Orange Man... Good?
Why are the institutions that shredded Trump 45 warming to Trump 47 and what does it mean going forward
Donald Trump is about to become President of the United States of America. Some may remember this has happened before, indeed, eight years ago Donald Trump similarly took the oath of office for the presidency.
If you are seven years old it might surprise you to learn that in 2017 people were extraordinarily mad Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. They changed the rules of online discourse, chased wild theories to discredit him, pledged to block his legislative agenda and wore embarrassing hats in massive street protests to show their distain.
Now? Not so much.
Why aren’t people as angry this time?
Let’s take a look at the world that was, compared to where we are now.
Tech
Only days after Trump’s surprise 2016 election, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) held their weekly TGIF all-hands meeting. These internal meetings provided access to leadership from rank and file employees. It was simultaneously live-streamed to remote workers and recorded for those busy during the event.
The leaked video gives a window into the apocalyptic view of a Trump administration from the San Francisco Bay Area. As a resident of the Bay Area in 2016 with plenty of friends in the tech world, I’d say this is accurate to my lived experience.
Palpable in the Q and A isn’t just a sadness but a sense of responsibility.
Why did we allow this to happen? How can we prevent it from happening again?
In 2025, Google donated $1 million to Trump’s second inauguration fund. It’s more than the $285,000 they gave in 2017 and part of a trend of Silicon Valley rethinking their terrified approach to Big Chungus.
Take Facebook (now Meta) who instituted a fact checking system to address backlash to Trump’s first election. This week they announced it would be shuttered. Also, their most prominent Republican in senior leadership will now head policy.
What changed? Well, a newly jacked 2025 Zuckerberg looks like the bully that would stuff 2017 Zuckerberg in a locker.
In the eight years after Trump upset Hillary Clinton, companies like Facebook cooperated with progressive forces both in and out of executive power. But what did it get them? In a chat this week with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg lamented being labeled as murderous by President Biden. He felt persecuted by Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Probably most telling, he said that the United States should protect vital industries like the tech sector against international regulation, specifically the EU.
This is an explicitly pro-business position that would be far more at home with a Trump administration with one caveat: the industry isn’t actively attacking him.
And so, they aren’t this time.
Press
Here is a clip of Game Change author Mark Halperin discussing a story about Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in the New York Times.
This is remarkable for a few reasons:
Mark Halperin was banished to the #MeToo Shadow Realm during the first Trump administration. After strong scoops surrounding President Biden dropping out of the race in 2024, he has reinvented himself as a digital media reporter and pundit.
Hey it’s Sean Spicer! ‘member Sean Spicer?
The point of the segment is correct, Trump 47’s Chief of Staff is not being written about as a Smithers-esqe Doormat like Reince Priebus or Fascist Svengali like Steve Bannon. She’s just a professional woman at the top of her game who wishes Ron DeSantis and his wife would fall into a vat of acid. You know, normal politics stuff.
The difference between the press reaction to Trump then and now can probably be best summed up in one word: Collusion.
By this point eight years ago the drum beat around Russia’s role in electing Donald Trump had begun. It would soon swell into a fever pitch by the spring enveloping Trump’s administration through the midterms before dissipating when special council Robert Mueller’s report found no evidence of collusion.
We’ve seen less of the tongue-wapping gossip of the first administration. Fewer “He said what?!” stories from Maggie Haberman at The Times and more “Here is how Trumpworld plans to tackle X” stories from Marc Caputo who has parlayed his Florida access to Axios after brief sojourn at The Bulwark.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of invective for Trump in the press. It’s just not novel to the mainstream in the way that it was in 2017. He is no longer a foreign body waiting to be rejected, he is America’s popular choice and those that care are seeking to understand him in a different way.
Politicians
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman dined at Mar A Lago this weekend.
Only nine Democrats voted against advancing the Laken Riley Act, a collection of harsher immigration punishments named for the nursing student beaten to death by an illegal immigrant, for a final vote.
With confirmation hearings on the docket tomorrow, partisan violence will surely increase but this is a stark contrast to 2017 when Democrats were proudly lining the barricades and pledging their political lives to stop the golden-quaffed philistine from Queens.
People
An estimated 70,000 people left their homes between election night 2016 and inauguration day 2017 to protest Donald Trump.
In New York City, in Washington DC, in Los Angeles.
It would pale in comparison to the demonstrations shortly after the term President Trump became official. The Women’s March on Washington was announced shortly after election night. The idea originated after multiple Facebook events went viral. Within a day, hundreds of thousands expressed interest in attending the march. These events were subsequently merged. The march was officially held on January 21, 2017, the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It became one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, with an estimated 500,000 participants in Washington, D.C., and millions more in sister marches worldwide.
Now? Not a pink pussy hat to be found.
While the inauguration will surely attract a smattering of counter demonstration, there is no mainstream swell.
So what does it all mean?
Some might simplistically say that these institutions capitulated to Trump. But I suspect the answer is more elemental than that.
It means an era ended.
Trump vanquished the final incarnation of the Obama dynasty when he ended Joe Biden’s career on live television and trounced a woman who was so often compared to him in Kamala Harris.
But also, with two terms history would tell us that the MAGA era now has more road behind it than ahead of it.
No one knows what the rules of the next era will be. But we know they won’t be the exact say as the last decade and a half. It’s not that anyone likes Trump more it’s that he’s less of a threat now that he’s run his last campaign. So if he has a popular idea, why not take advantage of it?
As for everyone else. They’re tired. They don’t quite know if the screaming and yelling mattered.
So whatever, bring on the tax cut.
I know that "five stages of grief" isn't the most scientific notion, but it seems that in 2016/17 there was a lot of anger, whereas this time round we see a lot more:
- bargaining (eg the tech bros doing business with him despite hating him)
- depression (various progressives just seem utterly beaten right now)
- acceptance (normie Democrat voters just getting on with their lives and trying not to think about politics)
My theory is that that institutional disgust for Donald Trump was always based on foreign policy and the feeling that he was not reliable on the subject. Therefore, the institutions of DC rallied behind Democrats in an unprecedented and partisan way in an effort to defeat him in politics. What changed was October 7, 2023 and the mass protests in favor of Palestine. Once those happened, the DC institutions realized that they could not trust the left either on the subject which caused them to evolve more towards a position of less hostility towards Trump.