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 Mark Zuckerberg donning a chain and saying that the corporate world was too hostile to “masculine energy.” It was corporate executives using Trump as an excuse to wrest control of their companies back from their workers. 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?
There is much to be said about where and how Trumpism ran aground. But a place to start is here: Trump’s electoral victory and his cultural momentum were in conflict. Trump won the 2024 election narrowly: 49.9 percent of the popular vote and an edge in the battleground states so slim that flipping 175,000 votes would have thrown the election to Kamala Harris. Poll after poll showed that the cost of living was what powered Trump’s victory.
But Trump’s victory provided confidence and cover to chief executives and billionaires and celebrities and institutions whose frustrations and resentments had concentrated across the Biden years. If Trump could take back power, so could they. And they did: Companies gutted diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies they never actually wanted; comedians felt freed from the language police; the purity tests of the left gave way to the gleeful cruelty of the right. The force of the cultural correction gave MAGA a momentum that the election results never justified. That created the conditions for overreach.
“There is little in the election results to suggest the public wants a sharp rightward lurch,” I wrote then. “But Trump and his team are jacked into the online vibes machine, and they want to meet the moment they sense. I doubt there would have been ideological modesty in any Trump administration, but I am particularly skeptical we will see it in this one.”
Now Trumpism is failing both the voters and the vibes. It is failing the voters in the most obvious of ways: Trump ran for office promising lower prices. But he also ran on policies — tariffs and deportations — that raise prices by driving up the costs of goods and labor. Nor did Trump try to persuade Americans that they should bear higher prices to subsidize domestic manufacturing or raise native-born wages or to isolate China.
Instead, Trump lied to his voters. He promised that Americans would pay nothing and gain everything. Then came Liberation Day and the markets began shuddering and the price of coffee began rising and Trump has been caught between his long-held beliefs about trade and his recognition that Americans do not want to pay the costs of his policies. He backs off the tariffs when the pain threatens markets or when China’s export restrictions threaten American manufacturers, but he has not simply abandoned the project.
The result has been a tariff regime that has raised prices, confused companies and alienated allies but has accomplished very little. The United States lost manufacturing jobs in 2025. The pivot to isolating China was short-lived — after all the tumult, the added tariff on most Chinese goods is 20 percent and Trump is now selling advanced Nvidia chips to China. The labor market is weakening. Deficits are rising. Trump may give his economic management an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” but a recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that only 36 percent of Americans approve of how he is running the economy, and Democrats have muscled their way to a four-point edge on the issue.
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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. I think, here, of New York magazine’s cover story, “The Cruel Kids’ Table”:
This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth’s into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a V.I.P. section “like a little Mexican.” Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause.
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?
In Trump’s first term, there was a constant yearning for a return-to-normalcy candidate. Many Democrats believed that Joe Biden or someone like him would defeat Trump in the polls and restore a more familiar form of political competition. That was enough to win the 2020 election, but not enough to turn the page on Trumpism. Instead, it roared back with even more force in 2024. 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.
What’s struck me about all of them is the way they embody a vibe different from anything Trumpism offers. The defining expression of Trump’s second term — the expression he chose for his official portrait — is a scowl. Mamdani’s smile is now its omnipresent opposite, potent enough to reduce Trump to a purring chumminess in the Oval Office. Talarico’s appeal is rooted in his Christianity; the response to him reflects, in part, the yearning for an explicitly moral and spiritual politics in the face of so much callousness and nihilism. Newsom has vaulted himself into 2028 front-runner status by following two seemingly contradictory impulses: He mocks Trump on social media even as he hosts genuine conversations with right-wing figures like Steve Bannon, Michael Savage and Charlie Kirk. It’s resistance politics incongruously married to a searching pluralism, and it’s kept Newsom atop my social media feeds all year.
Politics, of course, is more than just vibes. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill ran on declaring a state of emergency to freeze utility rates. Mamdani ran on free child care and rent freezes. Talarico is taking aim at the rage economy of social media and the corruption of big-money politics. Newsom is embracing abundance and a fight-fire-with-fire approach to redistricting.
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.
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