The Biggest Difference Between the Trump Era and the Obama Era

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A personal note: This will be my last piece as a staff writer for Slate after 11 years on the job. As such, I wanted to get down a few brief thoughts about What It Has All Meant.

My tenure writing about news and politics for this publication has, needless to say, covered an incredibly interesting period^[2]—a tumultuous time of fascinating social changes^[3] that will no doubt be remembered as one of the most eventful eras^[4] a great nation has ever experienced. (LOL.)

To some extent, the country is the same as it was when I started—politically polarized along lines having to do with race, culture, and the proper role of government in a market economy. But in other ways, well, things are a little different than they were in 2014 when Barack Obama was president, don’t you think?

One of these differences is the sheer number of basic societal functions that people are aware of, and forced to have opinions about, within the realm of politics. Think about COVID and the way everything worked or didn’t work^[5] while it was at its peak. Think about the crash course in vote tabulation and Electoral College procedure that followed. Think about what has happened in the past nine months^[6]—a sort of national unscrewing of the parts on the furniture that its advocates and opponents alike would describe as an attempt to change the entire nature of bureaucracy^[7] and commerce^[8] in this country. We’re in the midst of an effort to turn pretty much every entity that once maintained a certain “normal” and nonpartisan order of operations into one that acts for the benefit, and at the direction, of a specific political party and its leader.

In effect, we have spent the past five years as a society examining the gears that make us move. It’s been a slow-motion drug trip of noticing things that were always there. Look around you; look at that shelf. Think about the journey the shelf took to get here and end up as a thing in the room that you never notice unless you need it. Wow! Crazy. It would feel pretty weird, though, if all of a sudden you simply could not have a shelf, or if the shelf somehow supported the suspension of due process and the First Amendment. In a way, the shelf’s journey is society being held together. And in the U.S., so many things that we once never thought about are now political in a way that they were not a decade ago. The amount of stuff that is on the table and up for discussion has been vastly expanded.

It has all certainly taught a lesson to certain smart-ass online writers who thought they had one of the most interesting and important jobs out there, and secretly considered themselves a cut above all the people who did boring regular work! Our lives, it turns out, ran on boring stuff. The most important people in the country all along were the rule-followers—corporate attorneys^[9], regional judges^[10], visa-processing functionaries^[11], tax assessors^[12], customs officials^[13], food and drug regulators^[14]. Lawyers, it turns out, were critical! Statisticians^[15], air traffic controllers^[16]. The people who keep the mail running^[17], not to mention the people fixing roofs^[18] and taking care of cows^[19]. Even the human resources scolds^[20]; yes, you might even miss the human resources department, if it were gone. These people were the foundation and the load-bearing walls of the house in which you lived your little life. Without them, we get what we have now.

Some citizens of this country think it was a good idea to dynamite the house; many don’t. This has led us to some weird places. They might not phrase it this way, but liberals brought up to valorize concepts like “dissent” and “progress” have been made to consider that having an “establishment” or “status quo” might not always be a bad thing. A few weeks ago, former Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, rather than launching a campaign for a Senate seat in which he would have been under heavy pressure to avoid exercising any of the legislative or “advice and consent” prerogatives granted to him by the Constitution, chose to take a job running an airline industry trade association^[21]. Ten years ago the American left would have likely rolled its eyes about this—another turn of the corrupt revolving door, pathetic. But now? Chris Sununu is a courageous ally in the perpetuation of civil society, of the peaceful interface between business and government. God bless him. Bill Kristol, once the country’s most prominent conservative intellectual, is now essentially a Democrat^[22], and not only because he shares Democrats’ personal aversion to the Orange Man. As crazy as it might seem, Kristol and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually have a mutual interest in restoring some of the previous status quo. It’s rational for them to be part of the same coalition.

Other questions that were once seemingly settled have been put up for discussion too. The current regime believes that what it’s doing, for all its violations of democratic “norms” and dismal poll numbers, is legitimate because it is acting on the authority of the Americans who most deserve to have America run on their behalf. And while there’s never been a big announcement about it, it’s been made clear^[23] in many ways that these first-class, more deserving citizens are the white ones.

Disputes over whether some Americans are more American than others have, of course, characterized the country’s entire existence. But when I wrote about the 2016 presidential campaign, for instance, the implications Donald Trump made about the second-class status of people with Mexican^[25] and Middle Eastern^[26] ancestry, his false claims about Black criminality^[27], and his outreach to racial “science” IQ obsessives^[28] and Jewish world-control theorists^[29] registered as extreme and noteworthy not just to me, but to much of the general public. These things were scandals that led the news and made other Republicans nervous. Even after Trump won that election and began serving his first term, he would, from time to time, feel compelled to disassociate himself^[30] from some of these people and views.

