Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.
A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.
It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.
The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.
But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.
Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.
Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.
There are any number of ways to mark the shift back: the president’s abysmal approval ratings, including a –50 net approval rating among independents; the fact that Democrats, hated as they may seem, now have a pretty good chance of winning control of the Senate; the hugely unpopular Iran war coming to such a humiliating end.
But the most vivid might be the planned celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. A year or so ago, we were told that MAGA had won the culture wars, but barely a year later, when organizers with close ties to the White House tried to put together the Great American State Fair, the biggest stars they could attract were Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice and the living half of Milli Vanilli. Most of the performers who were announced quickly pulled out, then got called “libtards” by a cabinet secretary for doing so, and the lineup was repopulated by fillers like the girlfriend of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Motocross bikers did flying tricks on the White House lawn — which called to mind Evel Knievel rather than any less ironic embodiment of American greatness — and the White House staged a high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn that Americans judged inappropriate by a 3-to-1 ratio. And that was before the fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory by declaring that Michelle Obama was a man, as Joe Rogan giggled beside him.
A year ago, the U.F.C. spectacle might have seemed like a mark of right-wing cultural ascendancy, even though fewer Americans watch combat sports or motocross than do tennis, hockey, soccer or golf; even though Americans have, by and large, hated Mr. Trump’s rash remodeling of the White House property; and even though Mr. Rogan has spent 2026 criticizing the president on deportations, corruption, wars and foreign policy. But by the summer of 2026, it looked like the kind of imperial indulgence that tends to mark the end, not the apogee, of a given reign.
What happened? One explanation is that Mr. Trump simply squandered his advantage. His tariff crusade produced a burst of inflation. DOGE was a dud. His invasion of American cities in the name of immigration enforcement was so violent and aggressive, it seems to have alienated even those voters who wanted more serious action at the border. And his attacks on foreign countries exposed American military vulnerability, drove a big spike in the price of oil and other products and lost him any claim he might have had to being an antiwar president (always a dubious claim but a relatively widely held one nevertheless).
But look at Mr. Trump’s declining approval ratings, and you see a pretty steady line, from about plus-12 net approval on Inauguration Day to almost negative 19 this month. On particular issues, the decline has gone even further. On inflation, for instance, his net approval has fallen by almost 40 points. Same with demographic subgroups, perhaps most conspicuously those said to be central to MAGA’s claim on the country’s future.
His net approval with young voters has fallen by as much as 50 points, depending on the poll. His net approval among Black Americans was –9 on Inauguration Day and has fallen to –50 today, according to Decision Desk. Among Hispanic voters, said to be a new MAGA bulwark, the president is about 20 points underwater. In his first term, he grew steadily more unpopular but held on to the white working-class voters serving as his base. This time, their patience wore thin quickly, and their support for the president collapsed like everybody else’s.
This may seem like normal postinauguration decline, but the fact that Mr. Trump would be following a normal path toward unpopularity is itself a kind of narrative violation.
During his first term, pundits often marveled at the durability of his base: How could it be that someone so noxious and erratic, peddling such punitive and destructive politics, retained the unswerving backing of so many Americans? To some, he looked like such a transformative figure that the old rules no longer applied; others called him Teflon Don.
But in his second term, there isn’t much of a mystery or obvious superpower. Mr. Trump is in the same neighborhood as George W. Bush was at this point in his second term and no more popular than Joe Biden was at the end of his presidency, and the longer Americans live with Mr. Trump, the more they dislike him. Part of this is the result of voters seeing promise in his 2024 campaign that he was never likely to fulfill, rather than the more predictable path — toward punitive and incompetent governance laced through with corruption and self-dealing. But if Trumpism in office has done so much damage to MAGA’s popularity, it means, among other things, that the support wasn’t that robust in the first place.
As it turned out, according to YouGov, the only sustained period in which Mr. Trump’s personal favorability ratings were positive, since they started measuring them in early 2016, was in the one or two months around Election Day 2024. He was elected again by just 1.5 percentage points and did not even win a majority of votes in the midst of a global anti-incumbency wave.
We heard a lot about the red shifts along the Rio Grande and among New York’s working class, but those populations have swung so far back that they helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in New York City and have helped revive the perennial Democratic dream of a blue Texas. Project 2025 looked on Inauguration Day like a policy Death Star, but Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has been stymied in the courts, and these days it doesn’t seem that he spent the Biden years building a willing army of ideological loyalists. Instead, he can’t manage to find people to hire for very important jobs. Is that supposed to be a mark of populist integrity, that actual staffing proves to be an unsolvable problem?
On the surface, the rightward lurch of tech oligarchs appears perhaps the stickiest shift of the last cycle, with many leading figures in Silicon Valley still talking about tech accelerationism and how much liberals hate progress — and one of them, the most outspoken Trumper, becoming the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Yet even this phenomenon looks, on closer scrutiny, more like the drift of a few tech leaders than the arrival of an entirely new partisan landscape across the industry or region.
