In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it was a squeaker.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1 points; in 2012, Barack Obama won it by 3.9 points; in 2008, Obama won it by 7.2 points; and in 2004, George W. Bush won it by 2.4 points. You have to go back to the 2000 election to find a margin smaller than Trump’s.
Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.
And yet, they’ve felt like one. Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory. The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout. This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.
In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”
I was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.
Reading Cowen’s list with the benefit of hindsight, four factors converged to turn Trump’s narrow victory in votes into an overwhelming victory in vibes. The first is the very different relationship (most) Democrats and Republicans have to social media. To Democrats, mastering social media means having a good team of social media content producers; Kamala Harris’s capably snarky team was just hired more or less en masse by the D.N.C.
To the Trumpian right, mastering social media — and attention, generally — means being, yourself, a dominant and relentless presence on social media and YouTube and podcasts, as Trump and JD Vance and Elon Musk all are. It’s the politician-as-influencer, not the politician-as-press-shop. There are Democrats who do this too, like A.O.C., but they are rare.
Biden has no authentic relationship with social media, nor does Harris. They treat it cautiously, preferring to make fewer mistakes, even if that means commanding less attention. Since the election, I have heard no end of Democrats lament their “media problem,” and I’ve found the language telling. Democrats won voters who consume heavy amounts of political news, but they lost voters who don’t follow the news at all. What Democrats have is an attention problem, not a media problem, and it stems partly from the fact that they still treat attention as something the media controls rather than as something they have to fight for themselves.
I am not sure, in the long run, it will benefit Republicans to be so tied to Elon Musk’s X. The politics that Democrats absorbed from Twitter in 2020 hurt them in 2024. Politicians who are too in touch with their online stans lose touch with normal voters. Their sense of the public — who it is, what it wants — deforms.
But social media is humanity’s vibes machine, at least for now, and Republicans have invested more in it than Democrats have, with Musk’s purchase of Twitter sitting at the apex of that project. And so the Trumpist right has gained disproportionate influence over vibes.
The second factor is the corporate desire to shift right. Over the 2020s, corporations shifted left, driven by disgust with Trump, pressure from their work forces and perceived pressure from their customers. This was reflected in the endless corporate pronouncements over this-or-that social issue, the many green pledges, the construction of vast D.E.I. infrastructures and a general aesthetic of concerned listening on behalf of executives. Whatever mix of sincerity and opportunism motivated these changes, it curdled into resentment in recent years.
You can hear this in the interview Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder who has emerged as a major Trump adviser, did with my colleague Ross Douthat. “Companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution,” he said. “The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.” The biggest vibe shift Cowen misses in his list is the anger C.E.O.s — particularly tech C.E.O.s — came to feel toward their own workers and their desire to take back control.
Trump’s election acted as the pivot point for this trend, giving corporate leaders cover to do what they’d long wanted to do anyway. “The election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in favor of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender roles,” The Financial Times reported. Announcement after announcement from major corporations pulling out of climate change compacts or dismantling D.E.I. systems have been a vibes multiplier, creating the sense of a major shift happening at all levels of American society.
Perhaps the clearest example was Mark Zuckerberg’s almost ceremonial embrace of Trumpism at Meta: no more third-party fact-checking and no more D.E.I. programs. Zuckerberg sits at the helm of what is the largest vibe-tracking architecture in human history and he could not have built that — he would not have built that — if he was not himself exquisitely sensitive to changes in social sentiment. He knows which way the algorithms are trending.
I interviewed Zuckerberg in 2018, as he was still processing the backlash from the 2016 elections. He told me Meta had failed “on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference.” He worried over “a big rise of isolationism and nationalism.” What made him confident in the future was that, among millennials, “the plurality identifies as a citizen of the world.”
Now Zuckerberg is going on Joe Rogan’s show, chain dangling from his neck, to say that the fact-checking Meta was doing was like “something out of ‘1984,’ ” that companies like his own became too hostile to “masculine energy” and that what makes him optimistic about Donald Trump is “I think he just wants America to win.”
