The whole thing with Trump is so insane that people are waking up. Michele Stern
We are entering a new era of radical authenticity. Elysia Berman in an Instagram Thread about Rama Duwaji wearing Goth boots at her husband’s swearing-in ceremony.
We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Zohran Kwame Mamdani in his mayoral acceptance speech.
Whether you love him or loathe him, it is easy to look back on the last year and get fixated on Donald Trump. At the beginning of 2025, like most people I know, I thought Trump’s being elected was a terrible thing. Even before he took office, he went into hyperdrive, seeming to jam change into the American psyche at a record pace. I thought it was the first step away from the ideals we were taught in school; the professed ideals that make America – or make the United States of America, if you prefer – the self-identified greatest nation on Earth. Today, a year later, I feel very different. Today, I think Trump’s reelection is not the primary problem; it’s a reaction to and an exposure of a problem that has been slowly growing.
The problem is that we, the American people, are not who we say we are; we are not what we teach our children; we are not President Reagan’s “shining city on a hill… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” and we never have been. Still, for most of our history, and for almost all of my life, I thought we were moving closer together and closer to those ideals. But that has changed, and Trump’s election and reelection exposed that we have been moving away from those ideals for some time.
I like to think that the high point of that arc was just before Trump was elected, but that is not true. We first betrayed what we said we stood for with the Selective Service Act of 1948, which allowed full-time college students to defer their military obligation. That was our first overt step away from treating all our citizens equally (minorities, especially Indigenous and Black People, and, of course, Women, have never really been treated equally, but that’s baked into the Constitution). Twenty years later, when the Official Minimum Wage was decoupled from the actual cost of living, that inequality became even more obvious. Still, most of us either ignored or missed it – I probably did both- just as we ignored the growing unrest.
Either way, by then, the country was essentially ruled by a rich elite class because they had the money to control what we are still told is a government for all the people. We were no longer true to the supposedly self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Carpenters and factory workers and waitpeople and anybody doing manual labor were no longer as valuable – valuable as human beings – as people with lots of money. We were told that the less valuable should be sent into the meat grinder of war first. Soon, the less valuable didn’t even deserve a living wage or a home of their own.
Of course, this was never said out loud; we were told that riches were there for the picking if they just worked hard enough. Being rich became an outwardly visible sign of an inner worth that we all, pretty much, bought into, if not by our beliefs, by our acquiescence and actions.
Then came the Great Recession of 2008, brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble and the massive expansion of high-risk subprime mortgages that had sustained it. Nearly 10 million families lost their homes, and millions more lost their jobs. We, most of us, anyway, agreed that the poor, the homeless, were there only because they lacked that inner worth, and they should be kept out of sight so we, the valuable, wouldn’t be offended.
The country voted for Barack Obama and his promise of change. But we didn’t get that change. Nobody went to jail for the damage caused by the Great Recession; companies were bailed out, and rich people got their bonuses, but nobody got their homes back. Our costly wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which Obama ran against, continued. President Obama wanted to improve our health care system and, in a way, he did. Under ObamaCare, health insurance companies grew larger, expanded to include more people, and some of the added expense was covered by the government, but the rising cost of premiums and deductibles still left most families with significant out-of-pocket expenses.
When they voted for Trump in 2016, we said that his voters were stupid, but they weren’t stupid; they were pissed. Well, some are probably stupid, and some are racist, and some are getting rich as they make Trump rich, but, most I believe, are pissed that the establishment – both Democraatic and Republican – for lack of a better word, wasn’t treating them as promised, pissed that we – and, if you are reading this, you, like me, are probably part of the establishment – didn’t even acknowledge they had a right to be pissed. I think most people voted for Trump out of that anger and desperation.
I want to stress that I don’t think a President Trump is the answer; to me, he clearly isn’t. Donald Trump is a selfish, nasty human being with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old and almost no intellectual understanding of the problems we really face. For me, he is impossible to like or admire. After that, I also want to point out that Trump brings a couple of qualities to the table that we need more of: he is authentic, and he looks for ways to make things happen rather than reasons they can’t.
That leaves us with President Trump doing a staggering amount of damage to the climate, to the economy, to the American people, while getting breathtakingly rich. And he is psychologically incapable of not bragging about it. But I want to be clear that I think Trump’s public display of arrogance is good; it is waking people up, and many of them are starting to vote for Democratic Socialists, something inconceivable when Trump was first elected.
The most famous Democratic Socialists are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, but there are others. This year, the Democratic Socialists ran 150 candidates in the primaries, most of them in solid Democratic districts, of whom 35 either won their primaries or advanced to the general election without opposition. I expect that rather than three Democratic Socialists in Congress – Bernie, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib – there will be closer to 30, and that should make a big difference.
It won’t be easy, partially because the Democratic Socialists’ Platform calls for a complete end to all U.S. military and economic aid, as well as all weapon sales, to Israel. That means their opponents will be heavily financed by AIPAC. Although our relationship to Israel is changing too: according to polls, 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East versis 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. That is a huge change from only three years ago, when it was 54% to 31% in favor of the Israelis.
Still, a bigger point of friction on a smooth path to thirty members of Congress being Democratic Socialists is what I’ll call the Democratic Establishment. The politicians and monied interests who consider themselves “moderates” and have a vested interest in the status quo. Keeping out what everybody, from Chuck Schumer to The New York Times, calls the “far-left” or “ultra-left” as if they were very unrealistic and, even, slightly wacky. But Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new mayor, is showing the world that his will to make needed change is making the “moderate” view look self-defeating. His post-election popularity has not only remained strong but has actually grown, defying the historical trend of post-election “honeymoon” periods.
That is why, as we navigate the rest of 2026, the old label of a “Chinese curse” feels so fitting. We are living in an interesting time; a time of immense friction, change, and chaos. Much of it is hard to watch: the ongoing political battles over our public lands, the constant threat of foreign conflict, and the massive global shift away from fossil fuels. But if this “interesting” era has taught us anything, it’s that the status quo is no longer an option. Change is coming, whether the establishment is ready for it or not, and for the first time in a long time, the public is wide awake.
