The Trump Decade

A Ten-Year Reckoning with the Man Who Made Politics Personal and Performance Presidential

There was a moment in my recent Noosphere conversation with Steve Bannon when he looked at me and said something that he was looking for affirmation on: “Will you concede we are living in the age of Trump?” I didn’t hesitate. I said yes. Because we are.

It’s been 10 years since Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in New York City, and to say that entrance ushered in a decade of massive political upheaval is an understatement.

One quirky election—by losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college—could have been written off as a historical accident, but the staying power of Trump himself, and the movement, and, of course, is a near-unprecedented political comeback means a historical asterisk will never be attached to his name.

Perhaps he’s only a chapter in the history books 100 years from now, but he’ll be more than a paragraph and likely have more lasting impact on the culture and psyche of the country than the last person to win non-consecutive terms to the White House — Grover Cleveland.

Donald Trump’s influence on American politics and culture is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Greater than Barack Obama. Greater than Bill Clinton. Greater, even, than Ronald Reagan. You probably have to go back to FDR to find a president whose impact so thoroughly redefined the boundaries of the job and the shape of the national psyche.

What did we learn in the Trump decade? For starters, that simplicity beats nuance. That repetition beats reason. That attention — any attention — is more valuable than accuracy or consistency. In this regard, Trump didn’t break the rules. He discovered which rules were obsolete and which ones were never enforced.

Reagan, Clinton, and Obama all had moments where they bent norms or took political risks, but they did so from inside the system. They aspired to a certain standard of presidential behavior, even if it was only in their heads or ours. Trump never bought into any of it. He didn’t care what the political or journalistic class thought of him, though he wanted to be part of that conversation; he seemed to want their public respect, even if he couldn’t earn it privately.

For 50 years, Trump cultivated a very different skill set in a very different arena: attention as power. Celebrity as credibility. Trump is the living embodiment of the cliche, “fake it ‘til you make it.” He did it as a real estate developer, he did it as a casino owner, he did it as a golf course proprietor, and he’s done it as a politician.

It’s ironic, when he first ran for president, there were real questions about how much wealth he had and how much income he was truly generating for himself. Now, thanks to how he’s used his political power to acquire more wealth, he’s an actual multi-billionaire. In many ways, his version of a success story is what draws many Americans to him. He seemed to succeed without any tangible skill beyond sales and charisma — street smarts more than book smarts seemed to benefit him more, and that attribute has always been lionized by the American public.

In many ways, Trump is unoriginal. He borrows slogans, half-remembers ideas someone else planted in his head, and treats them like proprietary genius. “America First” wasn’t his phrase, but he made it sound like it was. Because in his mind, if it wasn’t said on TV while he was watching, it didn’t happen.

But what he is — and this is the part we have to grapple with — is uniquely comfortable being the outsider who takes over. He’s been treated as the skunk at the garden party for most of his adult life in business, so, in some ways, it’s made him more comfortable living in a world that didn’t respect him for his skills, but only grudgingly would respect him out of necessity. Just look at how the other G7 leaders seem to treat him when they were together earlier this week. They have to pay him public respect, but deep down, Trump knows they don’t really want to work with him; they’d prefer almost anybody else, but they have no choice. Some presidents would hate that kind of relationship. Trump seems to almost thrive on feeling disrespected.

Most political figures claw their way inside and try to stay. Trump stormed the gates and then built his establishment. Unlike Reagan and Nixon before him, he didn’t just win power — he redefined who got to wield it and why. And unlike them, he doesn’t believe there should be any limits. And despite two impeachments and multiple criminal indictments, he’s continued to redefine what accountability means in this country. If you beat the system, it doesn’t matter if you are innocent; it simply matters if you win. Winning and/or defiance is innocence; guilty verdicts or admitting mistakes are for losers.

To remake the country, Trump started by remaking the Republican Party. He moved it away from international intervention, away from free trade, and, perhaps most significantly, away from small-government conservatism. Trump is not a small-government conservative. He’s a strong-government conservative. And the most dramatic shift he made — one that still hasn’t fully registered (see the current Senate GOP agita on his Big Beautiful Bill) — was taking Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security off the chopping block. It is the single most important rhetorical shift he made to turn the GOP from a perennial loser with older working-class voters to a cultural cornerstone of his movement. Voters could punish the GOP if it behaves too much like the pre-Trump GOP and advocates for a smaller safety net.

If Trump fails in his domestic agenda, it will be because of this. But if he succeeds in expanding his base, it will also be because of this. His pledge not to touch the most popular government programs helped him hold onto working-class voters in the Midwest — voters who had once swung to Obama, then flirted with Romney before rejecting the Ryan plan in 2012. These voters have been culturally conservative for years, but they were also reliant and supportive of the government safety net. Once they found a candidate who would both protect the safety net and channel their cultural grievances, they were able to help turn Trump into a political juggernaut.