This time around, not so much! Elon Musk was given a major role in the executive branch while campaigning on behalf of Germany’s most Nazi-friendly political party^[31] and periodically retweeting ludicrous conspiracy claims about Jews^[32]. Several of the staffers Musk brought into the Department of Government Efficiency follow openly neo-Nazi and white supremacist social media accounts^[33]. One was kept on staff even after it was publicly revealed that he’d complained about having Indian colleagues and described himself as “racist.”^[34] (Not much plausible deniability there!) Now, flags are being lowered around the country and shows are being taken off television in the memory of a right-wing influencer whose most notable positions included^[35] denouncing the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, chuckling about Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s allegedly limited intelligence, and warning that New York City is in danger of losing its status as a center of “Anglo” society^[36]. (Indeed, what might happen under Zohran Mamdani to the Big Apple’s famously homogenous Anglo neighborhoods, ethnic food, and street culture?) A political activist who once said things work better when white men are in charge^[37] was appointed to a key diplomatic role in the State Department. The administration has argued successfully in federal court that appearing to be Latino is grounds for being detained by the authorities^[38].

None of these stories is necessarily even the main topic in the news on any given day. The reversal of a 250-year trend toward equal rights in the U.S. is just one issue among many. Admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism is now a mainstream part of politics^[39], which you can vote for or against. Is there an ongoing Jewish-led effort to use minorities to subjugate or destroy the race of white Christians, who should fill most leadership positions because of their inherently superior mental faculties and character? Like I said, it’s up for debate.

Why did all this happen? My God, what went wrong? It’s hard to say. During my career, two subjects I’ve written a lot about are politics and sports. When people learn what I do, they often ask me in a conspiratorial tone who is going to win an upcoming game or election. Their presumption seems to be that all of us, on the inside, know what’s coming but are keeping it quiet because of a kind of no-spoilers honor code. But if there is anything I have learned by doing this work, it’s that nobody really knows what is going to happen tomorrow, much less why. Barack Obama has, at best, only a little more insight into who is going to win the next presidential primary than you do. Being a genius on Wall Street or in Las Vegas means guessing right by a few more percentage points a few times more often than other people. The best we can usually do is come up with broad explanations and make models after the fact.

My own explanation of the national meltdown involves a few factors. One is that the establishment and the status quo, as effective as they had been in engineering U.S. world hegemony, dominance, and wealth, had gotten a bit stalled out. The people at the top got a little too smug about how many of the spoils of victory they deserved, about their own irreplaceability, and about what everyone else would tolerate. What I mean is income inequality, deindustrialization, enshittification^[40], institutional cowardice^[41]; put the Latinx stuff^[42] in there if you want, and then please stop bringing it up, there are more important things happening. The status quo had its merits, we may have learned, but also major flaws—something probably worth noting if it’s ever to be rebuilt.

The second is that, for economic and technological reasons, the media disintegrated and it became impossible to find any consensus about why things weren’t working. The third is that it turned out that there was a lot of willingness in the population—more than the population itself probably would have guessed—to support a candidate who held views about race that they found unsettling. And this wasn’t just otherwise tolerant white people who were willing to overlook Trump’s more offensive statements because of tax rates, but also the crucial Latino and Black voters who elevated him to a second term because they thought he would help ease inflation. Which is related to the last factor: the American mind, utterly hypnotized by television, believing that because someone played an intimidating business executive on a reality-show competition, they must be good at managing economic stuff in real life. Oh well.^[43][44]

Personally, I’d like the smartest and hardest-working people around the world to continue to be able to come to the United States and live alongside the people already here with equal rights, dignity, and opportunity. All considered, this system has actually worked well for a long time^[45]. Just my take.

A few months ago I drove to Delaney Hall, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where some Democrats have been arrested^[46] while attempting to make inspections. By coincidence, I visited just hours before several detainees, reportedly fed up with inhumane conditions and a lack of food, escaped from the facility by pushing through a shoddy drywall barrier^[47].

At the time, however, it was midday and the scene was mostly quiet. The sun was beating down, and the air was dusty. The building is an anonymous one, located near the Port of Newark among miles of warehouses and depots and parking lots. It is, maybe by design, not the kind of place an average person passes through on a daily basis.

Outside, though, five people were holding a protest. There was a radical traveling nurse who had brought home-brewed kombucha, a college-age activist who didn’t want to be photographed for op-sec reasons, and three white Baby Boomers from local refugee and immigrant aid groups. (The kombucha was pretty good.) They had signs and T-shirts with slogans on them, but there was for the most part no one to see them. In that sense it was more like a vigil than a protest. Every time a semitruck passed by heading to or from the port, the driver would honk its horn in a quick gesture of acknowledgment and, one imagines, solidarity with the men and women inside. None of them ever stopped, though; they didn’t have the time. They had work to do, making things go.

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