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
Three years on, the Manhattan Democrat is in the fight of his political life against New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a liberal challenger backed by prominent left-wing figures like Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders. In his campaign launch earlier this month, Lander declared: “We need leaders who will fight, not fold.”
“I’m running for Congress because we’re facing a five-alarm fire for our democracy” Lander declared in his mid-December launch video.
Goldman is among more than two dozen congressional Democrats battling serious primaries this year — a surge that party insiders attribute to a wave of emboldened liberals across the country who watched Mamdani’s unlikely rise and remain frustrated at their party’s struggles to fight back against Trump.
Democrats in Washington say primaries are simply part of life in a big-tent party. But privately, many see the surge in far-left challengers as an expensive headache that distracts from the party’s goal of seizing control of Congress next November. And it has infuriated some Democrats — including among the most vulnerable members — who fear the party will have to divert money away from the bigger fight against the GOP to protect incumbents in safe seats.
There are some parallels to what we saw with the Republican Party with the rise of the Tea Party wing, the forerunners of the MAGA movement. There was some pretty strong backlash to President Obama early in his first term. It was so bad that Republican Scott Brown won the race to replace the late Teddy Kennedy in deep blue Massachusetts. But the party failed to capitalize fully on the 2010 midterms because primary voters selected candidates in several states and districts who turned off independents and moderates necessary to win the general election.
Nearly half a century ago, William F. Buckley Jr. explained how he chose who to vote for in Republican primaries: “I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win.” It’s reasonable for Democrats to select an AOC in a deep blue Congressional district in New York. Nominating a Mamdani in New York City, where the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Eric Adams have won, is riskier, as evidenced by the nervousness of so many Democratic elites.
I’m skeptical of Gavin Newsom’s chances of winning back the swing states. He’s shrewdly tacked to the center on some social issues and, yes, he’s proved adept at fighting Trump using his own tactics on social media. But his California is the epicenter of both the culture wars and the “abundance” argument Klein and co-author Derek Thompson have highlighted.
But, yes, we need leadership to de-polarize American politics and there does not appear to be a plausible Republican candidate who has demonstrated the desire, much less the ability, to do that.
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Before we can depolarize, if such a thing is even possible and not just an illusion caused by the hangover of the New Deal coalition, there need to be real, career/fortune ending consequences for some of those responsible for either engendering or carrying out the Trump policies.
The Tea Party, which was a garbage astroturf “reaction” to something that was well within normal American political tradition/political philosophy, doesn’t compare to millions of people actually on the streets for “No Kings” protests. There’s a fundamental difference between the ACA, which was a proposal that came out of the opposing political party, and illegally destroying Congressionally mandated departments, killing millions of people around the world, and terrorizing millions in this country.
The Trump family, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others need to loose the bulk of their fortunes. Various companies/media entities need to be made examples of what happens when you give up on any pretense at civic virtue. And anyone associated with ICE or DOGE needs to be unemployable in any position of power/authority.
On one level, I am too,
On another, the issue in 2028 is going to be how mad are enough people at the incumbent party? Candidate quality is overrated (see the 2024 winner as some level of evidence for the thesis).
Klein, whom I like, is both right about the power of attention and, I think, too in love with that framing.
Also, I think his quest for some kind of alchemy to find the right kind of candidate assumes waaaay too much that voters pick policies then candidates/part,ies rather than it being more the other way around more than he wants to acknowledge.
I am also not sanguine that the politics of cruelty has peaked.
I believe he’s right, since I said the same right here a week or two back, and then again a couple days ago. It’s always gratifying to find the paid punditocracy on the same page with me. /snark
When is the last time either party earned a real majority? When is the last time either party set out an agenda to address some deep changes that have occurred in American society? Obama and Biden were both men of small moves. Trump’s vision of the future is more money in his account and more lips on his ass. Sure, we need to win the election in a year and in three years, and do it by any legal means. But if all we have to offer is Obama Part 3 and Biden Part 2 we’ll still be in a ditch.
