Will Trump Trigger a Second Great Awokening?

What the culture might resemble in 2025

What will happen to American culture if Donald Trump wins in the fall? There has been plenty of reporting on the kind of policy Trump might implement in a second term, but scant attention paid to how he might alter, again, the cultural landscape—what will Trump 2.0 mean for the arts, academia, and the tenor of politics that is inevitably downstream from all of that? Traditional news outlets don’t speculate because there are so few data points to grasp at and there’s still an unwillingness to fully account for the cultural hothouse of the 2010s. There was a time, four years ago this month, when employees at the New York Times revolted over the publication of an opinion piece by a sitting U.S. senator and a top editor there—once thought to be in the running to lead the entire newspaper—was forced to resign. There was a time when writing one anti-Trump opinion piece in Teen Vogue could make you into a major internet celebrity. There was a time when a Supreme Court nominee’s high school yearbook was the subject of great national interest. There was the profound oddity of the Nicolas Sandmann affair, the sordid oddity of Milo Yiannopoulos, and the dizzying oddity of Game Theory Twitter. There were female-only screenings of Wonder Woman. And there were people—many thousands of them—buying votive candles in the likeness of a Republican former FBI director.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what came to me in the soot of memory. None of it would have been possible without Trump deciding to run for president and shocking the world by winning in 2016. Enough time has passed to assess that upheaval from afar, to begin to comprehend what exactly happened. Before hurrying to the cultural implications, it’s important not to be dismissive of the material consequences of Trump’s victory. The 2016 election might have been the most important of the last twenty or thirty years because Trump, through a fluke of timing, was able to appoint three conservative Supreme Court justices in four years. Joe Biden, his four years almost up, has only had the opportunity to nominate one, Ketanji Brown Jackson. These justices are the reason Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to retire when Barack Obama was president and Democrats held the Senate. On the matter of making policy, Trump was far less brutally effective than George W. Bush, who signed the Patriot Act into law, oversaw the dramatic expansion of the national security state, and waged two region-shattering wars abroad. Trump couldn’t even repeal the Affordable Care Act. He had to settle for a corporate tax cut and the repeal of a tax deduction on affluent households in the Northeast.

What Trump did do, unintentionally, is revive liberal and leftist politicking in America. These factions, the left-liberals, democratic socialists, and progressives who never quite called themselves socialists, worked in harmony opposing Trump in 2017 and 2018. The electorate seemed much more receptive to the far-reaching social and economic policies they pitched, and unabashed progressives began winning elections. Bernie Sanders was the reason DSA became, for the very first time in its existence, a consequential electoral organization, but it was Trump’s victory that catalyzed their base and expanded their membership. Is there an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if Hillary Clinton is president? Is there an Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib? Does the Squad and the Congressional Progressive Caucus become so relevant? In New York, it is inarguable that Trump’s shock triumph led to the end of Republican control of the State Senate. Republicans had, with one brief interruption, sat in the Senate majority since the 1960s, and they spent the 2010s, with Andrew Cuomo’s blessing, roadblocking legislation on climate change, criminal justice reform, LGBTQ rights, transportation, and tenants rights. By the middle of the decade, GOP control was tenuous, and they relied on a dissident Democratic faction known as the Independent Democratic Conference to stay in power. Few New Yorkers had heard of the IDC until 2017, when many liberal Democrats, suddenly alarmed by Trump, started to pay attention to politics in their own backyard. In the 2018 cycle, six of the eight IDC Democrats lost primaries, and a new generation of lawmakers entered Albany. Among them was Zellnor Myrie, who is now running for mayor against Eric Adams.

The backdrop of all of this was the explosion of social justice politics, or “woke.” Burbling before Trump ever ran for president, with the rise of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner deaths, social justice politics exploded in the latter half of the decade. Could there have been #meToo without Trump? The Women’s March? The sudden embrace of immigrants and even open borders? What was notable about 2017 and 2018 was that Black Lives Matter actually receded, momentarily at least, giving way to liberal outrage over the treatment of women in white collar professions and migrants entering the country. When I ran for State Senate in 2018, there was no pressure put on me to say much about police brutality, though I wouldn’t have minded; I’ve long felt the police are over-militarized. What I did feel the need to do, however, was call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Thanks to activists like Sean McElwee, a future acolyte of the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, Abolish ICE was the cause of the year, and you could not be in good progressive standing without waving the flag. (For the record, I’d still argue abolishing ICE was more feasible, and had more of a defense, than abolishing all police.) In 2020, with the onset of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter returned in full force and radicalized; whereas the 2010s version called for sweeping reform of police departments, activists now bellowed for the end of all policing as we knew it. Rioting and looting were celebrated or at least explained away. Robin DiAngelo’s diversity trainings were de rigueur and Ibram X. Kendi was the new prophet of liberal America. Radical chic was back in style.

