I can only come at this from my personal relationship to the main currents in American thought. I don’t know how many others followed my own precise trajectory, probably a few. But I do know that some never felt there was a trajectory at all, and are now gloating that their first reaction was correct, while others refuse there was a trajectory but in the opposite direction: they are the die-hards, the holdouts, the hopefuls, and the fence-walking nuance-chasers who say “sure it’s bad in some ways, but not in others. Give credit where it’s due. Stuff like this is just politics. Wait and see. Stop overreacting.”

And this latter group, though rapidly dwindling, is a striking combination of peoples who truly believe in the inherent stability of our country. The sycophants are part of it, yes, but it would be a mistake to assume that’s all it is. There is a fundamental belief in goodness that propels the suspicion that the worst accusations, predictions, and analyses must be exaggeration. Must be fear mongering. And they are often right! So many times they have been right. Every time, in fact, in modern American history, they have been right, insofar as the most dire predictions were the crumbling of democracy itself. But in this last year or so, certain anxieties are springing up. And not through media-pushed narratives that can be preemptively dismissed as disinformation or propaganda. These anxieties are pushing up from below.

The first one

But let me take you on my own mighty-mouse roller coaster ride through this now decade-long political experiment. While some people will say, and are saying, “I did know he was really this bad,” I have to call baloney on about 95% of them. Prior to the first election, there simply was not evidence available that he would govern as he has after this third one. There was evidence every which way of common douchebaggery, business nefariousness, dimwittedness and sex-pestery, but this was rebuffed by two factors.

1. We never could have imagined what we are now forced to imagine regarding his (potential) activities with Mr. Epstein. And this not a statement about the truth of those alleged activities. But it is a statement about the what the average person is now forced to admit could be possible. They are images (true or false) that one must process. And even if one believes he is innocent, it is now almost impossible for that same person to deny understanding why someone else might not. But prior to the first election? No, this was not even on the radar. And the other critiques? They were rebuffed by our second factor.
2. A culture-cocktail primed for (pseudo)populist upheaval. At the risk of having too many lists, let me separate this cocktail into ingredients anyway.
   1. One-part social justice zeitgeist that pissed normal people off and made everyone (even its adherents) exhausted. Here are some terms that may induce cringe, panic, anger, or maybe even nostalgia for some of you: virtue signaling, social justice warriors, trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc. The intentions were good, but being socially policed by enlightened liberals was annoying even for those same liberals.
   2. Equal parts media-literacy and media-lies. For a brief, wonderful period of time, it was common sense not to believe everything you read on reddit, saw on Instagram, or heard on podcasts from the one-doctor-in-ten that actually doesn’t approve of that toothpaste. In this beautiful venn diagram, it also became common understanding that the mainstream media could not really be trusted, either, when it came to politics. This made the media’s too-quick outrage toward him a little absurd. People saw him in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, on Oprah, smiling with Hillary at his wedding. Then they saw the same media figures, democrats and leftists call him the same names they called everyone who didn’t abide by ingredient-A above: racist sexist homophobic transphobic, etc. you name it. Forget what you know or believe in 2026. The point is that the media at that time attacked him baselessly in equal measure to their reasonable attacks. They screamed about everything, so people took to heart nothing.
   3. Three dashes of democrats stealing a primary from Bernie Sanders to prop up a Clinton dynasty no one asked for.

So combine this cocktail of exhausted media-alert voters watching an all-out media hate campaign against a man previously accepted in the very same circles when he was “democrat,” with the lack of capacity to foresee just how far-reaching (and how true) the conspiracies regarding Mr. Epstein would be, and finally combined with the rationale of the current-day holdouts that believe in good over evil and therefore choose to believe “he can’t really be this bad,” and you get an American mind fully willing to vote red despite some attending character flaws. Taking it further, you get an American mind who wants those flaws because they disrupt the social-police-state while being (in this POV) relatively harmless. Locker room talk, business loopholes everyone uses, saying what he means. Pissing people off.

I say all this to admit that for the first one, while I did not vote for the guy, I wasn’t that upset when he won. I was 22. I found a new trove of subversive “independent” media that showed me what the mainstream media wanted me to ignore. I was pissed off that Bernie was swatted down like an annoying fly to prop up an entitled politician I only heard mixed things about, and who sounded like she market-tested which way to look when crossing the street.

Truly, he was very lucky in that first one because it was not all about him. People craved that sweet satisfaction of watching the entitled, smug, judgmental culture warriors face a defeat they never saw coming. It was perhaps the last political-culture war that stood on its own. All he had to do, as usual, was slap his name on it and make it worse.

The second one

The second election was about when I tapped out from the ongoing “culture war” that undergirded the resiliency of his followers. I was 26, and four years of the “subversive” thoughts now being mainstream was enough for me to realize that being subversive was not, in itself, a value-property of an idea or movement. Sure, I thought there was definitely some exaggerated hate still thrown his way, some overblown analyses about his effect on the world (prior to the outbreak, the economy was actually quite solid, for example. Not saying it was his doing, or it wasn’t. Just that nothing had collapsed or gone horribly wrong, which is what the most fervent critiques predicted). But, I realized anyway that I just didn’t like his demeanor and I didn’t like right-wing politics. I think that’s fair enough. This time around, he had to make the culture war about himself. And by then, that had become a tiresome prospect for a lot of people.