The end of globalization, AI, Boomers retiring to be replaced by a much smaller and poorer generation that will struggle to support the retirees and the economy. Climate change and the effects it will have on migration. The very possible collapse of Russia. Chinese dominance in Asia and our seemingly inevitable retreat. The coming revolution in bio-engineering. The end of international trust and faith in the United States. The miasma of paranoia and mistrust, the dismissal of facts in favor of ill-informed opinion and insane conspiracy. The internationalization of influence via social media. The resurgence of racism and anti-semitism. The stranglehold of the nihilistic billionaires. Open corruption at the highest levels. The surrender of the legislative branch. I could go on.
No national politician of either party, in this century, has come close to being the sort of person to cope with what’s coming. The people want solutions and reassurance and are being fed bullshit, lies and endless can-kicking. Those people may be about half morons, but even the dimmest need a narrative of hope.
ETA: TLDR; What’s the story? WTF are we doing? What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
I think people believed that the first Trump term would be happening again, and not Trump 2, which has made it impossible to find another JD Vance and drag him onto NPR to see what it’s inside the good heart of a MAGA voter.
Klein lives in pundit world, and has to talk about how maybe Trump is cool, but nobody could have actually believed that. Abundance was very similar. Pundit vibes which lead you into thinking that LA is a place where developers and landlords are at the mercy of regulations.
Trump 1 had a lot of liberals wondering what happened economically to make Republican losers this crazy or apathetic. It had a lot of people who would still be talking about Abundance and its worshipful homage to growth. In Trump 2, nobody cares. It’s time to move on. That’s the vibe shift.
@Kevin: Because Joe Biden, who I actually think was the best president of my lifetime, in terms of passing meaningful legislation that would have improved American lives, tried to unilaterally depolarize, and what that meant in reality is most of what he accomplished was destroyed. You simply can’t have an environment where one side behaves normally and the other side comes in with a bat to destroy as much as possible any time they’re in power.
The good news is that while the Democratic Party elders seemed to think a return to the past was a possibility, the next generation of Democratic leadership appears to be under no such illusion.
@Michael Reynolds:
I am guessing the “real” may be a loaded modifier, but the Democrats won absolute majorities of the popular vote in 2020, 2012, and 2008, to name three times recently. The Reps did so in 2004.
@Steven L. Taylor:
By real I mean enough not to look like national indecision.
@Michael Reynolds: So, Nixon in 1972? (60.7%)
I would note that such outcomes are outliers in our history.
What’s the margin for “real”? 3%? 5%? 10%?
I would note too that the electoral system we have does a piss-poor job of actually capturing majority sentiment (as I have railed on for years now).
@Michael Reynolds:
BTW–I think you are correct about this, and this is what I mean when I talk about the lack of responsiveness and representativeness in our politics.
The system itself is not designed to produce solutions, and this fact has gotten worse since the parties fully sorted ideologically after the 1994 midterms.
I think citizens know something is wrong but don’t understand what it is and so blame the “other” side, which, ironically, makes the problem even worse.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I dunno man, I think Obamacare was a very significant policy change. It overcame a filibuster in the Senate as well.
Passing it meant losing some of that majority because backlash is always easy.
Looking at it historically, we could name this The Crisis of the Taco Succession.
El Taco won’t get a third term. I’m sure he wants to. I think it’s probable the fixer court would allow it. But he’s too old to get one, or even for most of his high level supporters to want him to.
So the race is on to take control of the deplorable base and the Taco party. Maybe the Adolf Muxk faction would be perfectly ok with the policies of the JD Weathervane faction. But they won’t be ok with the latter holding the power when they could do so.
In a way, it’s reminiscent of what happened to the Greeks and Macedonians when Alexander died*. Holding the largest, and most diverse, empire the world had ever seen, now without a leader to hold it together, Alexander’s generals began to fight each other for dominance. The result was a major split into several lesser, but mostly still formidable, kingdoms: Parthia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, etc.
Of course, the Taco (un)faithful are not fighting over territory, even in blood red states, but over loyal (ie captive) subjects and their votes. A split like the Hellenistic one left Ptolemy with a rich, influential Egypt. it won’t leave Adolf or JD or Jr. Half-Brain, or Hestgheth with even a small town to call their own.