In 2024, tech titans donated much more to Republicans than they did in other recent years, then funded and attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, celebrating it as a return of sanity or perhaps masculinity. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where almost 1.5 million votes were cast in 2024, he won only 3,500 more votes than he did in 2020. Does that look like a culture-spanning vibe shift? Or like the strategic alliance of a relatively small number of wealthy executives and the candidate they believed would happily let them write their own ticket, policywise? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even wearing his chain anymore.
MAGA was never just a political movement. It pulled anti-establishment sentiment into a bundle with hard-line evangelicals and a new breed of gender traditionalists, unapologetic and rapacious entrepreneurs and those who spent the last decade bristling against the cultural reign of what the progressive wonk Matt Stoller recently called — pretty rudely — “HR lady” liberalism.
In the cultural sphere, those shifts are both a bit harder to measure and perhaps more enduring than the ballot-box version of MAGA. Affirmative action looks genuinely dead, and the S.A.T. is once again a requirement for admission at even those elite universities that briefly made it optional in the name of social justice. Big business still stands cocky and empowered.
Artificial intelligence still mostly holds sway in policy, and the immense wealth of its biggest cheerleaders may mean that hands-off consensus will endure, though the backlash against A.I. and data centers has been astonishingly swift, too, with four times as many Americans saying they were concerned about the A.I. future as were unconcerned about it. Presumably the culture of self-dealing and corruption won’t endure unchanged if a Democrat takes the White House. But it’s also hard to believe — given the ambient presence of gambling apps, for instance — that on questions of self-interest and acquisitiveness the country will return to the standards and propriety of the Obama years. Hardly any politician is willing to wage a public battle against crypto on principle anymore.
But narratively we often struggle to distinguish small shifts from big ones, significant microphenomena from the arrival of new cultural majorities and turns in the policy landscape from real changes in public opinion. Roe was repealed four years ago, for instance, but abortions are actually up since, and according to a 2024 Pew survey, there is only one state in the country where more people say that abortion should be illegal in most cases than say that it should be legal. The country wasn’t anti-vaccination in the aftermath of Covid, either, whatever we told ourselves about the cultural legacy of Fauci-ism. Rates of routine vaccinations dropped a couple of percentage points, but they remain above 90 percent and even 86 percent of self-identified Make America Healthy Again parents said they believed, for instance, that measles, mumps and rubella vaccination was important for their communities.
That is probably a pretty good model for many of these shifts, which appear to have tugged the country a bit back from the left without throwing all that much momentum behind a genuine MAGA agenda. America may look on the surface as though it has moved on from the social-justice angst of the 2010s, but the data is messy, and by some measures, concern about racism remains steadily high.
Hollywood has taken a few steps away from peak woke, but we haven’t seen anything like the pivot from 1970s New Hollywood cynicism to 1980s American flag blockbusters. Corporate America has gotten a bit less gung-ho about D.E.I. but still looks to conservatives to be impossibly woke. The temperature of climate alarm has cooled, but American concern about global warming is just a couple of points off its peak. And while the internet has grown a bit more right wing overall, it’s hard to know if any of that is natural drift, given how much more money has been spent on purchasing platforms and recalibrating algorithms.
The most worrying pattern may be around gender and sexuality, which seems significant enough it can make the whole MAGA phenomenon look like an expression of gender backlash. As recently as 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men surveyed said they believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” but two years later, that number was 48 percent. Among Republican women, the number jumped 14 points.
Support for same-sex marriage among all Americans has dropped six points since 2023, but the drop is powered by Republicans. In 2022, 56 percent of them told pollsters that same-sex relations were morally acceptable; in 2026, that figure was just 35 percent — lower than when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell in 2015 and lower even than when Mr. Obama belatedly came out in favor of gay marriage in 2012. In 2016 many liberal Americans believed that Mr. Trump was the reactionary product of the country’s ongoing race conflicts. A decade later, gender looks like a much more illuminating skeleton key. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Erika Kirk is a favorite punching bag of the country now.
But nationally, even these declines can be measured in just a few percentage points, and outside MAGA, it’s not clear how much, if any, ground has been lost since the peak woke years. Democratic men have grown perhaps one or two percentage points more reactionary in their views of gender since 2019, and Democratic women haven’t moved much at all. The share of Democrats saying gay sex is morally acceptable is higher than it was in 2019, as is true for independents, though each is down a bit from a Biden-era peak.
Shifts of just a few points matter, of course, for culture as well as for politics. For obvious reasons, the past 10 years can’t really be called anything other than the Trump era, and Americans will be dealing with the fallout for a very long time — in culture and in politics. But in retrospect it seems we might have gotten ahead of ourselves in tabulating all the things, beyond who was in power, that had really changed about the country as a whole.
Perhaps this sounds like liberal cope; probably at least some of it is. But it is also a reminder that partisan outcomes do not offer precise and comprehensive X-rays of the country, that politicians are rarely the avatars of national meaning we want them to be, that even in a time of hyperpolitics most Americans are pretty disengaged from partisan squabbles and that whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.
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