Most of this does not happen if Donald Trump is not president of the United States. Biden’s election cooled activist fervor, even as he set about, on the domestic front, enacting ambitious infrastructure and climate change legislation. Donations to progressive organizations slowed, Defund the Police and #meToo faced backlash, DEI withered, and DSA lost membership. Justice Democrats, who had helped to power the successful primaries of congressional Democrats, including AOC’s win over Joe Crowley, was facing financial calamity. What has revived leftist activism, to a degree, is the pro-Palestinian movement, which the proudly anti-Zionist DSA was well-positioned to capitalize on. The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 and Israel’s furious retaliation has fueled a new era of protest and organizing across the country, if the electoral implications remain unclear. There was no left-wing candidate to challenge Biden; Sanders, at 82, endorsed the sitting president, and the new Uncommitted movement seemed satisfied enough to run no one and let voters register blank or “uncommitted” votes in the Democratic primaries. This will give the pro-Palestine faction delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August, but not nearly as many as those Sanders brought in 2016, after he managed more than 40% of the national vote against Hillary Clinton.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, the polls are correct and Trump wins in November. Biden ekes out a popular vote victory but loses the Electoral College; Georgia, Arizona, and enough blue wall Midwestern states fall to Trump, and he’s the 47th president. He plans to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies and appoint many more right-wing judges. He shuts the border and makes legal immigration to the U.S. almost impossible. He tries to gut, once more, the Environmental Protection Agency, and makes more and more noise about serving beyond 2028—since the 2020 election, in his view, was “stolen,” he’s “owed” one more term, he declares at one 2025 rally. There will be plenty of Democratic opposition, and it’s possible Democrats control the House, serving as a strong roadblock to Trump’s legislative agenda. Trump, I’ve argued, lacks the competency to enact full fascism in the United States, but there are enough liberals who believe we came close in the 2010s and would certainly argue, come 2025, it can happen here. Is there, on the left, a reprise of 2017? Does activism balloon? Does Game Theory Twitter make a comeback? Will we, once more, be awoken?

The future is hazy and often unpredictable. What I’ll hazard, for now, is the middle ground: social justice politics will be more revived than they were under Biden but never reach the heights of the 2010s. There are only so many times such a surge can happen, so many bells that can be rung. The media infrastructure, as friends pointed out to me not long ago, has also changed enough that inculcating new waves of identity-based social justice fervor will be much harder. In the 2010s, social media-centric digital media start-ups fueled a youthful, liberal, and proudly confrontational sensibility that would be much harder, under the current conditions, to revive. Back then, legacy media, wary of a millenial putsch, adopted the politics and posturing of the digital upstarts. BuzzFeed was so ascendant that Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of the news division, attempted to hire away a Sulzberger from the New York Times. All journalists and editors, it seemed, were hooked into Twitter, and the prevailing wisdom of the period was shaped by the likes of Jay Rosen, the prominent media critic and NYU professor, who forcefully argued that media organizations needed to be open and direct about the dire threat Trump posed to the nation. The Washington Post rebranded in such a manner, yoking its fortunes to the anti-Trump wave. Traffic surged and subscriptions followed.

BuzzFeed News, Vice, and Mic are all gone. Pitchfork, Refinery29, and Jezebel are diminished. Twitter, rebranded X, has lost relevancy as Elon Musk suppresses link and video sharing. All of X’s competitors, including Threads, have failed to fill the vacuum. The Washington Post has been collapsing since Trump left office. The Times, which has remained profitable, is pivoting under Joe Kahn, the new executive editor; reporters have been pulled away from social media and even lambasted, by Kahn himself, for excessive politicking. “Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about may have been the case in the past,” Kahn told the Wall Street Journal. He added, in another interview, the “newsroom is not a safe space.” This is the prevailing wisdom of those who are in charge of the news. A second Trump term might not budge it much.

Culture shifts, in part, because the participants age. Performative leftism, in the 2010s, was regarded as cool—it was simply what many young people in those years did to fit in. Gen Z might be, on many issues, as socially liberal as their immediate forebearers, but there’s evidence of a fledgling right-wing counterculture, a desire among young people to subvert what they’ve perceived as the stifling mores of their upbringing. The cultural avant-garde, suddenly, seems quasi-conservative; as the novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens observed about the recent rightward shift in the European parliament, it’s the far-right that has outflanked the liberal-left on humor and irony, even if it’s for nefarious ends. This has occurred because liberals in the West adopted increasingly moralizing tones about politics and art over the last decade. When Trump was in power, good art, it seemed, equated to “good” politics. It was inconceivable that fascists like Ezra Pound could have also produced transformative poetry. In the 1980s and 1990s, it had been the right-wing that was most moralizing about art, that tried to police rap lyrics and R-rated movies. And then, come Trump, novels had sensitivity readers. If today’s forty year-old, born in 1984, perceives conservatives as those most prone to prudishness, it may be that the twenty year-old, born in 2004, sees the exact opposite: liberals, everywhere, telling her how to think and what to do. This would make the culture under Trump’s second term all the more unpredictable. Of course, Biden might still win. The culture could swerve yet again.