*I’m not comparing el Taco to Mr. The Great. They’re so far apart, it would be like comparing a virus to a blue whale. I’m illustrating what happens when the leader or power holdings thigs together loses relevance or goes away. Something similar also happened in the Roman empire in the crisis of the third century. I’m saying it’s common when people dominate over institutions.
FUNdamentals. The ’20 election was lost on inflation and Biden’s debate performance and holds few long term lessons. The choice was inflation or a deep recession. The Fed and Biden chose well and somehow managed a soft landing. Which carries no weight with the box of rocks electorate. But why were elections so close before ’20.
Democrats have basically enacted Bismarckian social democracy: old age insurance, health insurance, unemployment insurance. Being exceptional, we’ve implemented them clumsily and partially, but that only leaves marginal improvement to run on. Unexciting.
The Republicans have accepted their role as the party of the oligarchs. They’ve found a formula of faux populism and money that allows them to retain power with a slim majority. There’s a danger the populist Frankenstein’s monster will take over, but so far it’s the tech billionaires taking over from the finance and resource extraction billionaires. The populi can have fun at TPUSA’s AmericaFest, but Thiel, Musk, Ackman, etc. and their minions in the administration will set policy. And that policy will not be something they can openly run on. So they’ll continue the populist con. The con is largely telling people what they want to hear. Now we have algorithms to absolutely ensure people hear what they want.
Peter Turchin and Thomas Piketty see this as a recurring cycle of revolution, in this case WWI/Depression/WWII, breaking up the existing order and money slowly reasserting itself until the inequality causes another shakeup. Turchin sees Teddy Roosevelt style progressivism as a peaceful reordering. GOPs don’t want any kind of reordering and I don’t see how Dems accomplish a peaceful reordering.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Obamacare was significant, although as we are seeing, it was not the ultimate fix to the core problem.
It seems worth noting that it was signed into law just over 15 years ago. That is getting on to a while ago.
And I would pedantically note that it did not overcome a filibuster. There were a couple of finite moments wherein the Dems had filibuster-proof majorities in the Senate. The reason was a combination of Obama’s popularity in the 2008 election and a series of truly remarkable, and non-replicable, events.
And yet Klein is likely to encourage Democrats not to run people like Mamdani (because of his being a bit far from the center) and possibly Newsom (because of California, regulations, abundance etc). Or so I suspect, anyway.
I’m afraid we have dark days ahead. At least till 2033. No one understands how the tea Party has metastasized into MAGA, and now it is metastasizing again, with whatever is going on with Turning Point USA. New leaders, refined deceptive messages, even Ezra Klien seems fooled. We are all just playing catchup, pretending we know whats going on.
@Steven L. Taylor: It is my belief that removing the Public Option was an invitation for rates to rise to make up the profits Obamacare challenged.
@HelloWorld:
I believe most Americans are clueless, Ezra Klein included, about the dark days ahead. Anyone who had read their history on autocratic regimes, should be terrified. When you have an orthodox Christian like Rod Dreher sounding the alarm bells about the rise in anti-semitism, and actual Nazi proponents in the current GOP, everyone should be taking it seriously. The rise of young men under 35 who are pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi in the current GOP is not only alarming, but potentially catastrophic. It was disaffected young men in 1930’s Germany that gave the power to the Nazi uprising. Nick Fuentes is basically creating a new group of storm troopers for the current age. When multiple people (Ben Shapiro, among them) called out Fuentes on TPUSA’s event, they were booed by the audience. Booed for calling out a self-proclaimed Nazi who believes “Hitler was cool.” The amount of Groypers out there is being underestimated.
On top of that, you have literal Nazi groups openly organizing and recruiting to great success, as the FBI pulls back on it’s monitoring and surveillance of such groups.
Neo-Nazi terror group steps up US operations as FBI pulls back
Bad times are coming. People have their heads in the sand, including MANY on this site, who are still waiting for Trump to do something bad before they’re outraged and/or begin to fight back.
Scary times.
Glad I have an exit plan.