Excerpt:
For a moment, it seemed like anything was possible. With Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory in November, the old order had been dealt a devastating blow. Democrats were mostly despondent. The resistance had petered out. Where to go from here? No one really knew.
Many observers of American politics, me included, thought that a new era had begun — one of Trumpian hegemony. Republicans, emboldened, would reshape American culture, ushering in a period of conservative dominance for years, if not decades. This was the “vibe.” In theory, cutting waste and making the federal government more accountable was popular. For a majority of Americans, progressive policies on issues such as immigration and transgender rights had run their course.
Trump was riding a wave of exhaustion with Democrats’ cultural overreach. After he won the presidency for the second time, centrist and even left-leaning friends would suggest on encrypted group chats that some good might come out of this after all. I’d meet people at parties, reading groups and “salons” who would whisper — or, when intoxicated, shout — that they could finally say what they really thought on issues such as gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives without fear of being ostracized.
All of this was hard to measure. What is a vibe after all? As John Ganz writes, a vibe shift is a shift “to mood itself, that is to say, something felt but not fully articulated or articulable.” It’s more than a feeling but it’s still just that — a feeling. And feelings aren’t facts. Or, if they are facts, they’re not necessarily durable.
I was wrong to think that this — whatever this was — would be more lasting. It wasn’t. It turns out the moment of Trumpian dominance was just that: a moment. Something has shifted again. We are now in another phase: the vibe shift away from the vibe shift. The way we experience time has altered, as well. Through his flurry of executive orders and nonstop assaults on American institutions, Trump has compressed time. What would have taken months to play out now takes weeks, sometimes even days.
Some wear and tear is beginning to show up in surveys, with Trump’s approval ratings on a downward trend. For the first time in NBC News’s national polling, a majority disapproves of Trump’s handling of the economy, a striking reversal for a president who has traditionally received high marks on economic issues. The stock market has plummeted, inflation has ticked up, and Republicans increasingly face angry constituents at town hall events. Institutional opposition has grown as well, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, issuing a rare public rebuke after Trump called for a federal judge’s impeachment.
Trump is squandering what might have been a once-in-a-generation realignment. Already, the moment has begun fragmenting into something else, something not yet defined but unmistakably different. This is the paradox of our political moment: permanence announces itself only to dissolve almost immediately.