Zuckerberg’s look, message and venue reflect another way this moment is different. In 2016, Trump’s electoral victory was experienced as an interruption amid a profound shift in power. Obama had been the first Black president, Clinton was going to be the first female president. That the beginning of the resistance took the form of a women’s march on Washington — not a Democratic march, or an anti-Trump march — fit the times. That the #MeToo movement followed soon after was no accident. Masculinity was toxic. The future was female.
I won’t make any claims about the future, but the present feels decidedly male. Trump’s campaign in 2024 was gaudily masculine. Hulk Hogan and Dana White, the chief executive of UFC, spoke on the night of Trump’s speech at the Republican convention. The campaign fanned out to the podcasters young men listened to and embraced crypto culture. It connected to a larger anger building among men — a sense that there was no recognized masculinity aside from toxic masculinity, that there wasn’t much room for them in that female future.
Trump’s win, in turn, has been felt as a victory for a particular type of man in the gender wars. In the hours after his victory, the taunt “your body, my choice,” filled social media. Attention has focused on the spaces in culture that embraced Trump, from Rogan to crypto to UFC, deepening the sense — or recognition — of their power.
Then there was Joe Biden. In 2020, he promised to turn the page on Trump. Instead, he kept the focus on him. Biden took up very little attentional space. He did few interviews and the ones he did do rarely made much news. Biden’s policy agenda was ambitious but he, himself, was quiet. When George W. Bush was president, politics revolved around Bush; when Obama was president, it revolved around Obama; when Trump was president, it revolved around Trump; when Biden was president, it revolved around … Trump.
Partly this reflected the limitations of Biden’s age. But it was also a strategy. Democrats came to believe their coalition was an “anti-MAGA majority” that stretched from Bernie Sanders to Liz Cheney. Their relatively strong performance in the 2022 elections — despite Biden’s dismal favorability ratings — seemed to vindicate this view. But the anti-MAGA majority would only activate if the threat of Trump felt real. And so a sort of attentional détente developed between Biden and Trump: Both agreed that the public’s attention should be on Trump. There was no attempt to dislodge Trump from being the center of American politics.
I suspect we are at or near the peak of Trump vibes. Trump’s coalition ranges from a white nationalist right to Silicon Valley titans whose businesses are built on immigrant labor and genius and that’s already led to fractures over issues like H-1B visas. The divisions are growing bitter: Steve Bannon called Musk “evil” and vowed to annihilate his political influence.
Even where the Trumpist right can find common ground, the narrowness of Trump’s victory will matter once he has to govern: House Republicans will need either near-perfect unity — which looks, so far, unlikely — or they will need Democratic votes to pass anything. Senate Republicans will face the frustrations of the filibuster. The routine paralysis and compromise of politics will feel like betrayals to many of Trump’s supporters. Governing is a buzzkill. And Trump is as he has always been: disinhibited, erratic, obsessed with loyalty and grievance, and quick to turn on those who question him.
“Who’s going to stay around for year three?” Cowen said to me when I called him last week. “Is it the highest opportunity-cost people or the ones who are the loyalists who don’t have other great things to do?”
Perhaps the cultural momentum of Trumpism will give Trump’s presidency added force. But it is at least as likely that it lures Trump and his team into overreach. It is always dangerous to experience a narrow victory as an overwhelming mandate. Voters — angry about the cost of living and disappointed by Biden — still barely handed Trump the White House. There is little in the election results to suggest the public wants a sharp rightward lurch. 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.
Cowen may have correctly called the shift in vibes, but he isn’t particularly comfortable with it. If 2024 was partly a backlash to the Democratic Party and culture of the last four years, what might a backlash to this more culturally confident and overwhelming form of Trumpism look like?
“I’ve taken to insisting to my friends on the right: ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ ” Cowen told me. “You might get it.”
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