Trump grabbed a political opportunity hiding in plain sight: to protect Social Security and Medicare. It was a clear contrast with prior Republican orthodoxy, and it changed the shape of the GOP coalition. Suddenly, voters who wanted tougher immigration enforcement and cultural reassurance didn’t have to give up their economic security to get it.

That single move did more to realign the Republican Party than a decade of policy white papers. Trump didn’t win these voters with facts or empathy. He won them with defiance.

He turned politics into performance. He turned grievance into identity. He turned outrage into fuel.

But while he created a more reliable coalition for himself, the very nature of that coalition — built on personal loyalty and cultural pugilism — made it harder to keep the broader Republican coalition intact. Would a Trump with Reagan’s character have kept more of the GOP coalition in place while advancing the same agenda? Or has Trump’s personality become the price of entry for any movement capable of this realignment?

We don’t know. But what we do know is that character has become an exit ramp. When voters feel things aren’t working, they won’t admit they were wrong on policy. They blame character instead.

And this style of politicizing has changed the country’s relationship with politics and the presidency itself. Everything in our culture, down to visits to the White House by sports heroes, has been politicized. Gone are the ceremonial White House events where political opponents would set aside differences in the name of civic pride. Obama honored the 1985 Bears with Mike Ditka (who was an Obama critic and almost-political opponent of his in Illinois back in 2004) standing beside him and enjoying the event — a moment less imaginable today. Not because the teams are different. Because the culture is different. Trump made bipartisanship look like betrayal. And this is now a virus infecting both sides of the aisle. The left NOW looks at any Democrat who concedes a talking point to the right as some sort of turncoat, something the right’s been doing for years. It’s a reminder that Trump isn’t just changing the nature of the conservative movement or Republican Party politics, he’s changing the nature of the political opposition as well.

What makes Trump so polarizing isn’t just what he says. It’s what he represents. Reagan, Clinton, and Obama all left room for neutrality. Trump demands you pick a side. His political strategy requires a perpetual fight.

The damage he’s done is real. He’s turned disagreement into dehumanization. He’s taught a generation of political imitators that cruelty can be strategic and that spectacle is a substitute for governing. He’s normalized corruption not as a scandal, but as a political identity, meaning if someone is on your side, then they can’t be corrupt, regardless of their actions. And perhaps most corrosively, he’s made millions of voters more invested in humiliating their enemies than improving their own lives.

And yet, there are lessons in this decade of Trump — some necessary, some uncomfortable. We’ve learned that voter apathy is often a sign of complacency. That political engagement, even when rooted in anger, is a kind of strength. The system grew too distant from too many people. And that Trump’s rise was only possible because so many Americans were already disillusioned. Whatever one thinks of Trump, the fact that he has more of the country engaged daily should ultimately serve us well.

There are even aspects of Trump’s presidency that future leaders may be forced to emulate. His transparency — however accidental or narcissistic — often gave the public a window into the decision-making process. He craved attention so much that even mundane decisions became public performances. And that led to more people paying attention. His media accessibility set a new standard: if a president as obsessed with flattery and control as Trump can show up on anyone’s podcast, why can’t future presidents be equally accessible?

But the financial entanglements, the blatant grifting, the use of the presidency to enrich his family — these are scandals hiding in plain sight, or these are activities that Trump is trying to normalize. And they’ll only matter when voters decide they matter. That’s the other lesson: character only counts when competence fails. It’s a lesson that Clinton’s failed impeachment taught us because had his job performance suffered, then his character failings would have mattered more. At the time, this was attributed to some unique hold Clinton had with the voters. As it turns out, it simply may be how voters assess most elected officials — they assume they are all capable of corruption, so ultimately, they judge these folks on whether they’ve helped them live a better life, regardless of what ethics and morals they espouse.

Every era comes to an end, and every political movement fades at some point, and it’s usually corruption that is the exclamation point. Trump and Trumpism won’t be rejected by the voters directly on the merits, but we’ll turn the page when voters decide Trump and Trumpism are no longer capable of delivering for them.

So maybe this is how it ends. Not with a landslide. Not with an indictment. But with exhaustion. Trump may wear out his welcome (like he did during COVID). Or he may overstay it. Either way, the legacy he’s left behind — the culture he’s created — isn’t going anywhere and will impact the types of presidents we elect after him for another generation, at a minimum.

That doesn’t mean we’re doomed to keep living in the Trump era forever. But it does mean that how it ends — whether with a bang, a whimper, or a bitter reckoning — will define not just his legacy, but ours.

We’re not just living in the age of Trump. We’re still figuring out how to survive it.

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