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Trump’s Impact on Popular Culture

Trump’s Impact on Popular Culture

Last updated on: January 15, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Trump’s Impact on Popular Culture 2025-01-11T16:34:18-05:00 Gene Veith

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We’ve blogged about how Donald Trump’s political victory seems to be accompanied by a larger “vibe shift” in American culture. The shift is away from the woke progressivism that for decades has reigned supreme in Hollywood, academia, the arts, the media, corporate offices, and other enclaves of the cultural elite, towards attitudes that more closely resemble conservatism.

Politico has published a feature article entitled How Donald Trump Transformed Mass Culture, a round table discussion with a group of its reporters on Trump’s impact on popular culture–the realm of entertainment, fashion, business, and non-elite society.

The parade of tech executives bending the knee to the president-elect, Disney announcing it is dropping a transgender storyline from an animated series, Target announcing it is cutting back on its LGBTQ merchandise, and corporations dropping their DEI policies might all be explained as pragmatic business decisions. That’s revealing because it implies that their previous enthusiasm for wokery was also a pragmatic business decision. Still, such economic decisions suggest a perception that there is a change in the marketplace and in their consumers.

As the panel’s Jessica Piper says, “Companies seem to be more concerned about conservative backlash than they were a few years ago.” Beyond that, she observes, “Trump isn’t as culturally toxic as he was the first time around.”

This is evident in professional athletes celebrating with the “Trump dance,” and getting no blow back from the leagues or anyone else for doing so. Reporter Shia Kapos from Chicago, “a hard-core Democratic town,” says that she is now seeing people wearing MAGA hats, “which would have been unheard of four years ago.”

Ian Ward from New York sees a different shift in fashion:

This may be colored by the fact of where I live (in New York City), but I’ve noticed a resurgence of preppy culture and fashion recently — expensive barn coats, those Ralph Lauren sweaters with American flags embroidered on the front. These are the clothes of America’s traditional elite, and I think that after the election, people are (somewhat paradoxically, given Trump’s populist rhetoric) less nervous about identifying themselves with that elite that they were before. There’s a sense that you don’t have to apologize for your privilege — and that it’s socially acceptable, or even fashionable, to embrace patriotic symbols. Thus the $400 American flag sweaters, I guess.

Well, I would say that this is more likely an assertion of being elite and trying to show the victorious populists that the elite can also be patriotic. Though I suspect that even the elite feels relieved that they no longer have to subject themselves to the woke ritual of having to apologize for their privilege.

More to the point is that the elite may be waking up to the importance of the ordinary Americans they used to champion but in recent years have been looking down on.

Shia Kapos: Democrats have certainly had to rethink how they view voters who elected Trump. I don’t think they were doing that four years ago. This time, the Trump voter isn’t just a MAGA voter.

Moderator David Kihara made a perceptive observation from watching a recent movie on Netflix: Following the obligatory Hollywood principles, it was impeccably “diverse,” including characters who were black, Asian, LGBTQ, transgender, and otherwise checking all the boxes. Except they were all upper income! There was no “economic diversity,” no diversity of social class. That is to say no representatives of the working class, which leftists used to champion and which became Donald Trump’s base!

Those folks are now ascendant. They no longer feel the social pressure the elite used to impose. They now feel free to say what they really think. Says the New Yorker,

Ian Ward: From my own conversations with conservatives, there’s a sense that we’ve gotten past the period of “peak woke” in American culture. There’s a pretty common refrain among the conservative chattering classes that “wokeness” took off in 2014, peaked in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests and is now retreating after Trump’s reelection. What that means in practice is that the average, non-ideological American — who was never really on board with progressive cultural politics to begin with — doesn’t feel the same social pressure to defer to the “woke” positions on every cultural issue. People feel empowered to take the counter-countercultural position in a way they didn’t during the first Trump term.

The most interesting comment from this panel, though, has to do with attitudes among some of the elite. The possibility that Trump and Making America Great Again has become cool. From Ward again:

Ian Ward: We’re living in a moment of global rightward political retrenchment. I think it’s safe to assume that our cultural products will reflect that.

I would add that, fairly or not, Trump and MAGA have taken on a certain countercultural appeal — and that tends to jive with artistic subcultures that position themselves against the cultural mainstream. It’s not cool or subversive right now to be a Democratic partisan, who are seen as defenders of the status quo. There’s a certain subversiveness to being MAGA, and I think we’ll see that echo throughout the cultural sphere — though I’m not entirely sure what it will look like.

Now I don’t think the progressive elite will change its ideology to any great degree. The general public is just asserting itself and the elite is having to take notice. I suspect that the left will make a concerted effort to court the working class, to recover their old proletariat base. That will mean an important shift of emphasis and presentation. The left will still support the LGBTQ cause, but it’s realizing that the people they want to attract–who generally believe in minding their own business about sex–are turned off by in-your-face transgenderism and mandatory Pride parades. The left will still support racial minorities, but it is beginning to realize that a good number of those minorities also inhabit the working class and also in many ways are culturally conservative.

Of course, Trump could quickly make himself uncool again and unleash the old Sixties protest mentality. The left likes to think of itself as subversive, whereas the right tends to think of itself as the establishment. The roles have switched over the last few decades, but they may well reassert themselves.

Photo by Liam Enea, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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