But then something interesting happened in January. You were all there (some of you literally), so I don’t need to spell it out and I won’t litigate it. But I will say, for the die-hards, the holdouts, the hopefuls, and the fence-walking nuance-chasers, it was a major test. To believe or not to believe. And the thing is (and what a lot of analysts get wrong about those who continue to believe him even after all this), it was not even a question of whether to follow him at all costs. Outsiders see it that way, but from the POV of a follower who had embraced the identity of a repressed, anti-establishment, grass-roots American who knows what the media and its moneyed-interests do, the question was simple: is this crazy situation happening because everything I thought I knew is wrong? Or because they really do hate him this much?

And you know what, I was also eager for any and all evidence regarding the second election. But as court after court (liberal and conservative judges alike) dismissed every case, and that slick, black-beaded sweat ran down Giuliani’s face in the “Four Seasons Total Landscaping” parking lot, I was out, man. When the mustachioed pillow-demon-man became the primary spokesperson for what was supposed to be a legitimate accusation of nationwide tampering and theft, that was game for me, myself and I.

But this is the unique dialectic of his followers that we continue to ignore and forget: from their POV, they are doubling down on the inherent goodness of man. Societies and political establishments become evil, but man has a goodness that should be exalted. They see the outrage as comical, pitiable, and low. They believe that the outraged must eventually come to see the error of their ways. The outraged are sheep under a political and cultural regime that tells them what to think. And in this dialectic, the belief in the goodness of their leader need not be reinforced by a careful consideration of his character, but by the lengths to which a crazed, culturally brainwashed populace goes to politically annihilate him.

This is how the culture-war voters were strung along. And the genuine conservatives, if they could ignore some hawkish foreign policy and the relentless spectacle, still had no reason (from their POV) to abandon voting red altogether if he were to be on the ticket again.

The third one

(Stay on topic, stay on topic, stay on topic) So the coalition hibernated for those next four years, waiting. If we track the broad strokes of their movement (outlined here, above) and include the the conservatives who would vote red no matter what (especially since the world had not imploded last time), then it should not have been as much of a surprise as it was that he won. Significantly less people voted overall, and of those who did not vote, the vast majority had previously voted blue. It might be interesting to point out that those who did not vote certainly did not have the same belief in the inherent goodness of humanity as those who did. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Still, for me, the whole thing felt like a pale ghost of 2016. Like an event playing house in another event’s woodshed. The “urgency” of the “culture war” felt manufactured, as implied by the quotes I feel are necessary for both. The threats were more vague, the promises to the people slapdash and forced. Concepts of a plan, and so on. And while movers behind the scenes geared up to provide him with a real, fundamentalist-backed agenda, the “repressed,” “anti-establishment” figureheads of new-media promised that this was still all about proving a point. So almost a decade after they proved it once, they proved it again. The people who want you to shut up and sit down were in turn forced to shut up and sit down.

But even then, that palpable sense of underdog victory from 2016 was missing. Something about seeing Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg at the inauguration made the whole thing feel like somebody got played. Almost immediately, different sets of questions were being posed than the usual ones that had, up until now, been quite easy to answer if you were a follower. The actions taken were so quick, so numerous, and often so strange that when the media did not have time to “overreact,” his followers in turn were not presented with their never-ending opportunities to reinforce their belief in his goodness.

Off rip, we had:

• A billionaire lead a government agency that cut finding to child cancer research and meals on wheels, among other things.
• Tariffs going up down left and right more than Wile E. Coyote on Saturday mornings.
• The president try to end birthright citizenship.
• The pardoning of all criminally charged participants in the January event mentioned above, even those who assaulted and injured police officers.

So what was to come from the attention his followers had to now pay in full to his deeds, rather than to the comical, pitiable, and low outrage against those deeds?

Some of you may have noticed, it was around this time many of his followers’ interest in politics suddenly disappeared. Real life to live, and so forth.

But those anxieties springing up from below, remember those? They weren’t going anywhere. The current regime has undone too much of itself while also becoming too insular. Outrages that would have previously been labelled as TDS brain-dead echo-chamber fear-mongering insanity, are now appearing as unknown clusters of confusion (in the POV of his followers). The “subversive” media that was true by dint of its subversion is now fractured. Virgin-twink-Mexican-totalitarian podcast hosts and conspiracy grifter sellouts whose names rhyme with Brahlex Brones are meeting in the middle to decry the administration. An administration that is now exceeding its usual dose of broken promises and making decisions that those who believe in the inherent goodness of man can’t abide without further scrutiny. Real scrutiny from within and without. The kind of scrutiny that “I’m not really paying attention to all that anymore” can’t let you escape from.

Faced with these clusters of confusion, absent the mainstream media his followers have long cut from their content diets and absent the unified front of the “subversive” “repressed” media that is supposed to speak truth to power, a sober assessment is all that’s left. Not of the man’s character or his root goodness, although that will come later. For now it is enough to look at each incident on its own. To see the number of schoolgirls killed on day-one of a war we explicitly begged to avoid, or to see just how far “implicated” can stretch before it becomes worrisome in the millions of mentions of his name in the files of Mr. Epstein. It is enough to look at these and to assess them on their own. To now, finally, admit you didn’t think he was really this bad.

Turns out, he is.